The problem:
Microbes are the biological factories at the heart of bio-manufacturing, but natural microbes are not designed to produce high-value goods efficiently in commercial industrial conditions. Substantial microbe engineering and optimization is needed for economical bio-manufacturing that is competitive with traditional manufacturing processes.
The bio-industrial market has an amazing potential to shift our industries towards sustainability and circularity. However, this microbe development work requires a substantial commitment of time, expense and labour and is a large stumbling block in bringing bio-products to market and growing the bio-economy. Evolutor’s technology will eliminate this hurdle.
The solution:
Evolutor’s technology is a standalone microbe optimization platform that enhances and entirely automates the adaptive laboratory evolution of microbes.
We take the inherent power of evolution and apply proprietary microbiological tools and sophisticated automation of selection regimes within our high-throughput micro-bioreactor system. Through these scientific and technological advances, Evolutor can rapidly and reliably fine-tune microbes for industrial bio-manufacturing.
Evolutor’s technology has already been proven in an academic setting using several microbial species. Throughout 2022, we look forward to demonstrating Evolutor’s advanced microbe optimization capabilities with direct industrial applicability. This will begin by seeking pilot partners and customers in the bio-manufacturing of fuels, chemicals, and plastics.
Microbial bio-manufacturing spans many sectors including fuels, food, pharmaceuticals and materials and is only set to grow as more companies and industries adopt this renewable manufacturing approach. Overall, bio-manufacturing is predicted to be worth $2.3 trillion by 2027. Evolutor has potential across the majority of this market, but will initially target a much smaller beachhead within bio-based fuels and chemical manufacturers. Here, our current proof-of-concept demonstrations indicate that we can more than double microbe performances through optimizing factors like growth rate, survivability, productivity, and feedstock utilization. With potential customers having bio-manufacturing capacities of up to 1 million litres, Evolutor’s microbes can have a substantial impact on their outputs.
Looking further into the future, our goals are to capitalize on the early traction built for Evolutor to access wider bio-industrial markets and catapult Evolutor towards rapid expansion. This will involve the development of even more sophisticated microbe optimization platforms and pioneering microbes that can convert waste streams and by-products into valuable novel goods.
Traction:
- 2021: Evolutor has secured funding to support the first 12 months of its operation and will be using this to build a strong commercial team, scale its laboratory and engage with its first customers.
Associated Programme
