Biochemical Industry / Food
Bioprocessing of e.g. sugar sources to useful products is a key to success for developing economical viable business cases.
BPF has ample experience with developing and validating fermentation and DSP processes to build such business cases. We also have a separate food grade area dedicated to food ingredient processing. Want to check how BPF can help you with developing and/or validating your process, contact us to learn more about the opportunities.
Have also a look at our infographics:
- download the infographic on valorization of 1st and 2nd generation sugars
- download the infographic on how BPF can help you out on purification / downstream processing
Best practices
Choice of raw materials
Use the final product target as starting point. Should the product be used in Pharma (non-clinical)/Feed/Food/Bulk Chemical? Choose the right raw material grade from the start.
Furthermore, take into account the raw material costs:
Assume production scale is 200 m3. Kanamycin is needed to maintain plasmid stability of the production organism. Its concentration is 50 mg/l and the cost price is 3 USD/g. The process has been developed on lab scale by the customer. The total cost of kanamycin is 1.50 USD at 10 L scale.
However, customer targets to produce at 200 m3 scale. This makes the total cost of Kanamycin at this scale 30.000 USD. A great technical choice at lab scale is not always economically viable at commercial scale depending on the targeted end-product selling price.
Seed train optimization
The seed train is the starting point for a fermentation process. A typical example: 1 culture cryo-tube is added to a flask containing 500 mL of medium.
After 48 hours of incubation the complete flask is transferred to a lab scale fermenter containing 9500 mL medium (5% inoculum ratio). This means on 200 m3 factory scale you will need 20.000 flasks to inoculate your fermenter in order to obtain a similar amount of generations of growth. As you can imagine this is not practical.
If more generations are needed on planned scale of production, make sure to study the effect of more generations and the inoculum strategy on the process on lab scale or pilot scale. Are productivities maintained? Is the plasmid stable? Do viscosities change?
Anti-foam agents
Foaming behaviour is complex to model and in some cases unpredictable. Finding the right balance between aeration and agitation while the fermentation is proceeding without interruption is a challenge.
Extensive foaming interrupts the process and leads to yield loss or loss of the complete fermenter. Dosing anti-foam to the fermenter can keep foaming under control.
Anti-foaming agents are however known to potentially inhibit growth and can affect DSP by, for example, blocking membrane filters or negatively influencing product crystallization. Depending on the final application, the choice of antifoam can give rise to issues with final product registration.
Careful selection of a suitable antifoam type and determination of the maximum amount of antifoam that can be added without hampering DSP needs to be determined on lab or pilot scale.