Team:DTU-Denmark/HP/Gold
Making Yeastilization viable
Engagement and communication with stakeholders and the potential users of our technology has been evident from day one of the project by dialog and interviews with significant players in the industry.
Introduction
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We come from a technical university in a small country, where innovation is going to be our livelihood, so we have throughout our studies been encouraged to think outside the box and strive to make the impossible possible. But since we are just a group of young, blue eyed students coming from the comfort of the university, we wanted to investigate how our idea would fit into real life settings and explore the viability of basing industrial biotechnological processes on waste streams. Throughout our project, from the initial development of the idea to finalizing the lab work, we have been in close contact and collaboration with the industry. We started out searching for abundant waste streams in Denmark by contacting and visiting local factories, then we presented our idea to biotech manufacturing companies and all together the feedback made us more aware of the challenges our technology is facing and it ultimately led us to a more feasible product.
Investigating local industrial waste streams
Denmark is a country known for having the happiest people, the royal family and bicycles. We are also home to the world’s biggest pork exporter and you have probably tasted a beer from Carlsberg or played with Lego’s at some point of your life. We started of with the textbook example of an abundant industrial waste stream on the rise - glycerol from biodiesel production. *Numbers on biodiesel and increasing amounts of glycerol* We came in contact with local biodiesel producers, Perstorp and Emmelev A/S, to investigate their waste streams with the perception that glycerol was an abundant waste product from their productions and thereby a problem, we could help them get rid of. Surprisingly, we quickly learned that glycerol is far from being waste, but actually already is a valuable byproduct used for XXX. This made us go back to the drawing board. We turned to a local brewery, a canola oil producer, an abattoir and XXX. One true waste source we came across was the press cake sediment from cold pressed canola oil production.
Section 2.1
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Section 2.2
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Implementation of substrates from waste streams in the biotech manufacturing industry
The second part of our integrated human practices consisted of interviews and feedback from two of the biggest biotech companies in Denmark, Novo Nordisk A/S and Novozymes A/S. Novo Nordisk develops and produces more than 50% of the insulin worldwide along with growth factors and medicine for hemophilia. To get the perspective of Novo Nordisk on how the increasing demand for insulin and higher demand of crops/edible carbon sources will require a more sustainable technology, we went to visit the Novo Nordisk Science Park in Måløv, Denmark *Insert photo*, to interview Nina Gunnarsson and Kjeld Olesen, who both are researchers in the Strain Development department in Novo Nordisk. With more than five years of employment at the company, they provided us with some insights on how they currently produce insulin, what they value in a production organism and what it would take for them to apply our technology. Click here to read the full interview.
Novo Nordisk currently produces recombinant insulin in the conventional baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, by growing it on different refined sugars. “We use a very little amount of sugars compared to what is consumed for food, so right now that sort of sustainability is not that a big of a concern for us. We are more focused on our obligation to provide sufficient amounts of insulin to the patients,” said Kjeld Olesen, when we asked them if changing their substrate into a less competitive and sustainable one was something they were considering. Nina Gunnarsson added: “We obviously have a big focus on having the most optimal processes with the highest possible yield with the minimum environmental impact.” And the most optimal process is for Novo Nordisk is one, where the demand for purity is met. Nina and Kjeld explained to us that purity in regards to avoiding degradative proteins and post-translational modification, especially O-glycosylation, is very important, but the purity of the entire process is essential to obtain the high level of quality required for a therapeutic protein.
We ultimately asked Nina and Kjeld from Novo Nordisk, if they believed changing their insulin production to Yarrowia lipolytica growing on abundant waste streams would be an option: “Well, it would be a huge project! Because the product quality is so important, it would be a very long and complicated changeover, which will include a new factory and new experts, so it would have to be a very good business case,” Nina replied and Kjeld followed: “A stabile, continued supply of substrates is very important. The content of the substrate cannot vary either.” And in conclusion, Nina suggested we should consider applying our technology for something other than therapeutic compounds: “Maybe this would be more applicable for production of other things than therapeutics - such as bulk chemicals, enzymes or food additives, that do not have the same quality and purity requirements.”
Section 4
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Section 5
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