Ouwei Wang and Shannon Hall, co-founders of Pow.bio, want to change the way in which biomanufacturing production is done as they say that the current technology is not good enough. You must have seen several companies that are providing alternatives to meat such as No Meat Factory and others but they all have a problem with leveraging fermentation technologies to scale their production to commercial levels. Once they figure this out, these alternative meat companies can challenge the traditional meat companies in terms of cost as well as production while still maintaining the same quality.
Hall told TechCrunch, in a statement, that “Biology is the technology of today,”. “We see that in lots of consumer-facing goods, and lots of biomedicines and in Impossible Foods products. More importantly, it’s behind our aspirations for how we’re going to deal with some of the biggest challenges in the world. For example, climate change impacts, population growth impacts and our aspirations to live and travel in space. All of that is predicated on having biology technology working.” He added, “The real true story here is that most of the biology design stuff just is too damn expensive to take to the market. “Building bigger bioreactors doesn’t make that better, and as a result, what you see made are things you either need very tiny amounts of, like the heme protein in the Impossible Burger, or things that are crazy expensive, like lactoferrin, or human collagen, which is also nice to have alternatives.”
She explained that prototyping, a necessary step in synthetic biology production, is where the time and cost factors come into play. For example, it involves a six-month wait and a $50,000 investment each time. She added that “Pow.bio intends to bring down biomanufacturing costs by unlocking the potential of synthetic biology via a “broader palette of wins,” that involves the reimagining of fermentation facility operations”. Pow.bio is “building more efficient bioreactor capacity through its continuous fermentation technology. Anchoring the technology is artificial intelligence-controlled software called SOFe that is designed to accelerate process optimization and drive autonomous operation” in order to help companies increase their production.
