At the Bioprocess Engineering 2025 meeting in Bremen, researchers from Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Levitronix presented a novel benchtop bioreactor that uses magnetic levitation for stirring. This design replaces traditional shaft-driven stirrers with a magnetically levitated stirrer, which reduces contamination risk and adapts flexibly to different cell culture conditions without hardware modifications. Demonstrations showed comparable cultivation of E. coli and CHO cells versus conventional stirred systems, highlighting potential benefits for miniaturized, parallel bioprocessing.