Over my 40+ year career in industrial biotechnology, I’ve participated in quite a few fermentation projects, including several first-of-a-kind, totaling over a billion investment dollars. These projects had widely varying outcomes, ranging from miserable failure to great success. The first ones coincided with the early days of metabolic engineering and the last with emerging synthetic biology. Along the way, I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two - often the hard way. In recent years, I’ve shared as much as possible - the good, the bad, and the ugly - through publications, presentations, short courses, workshops, conferences, and consulting. Two case studies will be presented, both involving transfer of developed processes to manufacturing plants. The first was a costly, painful failure: the conversion of an active citric acid facility to astaxanthin production. The second was a remarkable success: the conversion of a mothballed amino acids facility to 1,4-butanediol production. Three basic principles were inspired by all of this: 1) begin with the end in mind; 2) mind the details; and 3) prepare for the unexpected.

Biologicals for crop protection and plant and soil health are going mainstream after decades of being niche products. All categories of biological crop inputs - bioprotection, biostimulants and bionutrients - are growing at double digits annually, outpacing their synthetic chemical counterparts. At this pace, by 2040, biologicals will be as large as the chemical inputs market.  New technologies in artificial intelligence/machine learning, precision fermentation, formulation, and advanced genomics have improved the performance and cost effectiveness of microbial products more rapidly than was possible in the past. In addition, we have discovered only a small fraction of the world’s microbial biodiversity; nature still has much to offer for new products for plant health and pest management. There is a robust innovation ecosystem of startups and venture capital fueling new product development of microbial inputs. This talk will discuss the innovations driving the industry and factors necessary for successful company creation, commercial development and scaling.

Amyris is a leader in rapidly developing, scaling up, and delivering novel fermentation products. In this talk we will present case studies detailing how we used our internal research, piloting, and manufacturing facilities, in harmony with external manufacturing partners, to meet customer deliverables spanning from kilogram-scale samples to metric ton-scale product.  We will discuss the path to find the right size facility based on fermentation needs, and how we worked with contract manufacturers to link together primary recovery, purification, and chemistry unit operations needed to successfully meet final product quality.

Pivot Bio creates live microbial soil inoculant products optimized for high biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) of nitrogen gas to ammonia even in fertilized fields. Farmers typically add tons of synthetic N fertilizer to crops because plant growth and yield is limited by availability of fixed nitrogen. Only 40-60% of applied fertilizer is incorporated into plants, with much of the remainder escaping into waterways or volatilizing as greenhouse gas. Pivot Bio’s products enable replacement of about 20% of nitrogen fertilizer for corn, wheat, and cotton crops. This presentation will describe challenges and successes in developing gene-edits, regulatory approvals, and processes for fermentation, formulation, preservation, and delivery of live microbes on farm. 

International Flavors and Fragrances, is a leading creator, innovator and manufacturer for food, beverage, health, homecare and scent solutions markets.  IFF products are sold globally to manufacturers of dairy, meat, beverages, snacks, savory, sweets, baked goods and other foods.  In addition, IFF is serving the specialty product markets in personal and home care such as functional formulation additives, the performance components in soaps and detergents, cleaning products and personal care products, perfumes and cosmetics.  Leveraging innovation across these market and product categories is driving sustainable growth and biotechnology takes center stage as enabling platform technology. Creating a better world at IFF means understanding how we can leverage our business, our performance and our partners to deliver a better tomorrow for people and planet.  
Overall, momentum is building for a transition to inherently more sustainable product and material choices manufactured in processes with reduced impact but without compromising the final product performance expected by consumers.  This is driving the continued need for material and product innovation but also the requirement to align with bioeconomy principles and to avoid undesired end-of-life material profiles such as microplastic accumulation.  
This presentation will update on the progress towards the commercialization of a new platform material technology through biorefinery integrated biomanufacturing.  The Designed Enzymatic Biomaterial™ platform is enabling sustainable material innovation with unique differentiated product performance across strategic IFF Health and Bioscience markets.  This presentation will highlight various commercial examples and an update on the EU based asset strategy and execution together with strategic partner in industrial markets.

dsm-firmenich is a purpose-led, performance-based leader in fragrance, taste, health, nutrition, and bioscience. We harness biology to create brighter lives for all and a sustainable future. Effective use of predictive models is essential for developing disruptive bioprocess platforms that deliver sustainable and profitable performance at scale. At dsm-firmenich we make use of multiple metabolic modeling paradigms in a fit-for-purpose approach to guide strain engineering, process development, continuous improvement, and to inform technoeconomic and lifecycle analyses. At the heart each methodology is a genome-scale description of metabolism. Central to our philosophy is democratization of model use to maximize impact. As we move towards net-zero processing, user-friendly and flexible models of metabolism become essential for derisking investment, allowing us to benchmark experiments against theoretical limits and understand simultaneously the metabolic and economic implications of transitioning our processes to sustainable feedstocks.

Synthetic biology stands at a critical juncture, as recent years have seen numerous companies fail due to challenges associated with long development timelines and high production costs. While significant advancements have been made in strain engineering processes—such as automated strain design, CRISPR-Cas9, and high-throughput sequencing—the fermentation process remains a critical bottleneck. Fermentation workflows in biomanufacturing have seen little innovation over the past 30 years, resulting in low R&D and data throughput. This disparity in data velocity between strain engineering and fermentation process development fundamentally limits the overall speed of product commercialization. To address these limitations, Pow.bio has developed a continuous fermentation platform that significantly enhances the efficiency of bioprocess development. Our system enables rapid optimization of fermentation conditions and generates data 5–10 times faster than traditional fed-batch processes. We have integrated a digital twin software to predict system outcomes, automatically detect abnormalities, and improve process reliability. The continuous process also achieves higher volumetric productivity than conventional fed-batch, capable of producing 1 kg of the high-value organic acid mevalonolactone from a 2L bioreactor in 21 days. By accelerating fermentation data generation and increasing productivity, our approach aims to fundamentally reshape industrial biomanufacturing and contribute to a more sustainable and efficient future for the bioeconomy.