While biomanufacturing promises to address a range of global problems like climate change and population growth, scaling biomanufacturing to commercial production is widely recognized throughout the industry as products too often fall short of being cost competitive.
Shannon Hall, co-founder of Pow.bio, said building bigger bioreactors is not a solution to the scaling problem.
“The real true story here is that most of the biology design stuff just is too damn expensive to take to the market,” Hall told TechCrunch. “Building bigger bioreactors doesn’t make that better, and as a result, what you see made are things you either need very tiny amounts of, like the heme protein in the Impossible Burger, or things that are crazy expensive, like lactoferrin, or human collagen, which is also nice to have alternatives.”
Pow.bio is seeking to reduce the cost of biomanufacturing using synthetic biology to reimagine fermentation facilities. The company is building more efficient bioreactor capacity through the use of continuous fermentation technology and artificial intelligence. The company said its approach can produce a five-fold increase in the speed of outputs at a of traditional capital expenses.
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