Reality Check for Biotech: Turning Laboratory Ideas into Industrial Production
GEA's new Application and Technology Center in Sarstedt helps biotech and new-food companies test whether laboratory processes can work reliably and economically at industrial scale before major investments are made.
GEA
Moving an innovative biotechnology process from the laboratory into commercial production is one of the biggest challenges facing the emerging new-food and biotech industries. A process that works successfully at laboratory scale may behave very differently when equipment, volumes, heat transfer, separation and process controls are scaled up.
GEA's Application and Technology Center (ATC) in Sarstedt, Germany, was created to address this gap. The facility provides an environment where companies can test processes under conditions that more closely resemble industrial production before committing to a full-scale manufacturing facility.
One example described by GEA involved a 500-liter bioreactor in which a production organism generated significantly more heat than expected from laboratory experiments. Testing at the ATC allowed engineers to identify the cooling challenge early and adjust the control parameters and process strategy before the technology reached a commercial plant.
The center can also investigate downstream processing challenges such as protein recovery, concentration, purification and separation. In one test, GEA engineers evaluated different pretreatment and high-pressure homogenization approaches to release protein from yeast cells while monitoring energy requirements. Subsequent separation and filtration tests helped identify an appropriate processing route, with one tested step achieving protein yields of more than 90%.
GEA presents the journey from laboratory to commercial production as a series of stages: laboratory validation, application and technology testing, demonstration-scale production and finally industrial-scale manufacturing.
This approach is particularly important for precision fermentation, alternative proteins and other emerging food technologies where technical feasibility, process economics, hygiene, repeatability and scalability must all be demonstrated before commercial investment.
The central idea is simple: discovering a problem at pilot scale can prevent much more expensive problems after a factory has already been built.