Bringing Innovative Industrial Biotechnology research to the market

Aim of the project

IB2Market aims to bring industrial biotechnology from the research lab to the market and to solve the bottle-necks in industrialization. The project covers process development, scale up, market exploration and the drafting of a valorization plan to support a successful market introduction.

Specifically, the project targets the development, scale-up, market exploration and market introduction of new industrial biotechnology processes that have recently been developed to produce the following compounds:

  1. Biosurfactants, surface-active ingredients with a wide range of applications. Specifically, the project targets bola-sophorolipids, a completely new type
    of biosurfactants.
  2. Specialty carbohydrates, mainly for pharmaceutical and cosmetic applications. Specifically, the project targets L-fucose and fucosylated oligosaccharides that are very difficult to produce through extraction or chemical synthesis.

For both product lines, the fermentation process and downstream processing will be optimised and scaled up to 15.000 liter scale. Sufficient amounts of product will be produced for application testing and exploratory marketing, in order to identify the most interesting market segments.

The technical, economic and environmental sustainability of the process from biomass to product application will also be assessed, with particular emphasis on identifying and solving the bottlenecks in the innovation chain. A valorization plan will be drafted to complete all the steps of the innovation chain. The project will result in the industrialisation and commercialization of the developed products and processes.

PARTNERS

SUPPORTED by:

This project is ffunded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union