#biofactories

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Bio-Factories: The Future of Manufacturing Living Materials

The future won’t be manufactured — it’ll be grown 🌱⚙️ From lab-grown leather to self-healing concrete and mushroom-based packaging, bio-factories are reinventing how the world builds. Sustainable. Regenerative. Alive. This is manufacturing’s next revolution.

Bio-Factories: The Future of Manufacturing Living Materials

The manufacturing world is undergoing a quiet revolution — one where products aren’t made, they grow. As climate pressure rises and traditi

[newstfionline]

Companies rush to build 'biofactories' for medicines, flavorings and fuels

By Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post, October 24, 2013

For scientist Jack Newman, creating a new life-form has become as simple as this: He types out a DNA sequence on his laptop. Clicks "send." And a few yards away in the laboratory, robotic arms mix together some compounds to produce the desired cells.

Newman's biotech company is creating new organisms, most forms of genetically modified yeast, at the dizzying rate of more than 1,500 a day. Some convert sugar into medicines. Others create moisturizers that can be used in cosmetics. And still others make biofuel, a renewable energy source usually made from corn.

"You can now build a cell the same way you might build an app for your iPhone," said Newman, chief science officer of Amyris.

Some believe this kind of work marks the beginning of a third industrial revolution--one based on using living systems as "bio-factories" for creating substances that are either too tricky or too expensive to grow in nature or to make with petrochemicals.

The rush to biological means of production promises to revolutionize the chemical industry and transform the economy, but it also raises questions about environmental safety and biosecurity and revives ethical debates about "playing God." Hundreds of products are in the pipeline.

Laboratory-grown artemisinin, a key anti-malarial drug, went on sale in April with the potential to help stabilize supply issues. A vanilla flavoring that promises to be significantly cheaper than the costly extract made from beans grown in rain forests is scheduled to hit the markets in 2014.

On Wednesday, Amyris announced another milestone--a memorandum of understanding with Brazil's largest low-cost airline, GOL Linhas Aereas, to begin using a jet fuel produced by yeast starting in 2014.

Proponents characterize bio-factories as examples of "green technology" that are sustainable and immune to fickle weather and disease. Backers say they will reshape how we use land globally, reducing the cultivation of cash crops in places where that practice hurts the environment, break our dependence on pesticides and result in the closure of countless industrial factories that pollute the air and water.

But some environmental groups are skeptical.

They compare the spread of bio-factories to the large-scale burning of coal at the turn of the 20th century--a development with implications for carbon dioxide emissions and global warming that weren't understood until decades later.

Revenue from industrial chemicals made through synthetic biology is already as high as $1.5 billion, and it will increase at an annual rate of 15 to 25 percent for the next few years, according to an estimate by Mark Bünger, an analyst for Lux Research, a Boston-based advisory firm that focuses on emerging technologies.

Since it was founded a decade ago, Amyris has become a legend in the field that sits at the intersection of biology and engineering, creating more than 3 million organisms. Unlike traditional genetic engineering, which typically involves swapping a few genes, the scientists are building entire genomes from scratch.

The early scientific breakthroughs by the Amyris founders paved the way for dozens of other companies to do similar work. The next major product to be released is likely to be a vanilla flavoring by Evolva, a Swiss company that has laboratories in the San Francisco Bay area.

Cultivated in the remote forests of Madagascar, Mexico and the West Indies, natural vanilla is one of the world's most revered spices. But companies that depend on the ingredient to flavor their products have long struggled with its scarcity and the volatility of its price.

Its chemically synthesized cousins, which are made from petrochemicals and paper pulp waste and are three to five times cheaper, have 99 percent of the vanilla market but have failed to match the natural version's complexity.

Now scientists in a lab in Denmark believe they've created a type of vanilla flavoring produced by yeast that they say will be more satisfying to the palate and cheaper at the same time.

In Evolva's case, much of the controversy has focused on whether the flavoring can be considered "natural." Evolva boasts that it is, because only the substance used to produce the flavoring was genetically modified--not what people actually consume.

"From my point of view it's fundamentally as natural as beer or bread," said Evolva chief executive Neil Goldsmith, who is a co-founder of the company. "Neither brewer's or baker's yeast is identical to yeast in the wild. I'm comfortable that if beer is natural, then this is natural."

That justification has caused an uproar among some consumer protection and environmental groups. They say that representing Evolva's laboratory-grown flavoring as something similar to vanilla extract from an orchid plant is deceptive, and they have mounted a global campaign urging food companies to boycott the "vanilla grown in a petri dish."

"Any ice-cream company that calls this all-natural vanilla would be committing fraud," argues Jaydee Hanson, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit public interest group based in Washington.

Jim Thomas, a researcher for the ETC Group, said there is a larger issue that applies to all organisms produced by synthetic biology techniques: What if they are accidentally released and evolve to have harmful characteristics?

"There is no regulatory structure or even protocols for assessing the safety of synthetic organisms in the environment," Thomas said.

Then there's the potential economic impact. What about the hundreds of thousands of small farmers who produce these crops now?

Artemisinin is farmed by an estimated 100,000 people in Kenya, Tanzania, Vietnam and China and the vanilla plant by 200,000 in Madagascar, Mexico and beyond.

Biotech executives say they are sympathetic, but that it is the price of progress.