Kairos adds a manufacturability panel — from design to cost-viable manufacture

Directional manufacturability + cost intelligence, not a predictor. Ranks and reasons with cited literature — NOT an absolute titer or $/g prediction. Absolute titer/recovery/scale-up/cleaning must go to the bench.

Why we built this

Design quality is only the first question. Downstream lives the expensive one: fermentation, separation and purification (DSP), and economics. Until now no tool answered it with cited, auditable evidence rather than a black-box estimate. This panel extends Kairos from “design a construct” to “design a construct you can afford to make”.

What the panel computes — all dry-lab, all cited

1. DSP sequence — protein class × purity tier (food/high/pharma) × secretion mode, each step recovery from the literature.
2. Step-wise recovery — 90% × 90% × 85% = 68.9%; five 90% steps collapse to 59%.
3. Directional TEA — COGS vs benchmark, four parity tiers.
4. Composite score — host-fidelity × total recovery.
5. Manufacturability audit — four hard WARNs + directional verdicts.

A real run: phytase in Pichia

The MVP class is industrial enzyme, whose process data is the most public:

• Host Pichia (K. phaffii) · titer 10–30 g/L.
• DSP (food, secreted) centrifugation → UF-DF → spray drying = 68.9%.
• COGS $5–15/kg vs $5–50/kg → in-range parity.
• Composite 0.92 × 0.689 = 0.63.

The four hard WARNs sit beside those numbers.

A correction worth stating

“DSP is 50–80% of cost” is wrong for food-grade precision fermentation. Food-grade fermentation, which drops chromatography, is 15–20% of COGS.

Honest boundaries

The panel is directional, not a predictor. Absolute titer/recovery/scale-up/cleaning are hard-coded WARN.

What this step means

Kairos’s workbench now spans the full dry-lab arc — evidence, design, structure, audit, and now manufacturability.

References

The panel’s titer and DSP recovery figures draw on these sources.

1. Barone GD, et al. Industrial Production of Proteins with Pichia pastoris. Biomolecules, 2023. PMC10046876
2. Keppler JK, et al. Downstream Processing of Food Proteins from Precision Fermentation. Annu Rev Food Sci Technol, 2024. annurev-food-060424-091647
3. Liu HF, et al. Recovery and purification process development for monoclonal antibody production. mAbs, 2010. PMID:20798573
4. Straathof AJJ. The Proportion of Downstream Costs in Fermentative Production. TU Delft.
5. GFI. Techno-economic insights on fermentation ingredients.
6. Synthesis Capital. Precision fermentation: pathways to cost parity.