https://bio.nikkeibp.co.jp/atcl/news/p1/23/06/06/10774/
https://www.nedo.go.jp/news/press/AA5_101654.html
On June 2, 2023, Green Earth Institute inaugurated the Biofoundry Research Institute, part of the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) Biofoundry Project, at the Mitsui Chemicals Mobara Branch Plant in Mobara City, Chiba Prefecture.
NEDO’s biopharmaceutical foundry project aims to establish and demonstrate the technologies necessary to build biomanufacturing using a variety of raw materials and diverse products.
The BioFoundry Laboratory is a facility that conducts demonstration experiments on biomanufacturing using glucose and other sugars as raw materials and hosts such as coryneform bacteria and Escherichia coli. The emphasis is on scale-up in the development process of biomanufacturing. While the bioengineering bench facility is equipped with a 1500L fermenter, the biofoundry building has a larger capacity fermenter of 3000L. As a result, it is now possible to conduct test production as well as scale-up. The company plans to jointly conduct two to four demonstration experiments per year, inviting companies and research institutions that wish to scale up.
GEI also plans to use the biofoundry building to develop a “scale-down model” that can estimate production efficiency when scaling up based on data from small-scale demonstration experiments. Since demonstration experiments for biomanufacturing require a large amount of money, GEI hopes to be able to estimate production efficiency on a large scale through small-scale demonstrations.