Adapting nanodiamond-based cell monitoring medical technology to gauge the health of material being produced in a bioreactor made immediate sense to a scientist who’d never seen one before.

For Dr. Romana Schirhagl, diamonds are a scientist’s best friend. 

The researcher at the Netherlands’ Groningen University uses nanoscale diamonds as quantum sensors to determine whether cells are healthy or under stress. 

“It’s something like an MRI, but for substructures of the cell,” Romana says. “You get very tiny magnets picking up signals from other tiny magnets, from electrons, from free radicals, and you can tell if cells are diseased.” 

Romana had recently founded a company, QTSense, to commercialize the technology for biomedical applications—she had been using yeast cells to study aging—when Schmidt Sciences cold called her. The pitch: use her nanodiamond sensing method inside a bioreactor.

“I work in a hospital, and you tend to work on problems you can see,” Romana says. “I had never seen a bioreactor before, and hadn’t put much thought into it.” 

The applications beyond biomedicine, however, quickly became apparent. Nanodiamonds placed within a bioreactor could provide scientists accurate, real-time, remote data about the health of whatever they’re making inside the reactor—biopharmaceuticals, plastic substitutes, fossil-fuel-free products. Keeping a close eye on the contents of a reactor without having to open it could reduce errors and waste and enable larger-scale production. 

“There are many different ways to probe inside a bioreactor to see how, typically involving sticking sensors inside to measure,” Romana says. “We’re trying other approaches to get our diamond particles inside the reactor.”

For Romana’s group, the effort has required stretching beyond their typical areas of expertise, a welcome effort for a team that is accustomed to working across several disciplines, from quantum mechanics to medicine. “We’ve gotten a lot of advice from other grantees,” Romana says. “About what types of bioreactor to buy, what sensors it should have, how to model a bioreactor.” 

With promising early results, Romana is already anticipating what could come next. 

“We’re thinking about an endoscope for looking inside the body, or monitoring for sepsis risk—the hardware we are building now could be similar in that application,” Romana says. “The longer I am in my career, the more I care that people use what we make. That’s something I would love to see—people hanging our sensor in their bioreactors and knowing what’s going on.”