Creating the Infrastructure & Regulation for a Sustainable Biofuture
“My vision would be that we manage to build a network of infrastructure together in Europe. One that interacts between the academic and private sector in a very fluid manner.”
We are living in extraordinary times, and we have been for the better part of last 200 years. Thanks to biobased innovations such as vaccinations, sanitation and modern agriculture we have been able to eradicate diseases, improve our life expectancies and feed a growing population.
We have gotten so good at it this, that until very recently many of us have taken it for granted and forgotten the biological systems that we live with in and depend upon. Now more than ever we have the opportunity to reflect upon the role of biology in our society and how we can work with it to face global challenges in health, food and water and create a more sustainable biofuture.
We began this discussion in our first virtual meetup on March 11th, with key opinion leaders in European synthetic biology & biotechnology to gather inspiration to progress towards these shared goals.
A key topic of interest for the participants was the infrastructure and regulatory requirements to help us achieve this and to support the scalability of solutions. Thankfully we were joined by an expert panelists; Olivier Rolland from TWB, Cindy Gerhardt from DSM Biotech Campus Delft, Simon Trancart from Altar and Alex Nielsen from REBBLS to discuss this and more. The discussion was moderated by Will Wright from iGEM.
Will: “Olivier, we have several biotech market leaders in Europe, especially within large scale fermentation. Yet, Europe is not often considered to be a front runner in Biotech Innovation. Why is that?”
“In my opinion there are three 3 main reasons.
I would say the first is access to capital, second is the capabilities and the third one is regulation.
With regards to capital, it takes time and money to develop the process around scale-ups. The funding is critical and you could get much more in the US compared to Europe. More in terms of size of the funding, the accessibility as well as in the number of opportunities. This goes all the way from VCs to federal funding opportunities like DARPA who invest in biotech research and development.
The second reason are capabilities.
The capabilities in the US are much more concentrated. Not only physically but also within specific organizations including companies. Start-ups like Ginkgo and Zymergen have raised 100’s of million of dollars enabling them to build the integrated capabilities in-house. Another example are national labs such as the Joint BioEnergy institute.
In Europe, I think we are a bit delayed in trying to shape our own research infrastructure. However we see some promising developments, in particular a EC-funded project called IBISBA-ESFRI which aims at building a research infrastructure on synthetic biology and industrial biotechnology that will be distributed over nine countries, the idea being to really accelerate projects from the proof of concept to Scale-Up.
The last one is regulation.
Regulation is somehow less stringent for businesses outside Europe. In particular as it relates to GMM/GMO [Genetically Modified Microorganisms / Genetically Modified Organisms] which results into an easier market access in the US or China as opposed to Europe. An example is the stand that has been taken by EU regulators to regulate CRISPR Cas9-edited plants as GMO’s. At the same time, the US regulates CRISPR Cas9-edited plants as non-GMO, leading to different ways of using those on the market.
I will finish on one comment here of what we could do in Europe.
We are pretty advanced in terms of carbon neutrality as a continent. However, I think that both the US and China have managed to link biotechnology to other strategic stakes. Such as energy independency or food independency which has a ‘pulling ability’ and has attracted a large amount of interest and funding. Such links are necessary.
I don’t think we should repeat what has been done in the US in terms of massive investments of private capital in startups. That will not be able to provide all the biotech R&D needed in the end. They will always have to take a product focus, as opposed to a service one as it relates to the role of an infrastructure, in order to break even.
My vision would be that we manage to build a network of infrastructure together in Europe. One that interacts between the academic and private sector in a very fluid manner. With some standardisation of our procedures between institutes we would be able to accelerate biotech development. We could then benefit from the European Union funding to really keep all partners at the state of the art and share the risks and funds between different member states and organizations”
Olivier Rolland from TWB.
Will: “Cindy, What are the the greatest challenges in creating an integrated supply chain from the lab to scale-up production in your opinion?”
“I also think there are three main challenges.
The first is in general the technology readiness levels (TRLs).
We have really promising technologies but their low TRL is often an issue. It’s hard for companies to invest if the TRL is too low and then the universities have to continue to work on it. In that case, universities often have difficulties to scale up and find commercial actors to join. We see the same difficulties with pilot plants that, despite promising results, don’t have the money to invest in new hardware for innovative technologies to the second development stage.
The second challenge is around infrastructure investment.
In Europe, we have established players that have been there for long time. Some of these companies have factories that are more than 100 years old. They could gradually upgrade them, but companies often opt to build new facilities, or venture with partners that have production facilities that are easier to modify. They would rather venture into finding partners outside of Europe to use their newer production facilities. Investment into into large scale production facilities is a big issue because of the high risk and long return on investment.
