A future without oil
How the BioTreasure team plans to conquer the mass market
Your Challenge:
Circular Biomanufacturing
Until now, our manufacturing processes have almost entirely been based on the use of newly, mined raw materials with not enough coming from the recycling of waste streams. This places an enormous burden on the environment and our society. In addition, dependencies remain in global supply chains that could be reduced through access to local materials.
Instead, we can create a circular economy in which new products are manufactured locally, using valorized waste streams as a source for raw materials, to build more sustainable and resilient production platforms.
To achieve this, biomanufacturing processes must be developed to market maturity and directly integrated with modern production processes. Scientific advances in recent years have produced new findings and methods that can significantly increase the performance of biomanufacturing processes and open up new application possibilities. Although alternative ways of producing a wide range of products to replace the conventional petrochemical or chemical manufacturing processes have gone to market, breakthroughs have so far only been achieved in niche applications. We need to reach the goal where the majority of bulk products are made through biomanufacturing processes that enable the use of locally available raw materials.
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The challenge: to develop an end-to-end prototype that processes various carbonaceous waste streams into new products as a continuous bioproduction process.
The prototype must demonstrate how carbonaceous waste streams can be processed and fed to microbes as food. The overall bioproduction process shall not use E. Coli or Saccharomyces cerevisiae and shall demonstrate continuous production over a period of at least 180 days during the Challenge. At the end of the process, at least three different products should be produced using a modern manufacturing process, such as additive manufacturing.
The Challenge runs over a three-year period. A panel of globally recognized experts will assist SPRIND in evaluating the applications and select up to eight teams to participate. During the Challenge period, teams further develop their bioproduction technology to achieve the Challenge goal.
Teams participating in this Challenge are fully challenged. SPRIND therefore provides intensive and individual support. This includes funding the teams with up to €1.5 million in Stage 1 of the Challenge, which started in November 2023. In order to unleash the full potential, SPRIND also provides a coach to accompany each team's work, advise them and network them. After one year and after two years, the jury reconvenes in each case to evaluate the interim status and decide which approaches have the greatest breakthrough innovation potential and which teams can prove themselves in the Challenge until the end.
In October 2024, the expert jury, on behalf of SPRIND, selected the participants for the second phase of the Circular Biomanufacturing
Challenge. Over the next 12 months, the six teams will each receive up to 2 million euros to further develop their technology. The teams will also be supported by SPRIND, advised, and connected with additional experts and coaches. After one year, the jury will assess the progress of the developments and decide which teams will advance to the third stage of the Challenge.
The Teams
Science Youtuber Jacob Beautemps introduces the Challenge teams at Breaking Lab
Do you have further questions?
Please feel free to contact us at challenge@sprind.org.
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Dr Luisa Gronenberg wants to do something about the climate crisis:
When the Circular Biomanufacturing Challenge was announced, Luisa Gronenberg and her colleagues Ruchita Chawla, Ed van der Ent and Johannes Sonnenschein, as well as the management of Insempra, realised that SPRIND could be a game changer:
My motivation is to replace oil-based processes.In Los Angeles, she researched the production of biofuels using cyanobacteria; in Copenhagen, she was a principal scientist at start-up Biosyntia, which produces vitamins through bacterial fermentation; and in Munich, she helped launch start-up Insempra, which uses bacteria and yeast to produce ingredients for cosmetics and food. The problem:
We can produce a lot with biotechnology, but we can't yet compete with the prices of the oil industry for mass-produced products.
When the Circular Biomanufacturing Challenge was announced, Luisa Gronenberg and her colleagues Ruchita Chawla, Ed van der Ent and Johannes Sonnenschein, as well as the management of Insempra, realised that SPRIND could be a game changer:
SPRIND will allow us to scale up our technology so that we can increase efficiency and move into low-cost commodity products.
She is now very happy with her yeast and is focusing on optimizing the overall process. One of the goals of the challenge is to transition to continuous fermentation.
Continuous fermentation is already more efficient than batch fermentation, which only lasts a few days. This is because you don't have to empty the reactors each week, dispose of the residual biomass, sterilise everything and let it grow again,says Luisa Gronenberg.
But we are currently working on water recycling, for example. We have created a computer model to calculate how we can make the process more economical. And water is a big part of that. Water is precious, and if we just threw it away at the end, that would be neither economical nor sustainable.Water conservation is also important to her personally.
I lived in the US for a long time, in Arizona, in the desert, where water is always scarce. It's actually a place where you shouldn't build big cities. And I saw that the way we're currently using our resources doesn't make sense. We really need to think about how we can live more efficiently. That has influenced my career and the way we approach BioTreasure.
Converting waste using an oil yeast
Luisa Gronenberg and her colleagues at Insempra have their set sight on mass consumer products currently made from petroleum. Nylon is their first product target. To achieve this, they feed a genetically modified oil yeast with waste materials, such as agricultural waste – mainly from forestry – which the yeast converts into precursors for polymer production. The polymerisation of the final product is carried out by an external partner.
A lot of research is needed to achieve the best results.
Nylon is not only used for clothing, but also for 3D printing, and it can also be moulded, for example for car and aircraft parts,says Luisa Gronenberg. Depending on the desired polymer, genetically modified variants of oil yeast are used.
A lot of research is needed to achieve the best results.
For example, we test ten different variants of a gene, but there are ten different expression levels for each of them. This means that we also vary the expression of the gene. That's 100 experiments in itself, and that's just the first step. There are many other parameters that add to the complexity, cost and development time,explains the scientist.
The next step for BioTreasure is already clear. The SPRIND project is currently still part of Insempra, but preparations are underway for a spin-off.
An independent company makes sense because Insempra focuses on other products, mainly in the cosmetics and food sectors, while BioTreasure wants to produce huge quantities of mass products at competitive prices. This requires a completely different sales structure,explains Luisa Gronenberg.
There is still a lot to do before the actual spin-off takes place:
We want to expand the market readiness of our technology, and SPRIND helps us a lot with that.But it's not just the SPRIND support that Luisa Gronenberg finds helpful, it's the other teams in the Challenge as well:
I think it's really helpful that we get to meet with the other teams a lot. We're a bit like a school class. We all have the same goal and sometimes the same difficulties. For example, we had problems with contamination in the continuous fermentation process, which the others also had to deal with. It's great to be able to share ideas and learn from each other.
It is a great advantage for the team that BioTreasure is still an internal project at Insempra. It benefits not only from the laboratory equipment, but also from the biotechnological expertise of the incubator.
Ultimately, however, our success will depend on market demand. We want to really convince customers – not only with quality and reliability, but also with price,says Luisa Gronenberg.
The whole team is focused on this.
I work with great people. You don't have to motivate anyone to work. Everyone is driven by the desire to promote greater sustainability,says Luisa Gronenberg, summing up the start-up atmosphere within the team.
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