3 ways to accelerate the biomanufacturing revolution

Our collective ability to engineer biology together with the deployment of automation, AI and data-analytics in production processes, has advanced in leaps and bounds over the last two decades, spurring a biomanufacturing revolution. Economies of scale are enabling significant cost reductions in fundamental unit operations, which in turn have enabled a maturation of the overall biological engineering toolkit.

The perception of biology has shifted from a natural phenomenon to a technology that is fundamentally 'programmable' through genetic code, DNA – and companies in this sector have seen the cost of programming cells decline by 50% every year. This technology has driven the evolution of general 'genetic engineering' approaches into the relatively newly established field of synthetic biology, which broadly seeks to design and build new biological parts, processes and systems for a specific purpose.

A new wave of innovation in synthetic biology is now capturing the attention of different stakeholders. In 2020, global venture-capital funding and deals in biotech amounted to a record $36.6 billion, while biotech IPOs raised more than twice the amount of capital compared with 2019. It's moving beyond healthcare, too; more than half of the direct impact of new biotech applications over the next 10 to 20 years is likely to be felt in sectors such agriculture and food, consumer products and services, and materials and energy production.

This wave of innovation, together with an ongoing fall in costs, is opening the way to sustainable, scalable and innovative biomanufacturing solutions across value chains, enabling organizations across a diverse set of value chains. According to a recent study by Mckinsey, the economic benefits could be worth up to $4 trillion per year over the next 10-20 years.

Beyond its intrinsic economic, performance and environmental advantages, biomanufacturing is also one of the most promising areas of developing technology when it comes to solving major global crises such as microplastic pollution and pandemic prevention and preparedness. Over the next two decades, it is anticipated that biomanufacturing will unlock major advances in areas such as:

1. Bioremediation: microbes and enzymes are being developed that can metabolize wastewater contaminants and transform them into useful bioproducts.

2. Biosecurity: Localized biomanufacturing capabilities across developed and developing nations will enable rapid and effective responses to emerging pandemics.

3. Bioinnovation: The development of existing and novel ingredients and materials are enhancing value chains while offering alternatives to petrochemically derived alternatives.

Many individual and joint efforts are already being directed towards these solutions; however, there are still obstacles to fully realizing the full potential of the biomanufacturing revolution. Currently there is a need to accelerate the feedback loop between biological design and product application to ensure commercial success. In order to power the diversity of applications emerging from this field over the next 20 years, significant effort is needed to grow and develop the future bioworkforce.

So how can we accelerate the biomanufacturing revolution? We suggest focusing on three main areas:

1. Workforce

We need to significantly expand the biomanufacturing workforce in order to realize the full potential of the bioeconomy and to enable local, distributed manufacturing. Here's how:

2. Scale

Increasing access to scale in both the development and deployment of biomanufacturing solutions is needed to accelerate growth of the bioeconomy. Here's how:

3. Policy

Policy must keep up with the pace of innovation in order to facilitate impactful solutions while mitigating any potential risks. Furthermore, early regulatory missteps can delay the progress of the biomanufacturing revolution and constrain innovation, especially in more forward-looking applications. Instead, we should: