Most biomanufacturing relies on living cells. Yet life is complex and unpredictable. Organisms are prone to waste, inefficiency and delays: all barriers to industrial scaling.
This is why some biobased producers are turning to cell-free production – an emerging approach that could define the future of renewable manufacturing.
Under cell-free approaches, producers extract and use cellular chemicals like enzymes without any living organisms. This could drastically cut renewable manufacturing costs.
The US government has recently invested into research that could make cell-free platforms viable. Already, some companies have scaled cell-free processes for certain applications.
Here is why the biobased industries have high hopes for cell-free biomanufacturing.
Biomanufacturing without living cells
Enzymes are fundamental to life. They speed up vital chemical reactions inside of cells, underpinning processes that keep organisms alive.
Right now, most of the biobased industry takes advantage of cellular enzymes indirectly, by using living organisms to make chemicals for them. This manufacturing approach is known as precision fermentation.
Methods like precision fermentation use organisms like bacteria and microalgae as miniature factories. Their enzymes and metabolisms allow them to make speciality chemicals out of whatever they eat.
Cell-free biomanufacturing, however, cuts out cellular middlemen like E. coli or yeast altogether. Under this approach, producers isolate enzymes from the cell. There is no need to cultivate bacteria to obtain high-value chemicals.
Advantages over normal biomanufacturing
Stripping away living cells and working with enzymes directly is a recipe for cost-effectiveness and scalability for a simple reason: life requires upkeep.
In precision fermentation, producers have to tightly control the environment they grow their microbes in. The right inputs and temperatures are needed so that the cells can maintain themselves, grow, and reproduce. All this racks up operational costs.
Cell-free biomanufacturing does away with all that. When divorced from cells, enzymes are no longer constrained by metabolic bottlenecks that come with living creatures. The enzyme is purely focused on biological reactions that will result in an end product – not on cell growth.
The result is that chemical synthesis can happen a lot faster without cells than conventional approaches like precision fermentation, lasting three to five hours compared to days or weeks.
The complexity of living cells raises the costs of working with them at an industrial scale. Removing their unpredictability opens the way for higher productivity and greater quality control in green manufacturing.
Cell-free commodity chemicals
The cell-free approach first appeared in the 1960s, coming to technological maturity in the decades that followed. Today, it is capable of making everything from recombinant proteins for foodtech, biopharma, biofuels, and industrial enzymes.
Textiles and food processing is where cell-free methods have made the greatest inroads so far. The enzyme xylose isomerase, for example, is being used to produce high-fructose corn syrup at a large scale.
The kind of enzymes that are used in cell-free biomanufacturing are special. Although they may originate in a living cell, they must remain functional even after being removed from its environment.
Xylose isomerase ticks this box. It can maintain functionality in an industrial, cell-free environment for up to 200 days and multiple cycles of use, adding to its appeal as a cost-effective biochemical converter.
In the case of corn syrup, xylose isomerase speeds up the conversion of glucose to fructose – a relatively simple yet crucial reaction step in the industry.
Fungal laccases is another type of enzyme that is already widely used in industry for processing. AB Enzymes makes industrial fungal laccases for denim finishing, as does Novozymes and DuPont Industrial Biosciences.
India’s first cell-free cosmetic producer
The next challenge for cell-free biomanufacturing will be scaling up in more specialist chemical sectors, where precision and purity is crucial.
Within speciality chemicals, cosmetics are where cell-free manufacturing has advanced the most.
One of the big names here is the Indian startup Cellarim, which claims it has developed the country’s first cell-free biomanufacturing system. Its platform isolates enzymes normally found in a living cell and uses them to convert bio-waste into foundational cosmetics chemicals.
Although there are hundreds of thousands of beauty products on the global market, there are relatively few basic ingredients that go into them. One major input found across products is hyaluronic acid, where Cellarim’s focus lies.
