Dr. Igor Lev

My current role is to lead all fermentation activities in the company with a team of 5. Formo is a food biotech company on a mission to bring the next generation of sustainable, healthy, and equitable dairy products to consumers.

The focus of my work as department head was to lead the development of upstream and downstream processes for all of the company's products. I managed a group of upstream and downstream scientists. I collaborated with the data science, computational biology, IP, and business development teams to ensure the alignment of research activities with company goals.

Achieved ten times increase in biomass production by optimizing cultivation conditions and medium composition. • Developed the anaerobic cultivation conditions for more than 30 strains. • Planned and designed a wide variety of experiments for overall small improvements and perform further statistical analysis of data. • Strengthened and applied knowledge of GMP and GLP to process development and scale-up.

• Achieved an increase in mAb yield by 50%, modifying the feed supply scheme • Developed the conditions for the cultivation of HEK-cells, which led to an increase in survival by 2 times • Developed and implemented a pH control system for fed-batch and perfusion cultivation based on accurate glucose supply, which reduced process costs and increased repeatability. • Successfully scaled 2 CHO cell lines to 3000 liters with a loss of productivity of less than 2%.

• Successfully created a prototype of the antimycotic drug for veterinary use, which passed preliminary animal clinical trials. • Managed a project to develop high-density cultivation of yeast technology for more than 150 strains. • Successfully identified, described, and typed a strain exhibiting antagonistic activity against pathogenic fungi, which later became the producer of the active component.