A new funding competition aims to help Scottish bio-based innovations move from the lab toward commercial production. The Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre, known as IBioIC, has opened applications for its BioProcess Scale-up Accelerator Competition. The program offers up to £10,000 toward scale-up project costs.
Funded by the Scottish Government, the competition builds on IBioIC’s FlexBIO facility at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The facility introduced Scotland’s first open-access 300 litre fermenter last year. Since then, it has let organizations test manufacturing processes at commercially relevant scale without major capital investment.
The accelerator targets a common bottleneck in industrial biotechnology. Many innovations show strong potential in early testing, but the cost and complexity of scaling up often stalls progress toward commercialization. Through the accelerator, companies get access to FlexBIO’s equipment, technical expertise and process development support, for projects ranging from bench scale up to full 300 litre production.
One early beneficiary is HydRegen, a University of Oxford spinout developing enzyme-based technology that replaces heavy metal catalysts in chemical manufacturing. Enzymes powered by hydrogen gas offer a cleaner alternative. To supply an industrial demonstration, HydRegen needed more enzyme than it could produce in-house. Working with FlexBIO, the company scaled its five litre lab process up to a 200 litre working volume, confirming the process held up at larger scale and generating data to support future production.
Neil Renault, director of bioprocessing scale-up at FlexBIO, said scaling up requires more than just producing more material. Fermentation, downstream processing and product recovery all behave differently as volumes increase, making that data essential before further investment.
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- Source: https://worldbiomarketinsights.com/ibioic-launches-funding-competition-for-bio-based-scale-up/
