Lumen Bioscience partnered with Google to use machine learning to advance the development of plant-based biologic drugs. The companies will harness the power of machine learning to increase the scalability of medicines based on spirulina, a type of blue-green algae.

Lumen’s approach allows for the “rapid and low-cost mass production of new biologic drugs at a small fraction of the cost of traditional batch-fermentation technologies,” according to data.

The machine learning research buoyed by Google, which has been supported in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is expected to provide a method to “short-cut the productivity improvement process” that took years for the production of older biomanufacturing platforms that included yeast, E. coli, and CHO cells.