10x Innovation Collides with SynBio Manufacturing
Synthetic biology is changing the product game. A growing wave of start-ups are pioneering the synbio space with diverse products from precision medicine to cultivated meat. The market impact of these biomade products is estimated to reach $4T by 2040*, largely driven by consumer demand for sustainable products. Unfortunately, many of these innovative ideas will never reach the marketplace as products, and a large number of companies will fail.
FACT: Today’s biomanufacturing solutions cannot keep up with demand - supply is 1000x off the mark. There is an influx of new companies with pipelines full of product ideas, widening an already significant supply gap. Current manufacturing partners (CMOs) are not only too few in number, but they were built to address older biobased markets, such as ethanol or BioFuels, or were built specifically for BioPharma, making them either inappropriate or exorbitantly expensive for common industrial applications like food products.
So, how do we solve this >1000x problem? Building more of the same infrastructure that we have today will not meet the pace or requirements of innovation. And even incremental expansion of traditional fermentation facilities is far too expensive. The end result is that we’re stuck in a too little/too expensive cycle. Incremental improvements will deliver incremental progress.
The solution is not financing facilities, which only leads to marginal capacity gains. We need a technological step-change to address the specific needs of these cutting edge products.
Pow.bio has developed a first-of-its-kind fermentation technology that solves the capacity problem. By utilizing existing fermentation infrastructure, Pow.bio can increase capacity (today!) by 10-30x. This is an order of magnitude step-change for the synbio industry, redefining the limits of biomanufacturing.
So how does Pow.bio do this? The key is continuous production: achieving and maintaining high performance fermentation processes that can run for hundreds of hours. Pow.bio has cracked the code on using continuous fermentation, a recognized holy grail in biology. By keeping microbes in an ultra-productive state, continuous fermentation not only increases capacity, but also solves for speed, cost, and scale.
Pow’s technology slashes the cost of biomade products by half (or even more) – enabling these products to achieve cost advantages and disrupt their non-sustainable incumbent competition. This is a game changer for every company leveraging biology to bring revolutionary products to market. Moreover, the outsized performance results in a significant reduction in energy, water, and greenhouse gas emissions. Even when compared to traditional fermentation strategies, Pow.bio’s continuous platform further reduces emissions by >60%, rendering it a carbon negative biomanufacturing technology.
Pow.bio’s technology is not just cost-effective, it is intelligent. Beyond harnessing the efficiencies inherent to continuous fermentation, Pow.bio is developing AI algorithms to optimize and automate processes. With each experiment, Pow.bio feeds more proprietary data into this algorithm, constantly taking steps towards autonomous, self-driving fermentation, much like a self-driving car. By merging biology and software, Pow.bio is building margins in synbio that are on par with (or superior to) Silicon Valley software.
Are you a synbio company searching for affordable approaches to scale-up? Whether you need to produce your first gram or kilogram of product or are advancing from bench production scale, Pow’s technology can help you get there. Get in touch to discover how Pow.bio’s continuous fermentation + AI technology can help you reduce costs and increase capacity by contacting us here.
*McKinsey Insights: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/the-bio-revolution-innovations-transforming-economies-societies-and-our-lives