Pow.Bio, a startup promising to change the economics of precision fermentation by enabling a continuous process, has opened a new facility with bench and pilot-scale capabilities allowing clients to transition from “gram-scale experimentation to the production of hundreds of kilos of ingredients.”
The 25,000 sq ft FDA-registered facility in Alameda, California, is equipped with a fleet of dual-chamber continuous fermentation systems at various scales supported by proprietary software enabling more rapid process development.
It also offers expanded downstream processing capabilities including spray drying and freeze-drying, says CEO Shannon Hall, who cofounded Pow.Bio with microbiologist Dr. Ouwei Wang in 2019.
“Today, many promising bioproducts are challenged with high costs of production and prolonged development timelines that delay revenue generation. The new facility is an active, working demonstration site for Pow.Bio’s modern, cost-effective manufacturing solution that is delivering meaningful gains for our partners right now.”
What is continuous fermentation?
In a traditional batch precision fermentation process, microbes proliferate (the growth phase) until they reach critical mass in a fermentation tank and are then triggered to start producing a target molecule via a change in the media (the production phase). The batch is then completed, the ingredient is extracted, the tank is cleaned, and the whole process starts all over again.
This, claims Hall, is slow and repetitive. Every time you set up, you need to sterilize everything, grow the cells, trigger them to produce the product, harvest it, and repeat this process over and over.
In contrast, Pow.Bio has found a way to maintain microbes in an ultra-productive state for weeks in a process it claims can cut capex costs and increase biomanufacturing capacity by orders of magnitude by combining continuous fermentation with advanced control methodology.
“By leveraging our continuous manufacturing approach, customers can achieve efficiency gains that were previously unattainable in traditional bioprocessing.” Shannon Hall, cofounder, Pow.Bio
Decoupling the growth from the production phase
The platform effectively decouples growth of the host microbes and production of the target ingredients, “solving the problems of contamination and genetic drift,” claims Hall.
“We’ve broken fermentation into unit operations so that we can focus on the performance parameters in each step,” she tells AgFunderNews. “We focus on growth, then on production, and then on product recovery, so we can have a true conveyor belt of cells in, product out.
“In doing so we’ve created an environment that is unlikely to induce mutation in the first stage, and we’ve created an environment that resists contamination in the second stage. And in practice, we’re able to measure that there aren’t contamination events or that there aren’t genetic mutation events.”
She explains: “There’s a small bioreactor that’s driving growth and a larger bioreactor that’s all about production, and a connection between the two. We have put an enormous amount of engineering into the software and the hardware to manage the rate of flow. And then we are constantly recycling cells, recovering product and managing the biomass. So all of that is built into our system and managed by autonomously driven software.”
Capex-light conversion model
So should customers get to the hundreds of kilos stage with Pow.Bio and want to move to commercial scale production elsewhere, can they easily work with co-packers to implement a continuous process if they don’t have the funds to build a facility in-house?
According to Hall: “We designed Pow.Bio’s continuous fermentation platform with a capex-light conversion model in mind to maximize adoption. Most existing manufacturers already have the necessary equipment, meaning integration of our technology requires minimal modifications rather than entirely new infrastructure.
“Our approach enables them to shift from batch or fed batch to continuous operation seamlessly, significantly increasing productivity without major capital expenditures. The result is an extremely fast and low-cost option to more than double production output and lower unit costs.”
If you can make a continuous process work, the benefits are clear, she adds: “Fundamentally, you can build a smaller facility to generate the same amount of output. So you’re clearly going to have a better return on invested capital and a faster internal return rate.”
Solution is ‘deployable within existing systems’
Currently, Pow.Bio works with customers of all sizes, from startups to “established, publicly traded multinationals,” says Hall. “The common thread is that these are customers who need to address cost or capacity constraints today. They choose us because we can deliver results quickly and our solution is deployable within existing systems.”
She adds: “We have built a modern biomanufacturing platform, powering both vertically integrated manufacturers as well as next generation product teams who need access to contract manufacturers. Our facility serves as both a proving ground – laying the foundation for onsite deployment, and a launchpad, allowing customers to rapidly de-risk their scale-up efforts and transition seamlessly to commercial production.”
Watch our interview with Shannon Hall at the SynBioBeta conference in San Jose last year:
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Author Elaine Watson
