Standing at the production line in a large brewery and watching as one glass bottle after another is filled with fizzy liquid from enormous bioreactors, the system looks both efficient and advanced.
But if you ask American researcher and entrepreneur Christopher Savoie, who is known for being behind the AI system that brought Apple's Siri application to life in 2010, development in bioproduction and manufacturing processes is at a standstill.
"We make beer today just as we did 5,000 years ago," he states.
Associate Professor at DTU Chemical Engineering Seyed Soheil Mansouri agrees. Throughout his career, he has made collaboration and openness in innovation his mantra, and this has led to many of his wild ideas also becoming wild solutions. This time is no exception.
Measurement ensures yield
A meeting between Seyed Soheil Mansouri and Christopher Savoie has resulted in the invention of a control system for production systems that combines artificial intelligence with quantum computing.
The system's AI agents monitor the process taking place in for example a company's bioreactor and, using a simulator, they can continuously suggest changes to ensure the highest possible yield.
"By measuring everything from temperature and oxygen fluctuations to cell changes, we can avoid errors and at the same time take advantage of when the cells are at their peak and producing the most protein. Today, we have no idea about these things. We just follow a recipe and hope for the best," says Seyed Soheil Mansouri.
"We're not crazy"
According to the two entrepreneurs, it is quite unusual for chemical and biologics manufacturing, quantum computing, and AI to be combined in a single solution.
Both see monitoring and data optimization as a natural part of their work. But in biological engineering, there is no tradition of collecting and processing data.
"I think there have been people at DTU who thought we were on the wrong track because we were early in adaption," says Seyed Soheil Mansouri.
