Top Industrial Biotechnology Trends in the U.S. – The View from Europe

by Mark Warner (Warner Advisors LLC/Biofuels Digest) ... Housed in a region with significant historic chemical operations, including the home of where buna rubber was first commercialized, Eastern Germany is similar to parts of the industrial midwestern United States. The area benefits from a strong infrastructure of research and scale-up facilities, including the Fraunhofer institute, which is similar to the U.S. National Labs, and includes support from a range of governmental officials and entities, ....

In a world-wide environment of limited credible scale-up options, the biocluster partners provide a unique set of attributes, which is the ability to perform both fermentation and complex chemical conversion within the same complex. The synergy of biotechnology and traditional chemistry is receiving more focus, but is still not mainstream within advanced biotechnology. While there are benefits of merging both technological approaches, there are limited industrial biotechnology scale-up resources that have experience in both. The biocluster provides a unique combination of fermentation scale-up and chemical conversion technologies, all within a close proximity, that make scale-up of a hybrid technology possible in one location.

The focus of my presentation was to summarize the lessons learned to provide guidance for strategic planning. The highlights are below and the complete presentation follows ....

Follow the money – from 2005 to 2015, most investment in U.S. industrial biotechnology were in biofuels and biochemicals, while recent investment have focused almost entirely on novel food proteins and compounds for agricultural use.

Agricultural bioproducts – the next wave of US biotechnology investment, from microbial pesticide replacements to organic fertilizers, has agricultural applications as an increased focus of US investment.

What the U.S. does well – a strong supply of industrial biotechnology funding, talented technical staff, deep understanding of synthetic biology and the ability to manipulate organisms has allowed the U.S. to take a leadership role in industrial biotechnology commercialization.

Where the U.S. could improve – an over-reliance on synthetic biology to solve all problems and proliferation of “bug development” companies without assets to commercialize their technology has the path to commercial success far from clear for many technologies. Lack of commercial-scale contract fermentation sites in the U.S. continues to be a major obstacle to product commercialization.