$275 million commitment to brew better molecules for manufacturing

On October 20, 2020, Berkeley News reported on the $275 million investment that the U.S. Department of Defense and more than 80 companies, universities, states, and research institutes will contribute to over the next seven years to scale up the microbial production of biomolecules. The effort will enable a growing biomanufacturing industry to supply a broad range of businesses with large quantities of chemicals at the low prices necessary to make them competitive with petroleum-based alternatives.

Biomolecules on the market today are mostly drugs or fragrances made by small batch fermentation in yeast or bacteria, a process much like that of a craft brewery. The goal of the public-private partnership, the Bioindustrial Manufacturing And Design Ecosystem (BioMADE), is to employ the same principles of genetic engineering and engineering biology used in the pharmaceutical industry to produce chemicals other than drugs on a scale similar to that used to ferment corn into ethanol for transportation. The new bioindustrial manufacturing innovation institute was announced by the Department of Defense (DoD) on October 20, 2020.

There is a strong UC-presence supporting this initiative, with the following featured collaborators:

• Richard Murray, California Institute of Technology (Institutional Membership Committee, Security Working Group)

• Michelle O’Malley, University of California, Santa Barbara (Individual Membership Committee, Policy & International Engagement Working Group)

• Elisa Franco, University of California, Los Angeles (Roadmapping Working Group)

• Chang Liu, University of California, Irvine (Roadmapping Working Group)

• Javin Oza, California Polytechnic State University, SLO (Education Working Group)

You can read the full article here.