Cellarim says its cell-free methods can produce high quality hyaluronic acid at less than one-third the cost of current methods of production. Yet its platform still needs testing at scale. This shouldn’t be far off, however. Having secured a seed funding round in 2025 it plans to set up a pilot scale biomanufacturing facility.
Cell-free Indian onshoring
If the company manages to scale its process, it will certainly find a large domestic market for the chemical. Not only is India’s beauty consumption booming, the country is also becoming a major cosmetics producer for the first time.
Increased domestic demand as well as the government’s Make in India initiatives are driving companies to onshore more of the beauty supply chain. Yet entering such a complex value chain poses technical problems, ones that cell-free biomanufacturing could help India address.
After years of import dependence on places like Korea and the US for beauty ingredients, Indian industry has a steep learning curve when it comes to producing its own inputs.
Unlike commodity chemicals, purity precision and quality control is just as important as cost-efficiency. This is because in beauty formulations, consistency is king: chemical purity must be perfect right through batches, day after day, year after year.
Acquiring the technical know-how to achieve this level of consistency is a formidable task.
Investing from the off in cell-free biomanufacturing could enable India to leap-frog competitors on this front, offering superior consistency over conventional like precision fermentation or natural extraction approaches.
eXoZymes wins over US government
Over in the US, cell-free startup eXoZymes departs from Cellarim and Enzymit’s beauty focus in their emphasis on nutraceuticals and novel medicine.
Publicly traded since June 2026, eXoZymes is developing a cell-free manufacturing pathway for N-trans- caffeoyltyramine—a rare plant compound with applications in metabolic, gut, and liver health.
In many ways, N-trans-caffeoyltyramine is exactly the kind of chemical where cell-free approaches offer advantages over traditional biomanufacturing. This chemical is only found at incredibly low quantities within hemp plants, making it difficult to obtain at commercial quantities without some kind of synthesis.
eXoZymes is a company heavily involved in shaping the direction of US bio-industries. eXoZymes CEO Damien Perriman and VP of development Paul Opgenorth were elected to key Governance Committees at BioMADE, the biggest US bioindustry group.
eXoZymes is attracting attention from the federal government too. In July 2026, it was selected to participate in the inaugural U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Genesis Mission – a nine-month project where eXoZymes will collaborate with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
The project will involve the company developing AI-powered digital twins for cell-free biomanufacturing. Running production processes in the digital space is meant to help engineers refine the system in virtual space – something that can avoid the waste and costs associated with trial-and-error experimentation in the real world.
The DoE exoZymes investment is evidence of growing national security interest in cell-free platforms. This goes back to at least 2025, when the U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP) announced an inaugural investment of $32.4 million to four teams to accelerate cell-free systems adoption.
The focus of this research was to find ways of bringing down cell free costs in order to widen its range of application and its adoption. Today, the costs of cell-free systems means that its use is largely confined to specialty chemicals.
A technology for the times
Although the technology works, cell-free biomanufacturing remains much more costly than living cell approaches like precision fermentation in most applications.
Yet many believe it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the cheapest, most reliable way to produce biochemicals at scale.
This is especially as cell-free biomanufacturing investment gathers pace amidst new geopolitical anxieties.
As global trade routes shift, key supply chains are more fragile than they have been in decades. Many countries are investing in domestic biomanufacturing capacity so essential industries won’t be caught out.
It is highly likely that the Chinese government is also investing in cell-free research for similar reasons. Chinese research institutes are publishing regularly on the topics, while the government has openly emphasised syn-bio and biomanufacturing in its most recent Five-Year plan.
Interest in the technology from both the US and Chinese governments means cell-free biomanufacturing is likely going to become a growing fixture in the industrial chemical ecosystem.
When tech gets caught up in geopolitical pressures, they are more likely to retain scaling momentum. The pressure on governments to maintain funding and policy support long term for strategic industries can secure infant sectors with the attention they need to expand. For this reason, we expect to see cell-free reach further into the biobased mainstream over the coming years.
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