The Verschuren Centre is filling the critical scale-up gap for vital biobased manufacturing companies to solve global challenges.
Biomanufacturing, a broad term encompassing a range of green technologies including precision fermentation, presents a pivotal technology to address key global challenges of human and environmental health. Numerous reports estimate the future impact of biotechnology as replacing 60% of the world’s physical inputs and alleviating 45% of the world’s disease burden in the next 20 years. This represents a market value in the trillions of dollars for companies targeting sustainable solutions for the future.
Biomanufacturing takes advantage of rapid advances in genetic engineering to create virtually any intermediary product that is otherwise typically derived from petrochemicals, and, as such, has huge potential to impact the country’s path to a net zero manufacturing future. Often referred to as the internet of the future, the potential product array seems infinite and will impact almost every aspect of our daily lives.
The bridge to success
To accelerate deployment of this green supply chain of intermediaries and functional materials, key capital-intensive assets and infrastructure are required to keep up with the needs of these technologies to derisk sufficiently to enter manufacturing and commercial production. This intermediary capacity, which is transitory enroute to CMO
and manufacturing, is recognisably lacking in many countries around the globe – representing a self-limiting step.
The Verschuren Centre and its partners have therefore adopted a shared-asset-use business model to overcome this gap. This ensures that one main investment is available to benefit many companies, thereby being more capital efficient, and accelerating the time to market within a supportive ecosystem. Typically, companies not only require the upstream precision fermentation equipment, but also size-matched separation and purification technologies.
In partnership with national and provincial governments and private capital (Ascend Bio), we have built our pilot to demonstration scale and partnered on full CMO production scale (Neptune BioInnovation Centre) in Nova Scotia to provide this end-to-end capacity for companies. These assets service over 50 companies from across North America and can attract future partnerships from Europe and Asia, affirming the global need and potential.
Broad impact areas
The combined impact of genetic engineering and precision fermentation production platforms is a pathway to a vast array of functional materials, green chemical, functional food, therapeutics, polymers, and plastics. These become primary ingredients or high-value intermediaries in our food and agriculture, manufacturing, automotive, construction, and defence sectors – bringing increased competitiveness to manufacturing while delivering improved carbon footprint and reduced environmental impact. The potential is immense, yet capacity is constrained.
To enable greater propensity to scale these innovative products, a collaborative shared investment partnership is required to reduce the cost burden of the scale-up journey and allow more capacity development. The Verschuren Centre is looking to grow these vital partnerships to further advance the mission of positive impact on planetary and human health by deploying sustainable everyday products.
A natural ecosystem
For companies to grow at speed and efficiently, a supportive ecosystem of partners and assets are required. Nova Scotia has committed to building this in collaboration with partners from across Canada – from top university innovation, through top accelerator programmes and private investment, and into collaborative industrial partnerships to deploy advances quickly and with industry relevance.
Industrial partners are recipients of derisked technologies and can help drive the direction of consumer-relevant advances. A new Nova Scotia partnership in 2025 with Neptune BioInnovation ensures Canada is growing the contract manufacturing capacity to meet increasing market demand as companies build out their markets and plants. Canada has the advantage of vast natural ingredient supply to feed this unique growth sector while benefiting from the intermediary supply chain advances in a multitude of sectors of our economy.
Biomanufacturing is a natural fit to our resource and manufacturing base and should ensure we grow and deploy technologies that benefit Canadian and European manufacturing sectors having the greatest positive impact on human and planetary health.
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Please note, this article will also appear in the 25th edition of our quarterly publication.
