The world stands on the brink of an industrial revolution driven by biotechnology and biomanufacturing. Emerging biological technologies are transforming the foundations of our physical world, encompassing everything from clothing to plastics, fuels, and concrete.
Through biomanufacturing, sustainable biomass globally can be converted into new products, offering an alternative to medicines, food, materials, and more. While the most notable applications today are linked to human health, Biotechnology and biomanufacturing are expanding to create products that will permeate our lives, support climate and energy goals, enhance food security, and stimulate economic growth in all countries.
Unleashing biotechnology's incredible potential depends on harnessing the diverse capabilities present in living organisms to create new products and processes that can diagnose and treat diseases, develop resilient crops, and produce clean forms of energy, food, beverages, and more.
A key challenge in scaling up biological systems is that they behave differently depending on their environment.
For instance, a cell engineered to produce a commodity chemical might yield high outputs in a lab setting, such as in a 100-milliliter flask. Still, that performance can change dramatically when scaled up to a commercial operation of 10,000 liters.
Another complication in commercial-scale production arises when organisms are often designed to produce a biochemical without considering how it will be purified post-production or disposed of after use.
This lack of early integration leads to high costs and unnecessary waste, hindering successful commercialization. Therefore, to achieve ambitious goals of accelerating scale-up for straightforward bioprocesses and integrated industrial-scale operations, there is a compelling need to incorporate new developments in predictive modeling of biological processes and measurement with advances in process engineering to enhance the science of scaling up and controlling biological systems.
