Public Funding for Dynamic Extractions Limited

Green Biologics (GBL) is a renewable chemical company currently commissioning the first new Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol (ABE) plant to be built in the USA since 1938. GBLs technology is a bacterial fermentation, converting renewable or waste feedstocks to bio-acetone and bio-butanol. Currently butanol and acetone are derived from oil but the fermentation bio-products have superior characteristics, giving them an advantage in consumer markets. GBLs strain development programme aims to deploy the same robust microbes to produce a wider range of non-native, but natural, bio-chemicals through fermentation. Dynamic Extractions (DE) and BioExtractions Wales (BEW) provide innovative solutions for the purification of chemicals from complex mixtures. DE’s chromatography method will be applied to the extraction of these example chemicals from fermentation broth and BEW will evaluate purification and (bio)chemical transformation to higher value products. A critical need in developing new technologies is ensuring that end-user views and current market dynamics are taken into account. A social science intern will explore stakeholder perspectives in order to gauge the social feasibility of this work.

Green Biologics Ltd, a renewable chemical company which is now producing the only commercially available renewable acetone and butanol globally, is teaming up with innovative SMEs Dynamic Extractions (DE) and BioExtractions Wales (BEW) to develop a manufacturing process for the biological production of a medically and chemically important biochemical. Supported by the University of Exeter (responsible research), E4tech (life cycle analysis) and Keit (process analysis and control) the team aim to develop a process for production that uses renewable feedstocks and processing, reduces the environmental impact of manufacture and is made using methodology that is acceptable to society at large. The project will apply CLEAVE™, a GBL-developed technology that revolutionises the use of clostridial bacteria for the production of a wide range of biochemicals. GBL will develop the microbes and manufacturing process with technology developed by DE and BEW being used to purify the product and develop new markets based on promoting sustainability.

The collaboration Dynamic Extractions, Novartis UK and Imperial College supported by the TSB will overcome the last major barrier to the widespread adoption of High Performance Countercurrent Chromatography (HPCCC). This barrier is the time consuming process of developing the correct combination of solvents to separate any given chemical mixture to obtain only the desired chemical. The collaborators will create a fast and effective standard approach to select the best mixture of solvents from a standard set of solvent combinations to target the desired chemical. This will benefit the UK's pharmaceutical companies by allowing more chemicals to be purified leading to the availability of more and better drugs that will improve public health. Also as HPCCC is easily scalable (does not use expensive solid stationary phases and thus uses significantly less quantities of solvents than existing processes) the development of these new drugs will be less expensive and greener.

The aim of the project is to drive substantial cost efficiency in both drug development and drug manufacturing processes by developing commercial counter current separation technology which will allow selective purifications to be achieved at a loading of approximately 1kg/day. In contrast to high-performance liquid chromatography, counter current separations do not require expensive packing materials; are more tolerant of particulate matter and have the benefit of excellent reproducibility. The project will demonstrate the broad applicability of the technology to pharmaceutical separation problems and specific examples will be more closely examined demonstrating separation capability at scale.