Professor Demirel is cofounder at Tandem Repeat Technologies and Huck Endowed Chair Professor at Penn State.
getty
Our planet faces an urgent environmental and social crisis, but hope could be on the horizon. Biomanufacturing offers a revolutionary solution for improving the sustainability and responsibility of our current economy.
Biomanufacturing is the use of engineered microorganisms (for example, bacteria and yeast) to create products with desired properties. Biomanufacturing can enable the production of valuable compounds and materials with greater efficiency and sustainability than traditional methods. Examples of biomanufactured products include pharmaceuticals, textiles, food ingredients, fuel enzymes, cosmeceuticals and more.
Renewable biomaterials such as cellulose, silk, chitin, squid ring teeth and alginate offer low-carbon footprint alternatives to plastic. Different industries worldwide are eager for renewable resources that can solve multiple issues at once, and the biomanufacturing of proteins and sugars is one place they are looking.
Why Biomanufacturing
An incredible 550 billion tons of carbon from natural biomass can be found across all lifeforms—with the plant kingdom alone accounting for a remarkable 450 billion tons. Allowing organisms to produce biopolymers like cellulose, chitin and alginate, these covalently bonded monomeric units form impressive membrane complexes that are hard at work in nature.
The most widespread is cellulose, an efficient energy source with countless everyday applications, such as paper production, when its molecular weight makes it suitable for wood pulp processing. In the past decade, scientists have found ways to transform cellulose into monomers for consumer materials (for example, biofuels or ingredients for cosmetics) traditionally sourced from crude oil.
However, many of these processes produce low-value chemicals with short molecules and filaments—far too small to be used commercially in most cases. This has resulted in a need for novel processing methods that can preserve cellulose's larger molecular structure while producing higher-value commercial materials. Cellulosic resources exist abundantly within wild grasses and agricultural plants like cotton. However, they often require more sophisticated techniques than traditional conversion methods due to their smaller size.
Renewable protein alternatives such as silk, wool and soybean are increasingly used to create bio-engineered materials that offer extraordinary properties. Also, recently discovered squid ring teeth proteins, a solution that I invented and hold multiple patents for, have aroused interest in biomimetics due to their great structure and remarkable qualities. Although direct extraction of this protein from squid tentacles is possible, it still presents a challenge economically and naturally due to the limited sources available.
What's Next For Biomanufacturing
Producing natural polymers from microorganisms offers various benefits, like a better understanding of the molecular synthesis and assembly process. However, these theoretical advantages are not easily translated into a cost-effective reality for large-scale production.
Even with current initiatives to synthesize chemicals through biomanufacturing methods in microbes, their price point is still significantly higher than that of a complex organisms such as plants, which rely on photosynthesis. Various considerations shape manufacturing costs, from energy overheads to labor and production output. Modern industrial biotechnology faces the challenge of understanding how molecules and biopolymers are synthesized and assembled on a large scale. Four main elements must be addressed to overcome this issue.
1. Transporting metabolites, feedstocks and waste within a multicellular organism can be accomplished through vascularization. Vascularized flow increases the solubility of these substances, which enhances fermentation activity in the host—providing efficient transport to optimize efficiency.
2. Energy efficiency, which is an essential factor in bioproduction. For example, bacteria require up to 1000 watts/kg while animals or plants only need 1 watts/kg, making much more energy-efficient sources compared to microbial fermentation processes.
3. Biomass control, which is limited by the size of the organism and division rate (e.g., the size of bacteria limits the crowding of chemicals).
4. Contamination or sterilization cost is another problem in producing large batches.
In addition, exploring the potential of engineered plant genomes to create biopolymers could provide a viable alternative to traditional microbial fermentation. But ensuring genetically engineered organisms (GMOs) are responsibly contained and regulated (i.e., introducing new genetic material into an organism could have unintended impacts on the environment or other organisms) presents its own challenges.
Unless these issues can be resolved, optimizing yield rates or reducing expenses associated with biomanufacturing processes for producing biopolymers will not be easy. Despite the obstacles, biomanufacturing presents a promising future, as it offers revolutionary solutions to existing problems by addressing these challenges and utilizing new technologies.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
