(284b) Recent Advances in Bioprocess Development for Mass Production of Medicinal Polysaccharides and Beneficial Microbes for Health and Agricultural Industries in Malaysia'

Biotechnology industries are classified under the category of new technology based firms (n-TBF) and considered as main components of knowledge based economy. Based on this fact, different Asian countries paid more interest in the development and growth of this business sector. The Development of biotechnology incubators to act as techo-industrial platform for RTD and large scale manufacturing of biomass and bioactive metabolites is one of the main drivers to promote industrial biotechnology sector in national level. This presentation will focuses on finding the best answer for the question, How can process based and biofactory based facilities in research organization be integrated to form techno-industrial based platform for technology transfer and industrialization of biotechnology products?. In this context, two successful industrialized products will be given as examples. The first is the development of industrial platform for large scale production of immunomodular exopolysaccharides by medicinal mushrooms. This research was designed to achieve three main targets. First, optimization of cultivation process in shake flask level to increase the polysaccharide yield in short production time. Second, bioprocess development in semi industrial scale 16-L stirred tank bioreactor followed by scaling up of the process to 300-L bioreactor. Third, development of an efficient solvent free downstream process for exopolysaccharide extraction, purification and precipitation. The second example in this presentation will be the development of industrial platform and large scale production of nitrogen fixing bacteria for agriculture application. In this process, medium composition and cultivation conditions were developed to face the main challenge in this process in terms of high polysaccharide production during cultivation of nitrogen fixing bacteria. Under normal batch culture cultivations, low cell mass was produced and oxygen became the limited substrate in this process. In the process developed in this work, we achieved high cell density cultivation of nitrogen fixing bacteria up to 45 g/L biomass with minimal polysaccharide production using an optimized fed-batch cultivation strategy. This production process was scaled up successfully to 150L stirred tank bioreactor. The produced cells were used as one of the major component of biofertilizers developed by one of the major companies in Malaysia. These two examples show clearly how universities and research centers can work effectively in cooperate with private and public companies to harmonize activities in industrial biotechnology sector and work as industrialization hub for bioprocess industries in Malaysia.