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 from around the world can be converted into new products, offering alternatives 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, but 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 designed to produce a biochemical without consideration of how it will be purified after production or disposed of after use. This lack of early integration leads to high costs and unnecessary waste, hindering successful commercialization. Therefore, to achieve the ambitious goals of accelerating scale-up for simple bioprocesses and integrated industrial-scale operations, it is essential to combine new developments in predictive modeling and measurement of biological processes with advances in process engineering. This integration will enhance the science of scaling and controlling biological systems.