Clean manufacturing powered by biology: how Amyris has deployed technology and aims to do it better
Paul W. Hill, Kirsten R. Benjamin, Binita Bhattacharjee, Fernando J. Castillo-García, Joshua S. Leng, Chi-Li Liu, Abhishek Murarka, Douglas J. Pitera, Elisa Maria Rodriguez Porcel, Iris da Silva, Chuck Kraft
Abstract
Amyris is a fermentation product company that leverages synthetic biology and has been bringing novel fermentation products to the market since 2009. Driven by breakthroughs in genome editing, strain construction and testing, analytics, automation, data science, and process development, Amyris has commercialized nine separate fermentation products over the last decade. This has been accomplished by partnering with the teams at 17 different manufacturing sites around the world. This paper begins with the technology that drives Amyris, describes some key lessons learned from early scale-up experiences, and summarizes the technology transfer procedures and systems that have been built to enable moving more products to market faster. Finally, the breadth of the Amyris product portfolio continues to expand; thus the steps being taken to overcome current challenges (e.g. automated strain engineering can now outpace the rest of the product commercialization timeline) are described.