Support for biomanufacturing processes that can advance solutions in climate change and bolster national and economic security, like the executive order on advancing biotechnology and manufacturing is a welcome, much-needed pivot.
But with traditional processes of engineering biology coming at a cost and often turning into long, complicated endeavors, success has been too slow for a rapidly changing world that needs solutions now.
At DMC Biotechnologies, we’re taking the call to action for faster and effective biotechnology innovations seriously. DMC’s proprietary precision fermentation process is a holistic approach ushering in the next transformative wave of biotechnology with global implications.
By addressing the barriers that have challenged the industry for decades, the DMC process brings biomanufacturing into a new era, pioneering pathways needed for rapid commercialization, and in turn, sustainability that has an impact. DMC is the platform that is Made to Scale™.
Simplifying Biology for Scale
Microbes have evolved over millennia to respond to their environments as a means of survival. While that may be advantageous for survival in the wild, it has created the need for significant work in process development in the industrial environment.
It was a challenge that DMC Biotechnologies founders Dr. Matthew Lipscomb and Dr. Mike Lynch, chemical engineers who met in grad school, were all too familiar with. Having experienced first hand the labors, frustrations, and challenges of engineering biology, they were inspired to develop a better approach that addressed these challenges: Dynamic Metabolic Control™.
DMC’s technology uses a standardized, two-stage fermentation process that decouples the growth of the microbe from production of the desired product.
In traditional bioprocessing, the individual strains used for each production process require unique process development at each scale and are sensitive to even minor changes in the physical properties of the fermentation broth such as temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen (DO), which are unavoidable at commercial scale.
DMC’s precision fermentation technology limits the ability of the microbe to respond to the environment, simplifying biology and enabling predictable scale-up. This process creates the opportunity to reimagine how everyday products are made with applications that range from personal care to nutrition to the composite materials that we rely on every day.
A True Technology Platform
With DMC, the strain is more robust to the process environment, eliminating the need to develop a new process for each new strain, product, or scale. DMC’s platform enables bioprocesses that can tolerate a greater range of industrial process conditions, resulting in fewer lost batches and better economics than other approaches.
DMC further simplifies biomanufacturing by using a standardized set of equipment, operations, microbes and feedstocks. The frequent failure of small-scale screening studies to readily translate to larger-scale production processes has been a major factor inhibiting the commercialization of fermentation processes.
On the contrary, by combining standardization and process robustness DMC’s technology creates a pathway to predictable performance through a true platform technology that can produce bio-based chemicals for every product and at every scale.
Scaling to Commercial Success
DMC’s Made to Scale™ platform powers the efficient commercialization of bio-based chemicals, taking concepts to products quicker and more cost effectively than the traditional approach, which remains artisanal and exorbitantly costly.
By 2020, DMC Biotechnologies had produced four products with commercial performance metrics and demonstrated at scale (3000L scale fermentation). It has also brought its lead product, L-alanine, to 85,000L scale fermentation and has a full pipeline of products, with markets such as intermediate chemicals, nutrition, and personal and home care, among others. All of this was accomplished with an investment of less than $15 million – faster and more economical than any other technology in the field.
DMC Biotechnologies is now growing a pipeline of bio-based chemicals that it will deploy over the coming decade to meet the urgent need of faster and more cost effective success in biomanufacturing.
By addressing key barriers and streamlining product development with standardized, predictable and robust methods, DMC is creating a dramatic reduction of time-to-market and costs, transforming traditional product and chemical development that is better for consumers, and better for mitigating climate change.
Get in touch to learn more about how DMC fuses sustainable chemistry with business sense.
