Changing the paradigm for bioprocessing
Matt Lipscomb , CEO and co-founder of DMC Biotechnologies , talks about standardising metabolic engineering and fermentation to make it a predictable engineering discipline
Historically , the commercial path to producing biochemicals has been costly and challenging . In synthetic biology , the metabolism of microorganisms such as bacteria or yeast is manipulated so they will grow and produce the desired molecule at the same time . The technology for manipulating the microbial genome has made major advances in the last two decades , with many exciting developments in the field . The commercialisation of 1,3-propanediol for fibres and fabrics , lactic acid for biodegradable polymers and 1,4-butanediol for elastic fibres are just a few of the successes . The challenge with the historical approach is that each time a new strain is created or advanced to a larger scale , the fermentation process must be re-optimised for each of the process variables , such as oxygen concentration , pH , temperature , medium composition , feed rate , etc . This ultimately results in very long and costly development cycles . Underlying this challenge is the fundamental sensitivity that traditional microbial processes have to their environment . Microorganisms have a highly complex metabolic network involving many input and output , signals , intricate pathways and complex feedback loops . This makes the simultaneous growing of the microbe and the production of target molecules extremely sensitive to environmental process variables . The high sensitivity - or lack of robustness - to the industrial process environment has led to commercialisation paths that have historically taken five to ten years and cost several hundreds of millions of dollars per product .
Engineering process
DMC ’ s platform technology standardises the approach to engineering the microbe and is predictably scalable from highthroughput approaches to full commercial scale . It also utilises a standardised fermentation process regardless of the product being manufactured . Thus , instead of trying
Stage 1 : Catalyst production
Stage 2 : Catalyst activity Switch catalyst on
Accumulate catalyst
Convert feedstock
into Product
Figure 1 – Two-stage process decoupling growth from production
Image reproduced from : J . M . Burg , C . B . Cooper , Z . Ye , B . R . Reed , E . A . Moreb & M . D . Lynch , Large-scale bioprocess competitiveness : the potential of dynamic metabolic control in two-stage fermentations , Curr . Opin . Chem . Eng . 14 , 121-136
60 SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE ESTABLISHED 1981