Then we have the third point, the value chain.
The whole value chain is scattered around Europe. When you think about it, the most effective way to organise the production and scale up is when you combine all the elements of the of the value chain in one location. However, the access to the raw materials and feedstocks in Europe is sometimes highly scattered. Especially access to primary biomass is often not co-located with locations where the final products are manufactured. Or, with locations where biobased innovations are being developed. So there’s a scattered landscape across the many European countries, and connecting those value chains remains a big challenge. On the other hand, biotech may provide excellent opportunities for smaller scale, local initiatives to upgrade local feedstock, byproducts or waste.”
Cindy Gerhardt from DSM Biotech Campus Delft.
“I think GMOs are a really fundamental question to address to open up for the full potential of synbio. If we really want to solve the grand sustainability issues at scale, then we need the biotech community to be more progressive on this issue.”
Will: “Simon, aside from physical infrastructure what EU regulations have positively or negatively affected your business?”
“In our field, the GMO regulation is more strict than in other areas. In the case of my company, we are in a particular situation, because we harness natural selection for making better microbes instead of using genetic engineering. Therefore, we develop non-GMO organisms. Because the microbes we improve are non-GMO in a majority of cases, I can witness an increasing interest for our technology in Europe because of the strict regulation.
Unfortunately, interactions between stakeholders — consumers, industrialists, politics and lawmakers — are tense and the debate does not progress. In my opinion, this situation prevents us from financing more industrial biotech companies. In cosmetics markets for instance, regulation does not ban GMOs but large companies and investors tend not invest in these projects because the risk is too high that, eventually, the end consumer boycotts the use of GMOs or that the regulation changes.
For these reasons, I think that EU regulations have negatively affected biotech businesses in general. But it’s also the public perception. Both are weaknesses for our industry.
I also think we lack efficient financing institutions to bring money into longer-term high-risk projects. Whereas health biotech is a mature industry with well-defined and standardized stages of development which creates exit opportunities for investors, industrial biotech investments are more risky because the exit may only happen when a scientific start-up has become an industrial producer. The limited life cycle of private equity and venture capital funds may not suffice. That said, this situation is not specific to Europe.
Now, the regulation can have a significant impact on the competitiveness of industrial biotech processes. As they aim at replacing our massive use of fossil resources by sustainable conversion of feedstocks that are in our hand, they contribute at mitigating climate change and make us independent. In that perspective, Europe could pioneer incentive regulations in the frame of the Green Deal and shape tomorrow’s world.”
Simon Trancart from Altar.
Will: “Alex, what do you think is the key topic to address in regards to large scale biotech innovation?”
“Regulation is key in my opinion. Seeing the struggle of new breakthrough biotechnology, with huge potential impact for more sustainable industries, due to lack of the right regulatory frameworks. A positive example can be found with Novozymes, which has been very successful in scaling up biosynthetic enzymes for use in detergents. A major growth driver for them has been the ban on certain surfactants that could be replaced by enzymes to protect ecosystems. So we can see that to switch demand it started with proper regulation.
In this respect, I think GMOs are a really fundamental question to address to open up for the full potential of synbio. If we really want to solve the grand sustainability issues at scale, then we need the biotech community to be more progressive on this issue. We need to take a bolder position in demystifying and demonstrating its potential for good. The way I see It, we need to be way more progressive about technology in this anthropocene age. I think we in this community should push more to surpass that obstacle in a responsible manner.”
Alex Nielsen from REBBLS.
Based on these discussions we encourage you to continue the conversation, and would like to hear from you as we plan for our next event. Please register here for more information on upcoming events and follow the process on our first community whitepaper.
About BioFutures
The Biofutures Initiative was co-created by iGEM & Hello Tomorrow as an opportunity for researchers, startups & companies in biotech to meet and discuss what infrastructure is needed to facilitate a sustainable Biofuture in the European Union.
Biotechnological advances have accelerated over the past two decades. Our ability to read and write DNA has provided us with unprecedented abilities to engineer biology, also known as synthetic biology. Fundamental biotechnologies are increasingly transformed into B2B/B2C products, as well as new medical therapies and diagnostics. We believe that biology will create the next innovation wave and that it has the potential to positively impact many of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Therefore we will bring together key stakeholders to define priority actions that aim to better connect the EU biotech-ecosystem, promote the expansion of local bioeconomies, prepare and educate future generations.
We invite biotech startups, corporates, researchers with ideas to strengthen the EU biotech ecosystem to join the initiative. Register here to receive updates about our activities or to join as ecosystem partner. You can also follow our progress on Twitter.
