Spiber launches biofoundary to develop proteins through contract fermentation
In Japan, Spiber Inc., the biotechnology company behind Brewed Protein™ materials, recently launched SPIBER BIOFOUNDRY, a contract development and manufacturing service that opens its strain engineering and fermentation capabilities to customers. Spiber built those capabilities over nearly two decades to become the first to produce a structural protein material at commercial scale. SPIBER BIOFOUNDRY now offers the hardest part of that journey, scale-up itself, as a service.
SPIBER BIOFOUNDRY offers high-yield strain development services for customers’ target proteins, and provides process development and contract manufacturing at every scale, from 1-liter fermenters to commercial facilities of over 100 kL. Target products include research reagents, industrial enzymes, diagnostic raw materials and food ingredients, as well as other proteins and fermentation products.
The services are for companies facing three familiar problems: yields that will not improve, projects stalled at scale-up, and no contract manufacturer able to take a genetically modified microorganism from the lab to commercial volumes.
Scale-up and manufacturing are also a capacity problem: contract fermentation capacity at pilot and commercial scale remains scarce worldwide. Experience is scarcer still. Few providers have ever taken a recombinant protein of their own from laboratory yields to routine commercial production. Spiber has, with Brewed Protein.
Category: Fuels
