Swiss manufacturing giant Bühler Group has collaborated with US firm Pow.Bio to launch an AI-led continuous precision fermentation technology.
Addressing a major bottleneck of food biomanufacturing, a new partnership seeks to advance industrial-scale precision fermentation with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
It brings together Berkeley-based fermentation specialist Pow.Bio and Swiss equipment manufacturer Bühler Group, which have developed an integrated continuous precision fermentation platform to enable low-cost industrial-scale biomanufacturing.
Precision fermentation involves inserting DNA into microbes to teach them to produce desired molecules when fermented. It’s a technology that has been used for decades to produce insulin and rennet, and is now being used to create animal-free proteins, lipids and bioactives with minimal environmental impact.
“Our collaboration with Bühler sets a new benchmark for biomanufacturing: not just faster, but smarter and more robust,” said Pow.Bio co-founder and CEO Shannon Hall.
This partnership solidifies Pow.Bio’s position at the forefront of industrial biotechnology, enabling us to deliver enduring value for our clients and the sector as a whole,” she added.
A departure from fed-batch fermentation
Pow.Bio helps synthetic biology companies commercialise faster and at competitive cost advantages through its AI-enabled continuous fermentation platform. This technology rapidly identifies better-performing process conditions for fermentation, helping increase outputs from existing infrastructure in a short time frame.
Now, it’s combining this technology with Bühler’s expertise in engineering, delivery, installation, and commissioning, supported by advanced model-driven control software. It has resulted in a platform that allows companies to establish precision fermentation capacity faster, with predictable performance, lower unit costs, and a direct path to scale.
According to the companies, traditional fermentation approaches rely on batch or fed-batch processes, which are stop-and-start methods that require the tank to be emptied and cleaned between runs. Companies using these methods face cost and scalability constraints, as well as inconsistent output.
Bühler and Pow.Bio’s platform, however, offers them an “ultra-efficient and streamlined solution” via a continuous, model-driven system. This enables customers to achieve significantly higher productivity, better process consistency, and more cost-effective manufacturing through an established, low-risk pathway from lab to pilot and full industrial scale.
“Clients can now capitalise on proven technology and global deployment expertise to unlock commercial-scale production with lower risk and unprecedented efficiency,” Hall explained.
Bühler and Pow.bio to onboard customers after successful scale-up
The new platform is designed for a whole host of fermentation-derived products, from ingredients like enzymes and organic acids to novel categories like functional proteins, specialty lipids, and bioactive compounds.
Pow.Bio and Bühler’s partnership comes weeks after the former successfully scaled up its continuous fermentation platform to 3,000 litres at ATV Technologies’s facility in France, in an effort supported by Bühler. It showcased that Pow.Bio’s technology can deliver three times higher protein productivity than fed-batch methods and cut the projected cost of goods sold by over 50%.
The companies’ joint solution addresses obstacles that have long slowed scale-up in the sector. “With the technology validated and the full system in place, we are prepared to onboard customers and support them through deployment and scale-up,” said Adham Rizk, sales and commercial manager at Bühler.
“Precision fermentation has the potential to impact the food, feed, and specialty ingredients industries. Companies are already using it to produce dairy, meat, and egg substitutes, alternative oils and fats, and even novel pet food – and we are only at the beginning of what this technology can unlock,” said Thierry Duvanel, Bühler’s North American director of innovation.
“By joining forces with Pow.Bio, we take a clear step toward reducing unit production costs in biomanufacturing, combining complementary expertise to accelerate innovation and deliver a fully integrated system backed by experience, service, and reliability,” he added.
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