While significant progress has been made in recent years to optimize microbial strains and drive efficiency in biomanufacturing, a disconnect between upstream and downstream work continues to hold back progress, claims Boston Bioprocess cofounder Dr. Michael Tai.
Founded in Boston in 2022 by Tai (formerly head of bioprocess at Motif FoodWorks) and Ted Netland, Boston Bioprocess moved to Champaign, Illinois, in 2023.
The firm, which offers fermentation and downstream processing services at benchtop and pilot-scale, supports a wide range of companies from startups to established players looking to optimize their processes or develop new products.
AgFunderNews (AFN) caught up with Tai (MT) at the SynBioBeta conference in San Jose to get his take on what is holding back the bioeconomy.
AFN: What problems were you trying to solve when you founded Boston Bioprocess?
MT: When we started Boston Bioprocess there was a significant relative weakness of offerings in the bench development and processing scale up area, compared with relatively strong capabilities in strain engineering and development in the front end.
You could be very familiar with the performance [of your strain/bioprocess] in a 500-liter bioreactor, but there is a significant gap to be able to accurately predict performance in a 500,000-liter bioreactor.
Likewise, it’s very hard to tell how [upstream] fermentation performance can be integrated with downstream performance. So if I have a 10g-per-liter protein and you ask me what is your final harvesting yield after multiple stages of, let’s say, TFF [tangential flow filtration], it’s still very hard to predict.
So one thing I believe is critical is the integration between upstream and downstream work. There is still a significant resource poured into optimizing fermentation but relatively speaking an insignificant amount of resource going into the downstream process to solve questions as small as anti-foam [a common additive in bioprocessing to prevent or reduce foam formation] interference.
So when an upstream engineer says, if I put five more milliliters of anti-foam in my process, I can increase my fermentation yield or titer by 10% before the downstream guys know about it, then you might have to sacrifice quite a bit of downstream yield.
So I do think that it’s the integration and the talent pipeline between the fermentation and downstream area that is, in my mind, probably the top priority if we want to build a better biotech industry.
Read the rest of the interview on AgFunderNews