Designing Synbio Products with the End in Mind – Techno-Economic Analyses (TEAs) As a Tool for Strategic Development

Recent efforts to generate biomaterials and chemical precursors through federal programs, such as DARPA 1000 Molecules, have created vast libraries of microbes capable of producing both essential and novel SynBio products. Army SynBio products have the potential to revolutionize everything from essential supply chains to device performance, both supporting the warfighter in the field and creating opportunities for public sector spin-off technologies. Considering the impact of physical, technical, and economic scale-up factors during strain engineering, including physical limits imposed by process capabilities at larger scales, byproduct impact on downstream separation strategies, and feedstock market factors, can substantially impact successful transition of SynBio products from the lab bench to the industrial facility. One tool to strategically assess a SynBio project in development is the techno-economic analysis (TEA). To illustrate the insight that early-stage logistics consideration can offer for SynBio product design, we performed a retrospective TEA for a recent in-house scale-up operation. E. coli filamentous phage-based BioCNF is a carbon filtration material with properties tunable through bioengineering of the phage template. BioCNF is useful for oxygen storage, gas mask filtration, and fiber-based technologies, and was recently produced at the 10 lb (4.5 kg) scale using DEVCOM CBC’s pilot scale BioManufacturing facility. TEA insights suggest transitioning the strain to a lower-cost media would improve overall economics.

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