Innovators Magazine asked some biotech stakeholders what trends they expect to see in their markets this year.
The opinions were published in our special biotechnology edition, which was distributed to delegates at an industry conference in Glasgow this week.
One of those was from Kathrin Rübberdt, Head of the Biotechnology Department of DECHEMA, in Frankfurt. She told us she is confident there will be some major developments in industrial biotechnology in the near future.
“Biotechnology has already become an integral part of pharmaceutical production and is currently merging with conventional chemical processes,” she said. “Combining the best of two worlds, especially fine chemicals and complex molecules can be produced a lot more efficiently and sustainably than before. In order to achieve this, a couple of challenges need to be tackled: reaction conditions need to be adapted to allow for a seamless integration of different steps. This is especially true for reaction media – biotechnological processes often take place in highly diluted aqueous solutions – a chemist’s nightmare and a big issue in downstream processing where efficiency gains in the reaction are often offset by the efforts required to isolate the product. A key to better synthetic pathways are robust production organisms. New developments in biotechnology research such as synthetic biology or novel genome editing techniques open up a whole new horizon of opportunities including tailor-made production system with customised synthetic pathways and high tolerance for (by-)products. We expect to see a lot of progress in industrial biotechnology in the near future based on today’s groundbreaking lab research.”
Read the trends article and more on the biotech industry in our new special edition – available online now.
