Bio-based products embrace foods, fuels, medicines and other products made from renewable biological resources. With the increasing demand for bio-based products, and the currently massive expense for their isolation and purification, there is an urgent need to improve the existing downstream processes, and design new sustainable ones. Our role is to help develop these innovative processes, and to promote downstream processing in Europe and beyond.
The currently established platforms for downstream processing of bio-based products account for more than 80% of the manufacturing costs. As a consequence, there is a need to improve existing downstream processes, as well as, to design new, sustainable, and integrated platforms for isolation and purification of bio-based products.
The market for bio-based products has grown sharply over the past decade as consumers embrace foods, fuels, medicines and other products made from renewable biological resources.
The use of bio-based raw materials for chemical synthesis is of growing importance, and process improvements in the chemical industry are focused on the development of biocatalytic reactions or patways in order to replace hazardous chemical reagents. The integration of biocatalytic reactions and downstream processing with product isolation has led to a variety of in situ product recovery techniques and has found numerous successful applications.
The specific needs an aging society for new affordable biopharmaceuticals to treat age-and prosperity-related diseases, such as Alzheimer, cancer, or Rheumatoid arthritis, will increase considerably, reinforcing the demand for efficient, scalable and cost-effective production technologies. Continuous discoveries in molecular biology and genetics, combined with new advances in media and feed development, have significantly increased the production titres. In order to keep up this gain, it is now essential to design new, as well as to improve existing downstream processes, currently seen as an unresolved bottleneck.
Bio-based products, including recombinant therapeutic proteins, monoclonal antibody and nucleic acid-based products, have shown to have application in several medicinal areas such as vaccination, immunisation, oncology, autoimmune, cardiovascular, inflammatory and neurological diseases. Additionally, other bio-based products like enzymes, diagnostics, specialty chemicals, and food ingredients are also produced in today's biochemical process industry. Also here dsp improvements on existing processes or the introduction of novel technologies are highly needed to increase productivity by alleviating dsp bottlenecks.
The Mission of the DSP Section is to identify and help develop novel dsp techniques and methodologies for the European community and beyond, and:
