Was Walking Away From an In-House R&D Team the Right Call?
The client traded a standing in-house R&D organization for outside process development expertise. Then came a new facility, a new region, and a new feedstock supply chain, and a proven process that had to be proven all over again.
Re-validate a proprietary fermentation process for a new facility, a new region, and a new feedstock supply chain.
A sequenced scale-up and scale-down program across bench, pilot, and industrial-scale batches, built to eliminate the biggest risks first.
A validated process on lower-cost regional feedstocks, converted to fed-batch, without the burden of owning and operating its own bench and pilot infrastructure.
The client spent years developing proprietary organisms in house. That work led to a yeast strain that naturally consumes pentose sugars, allowing it to run on non-food plant waste for cost and environmental advantages. Because the trait occurs naturally, the strain does not carry a GMO designation, making it more attractive to the food and feed markets.
The client made a strategic choice as it moved towards commercial production. Rather than carry the ongoing cost of a full in-house R&D program, it would focus on industrialization and bring in outside process development expertise as needed.
That decision brought a new challenge into focus. When it was time to increase production capacity and expand into a new facility and region, the client had to revisit its process. Many key parameters and assumptions had to be re-checked or optimized for a new set of equipment and a new supply chain.
The client still needed R&D capabilities. The challenge was finding a way to answer critical process questions and validate changes at an industrially relevant scale without rebuilding the infrastructure, equipment, and personnel that were no longer core pillars of its strategy.
The Client's Challenge
Moving a proven process into a new facility meant re-checking assumptions and validating performance.
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Challenge 01
New Site, New Supply Chain
Re-validate and adapt a proprietary fermentation process for a new facility and feedstock supply chain.
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Challenge 02
Stability Over Long Runs
Confirm long-term genetic stability of the production strain.
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Challenge 03
The Scale Gap
Bridge the gap between small-scale optimizations and industrially relevant processes without owning equipment at either end.
Growth Curve's Solution
Growth Curve and the client developed a comprehensive scale-up and scale-down program. This allowed the client to answer the key questions as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, sequencing bench, pilot, and industrial-scale batches to eliminate the biggest risks first.
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Feedstock Flexibility
Off Glucose, Onto What's Local
Swapped the process off glucose and onto alternative carbon sources, including corn mash, barley mash, molasses, and woody sugars, then developed protocols that led to predictable, consistent performance.
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Feeding Regimen
Fed-Batch and Continuous
Developed fed-batch and continuous processes, including a simplified design that combined feed streams.
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Base Optimization
Cheaper Base Chemistry
Screened alternative bases for pH control and identified optimal concentrations for each.
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Strain Stability
Proof It Holds Up
Ran extended fermentation protocols and supplied samples for independent genetic drift analysis to confirm the strain would hold up over long production runs.
What Changed for the Client
The client walked away with a validated process for its new site.
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Gained flexibility to run on lower cost, more regionally available feedstocks instead of a single fixed carbon source.
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Converted to an optimized fed-batch process, opening the door to a much wider set of contract manufacturers for future scale-up, since few CMOs can run continuous fermentations at scale.
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Identified lower-cost, more available base options for pH control at scale.
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Answered fundamental biology questions without building its own pilot infrastructure or arranging a university partnership.
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Kept capital pointed at growth instead of committed CapEx and OpEx, treating R&D and process development as a capability to call on when needed rather than an ongoing cost.
The direct access to the engineers and leadership, along with the quality of the data, has exceeded our expectations and enabled us to scale with confidence.
About Growth Curve
Growth Curve helps synthetic biology teams turn ideas into commercially-viable bioproducts. It operates as an independent development partner with deep experience across microbial systems, with no competing product interests, no academic mandates, and no publishing agenda.
Growth Curve's capabilities span the full path from strain engineering to large-scale manufacturing hand-off, backed by a precision fermentation facility specializing in BSL-1 microbial hosts, including downstream processing and analytics.