Engineers from the university are commercialising microbial engineering technology, as part of a pioneering new spin-out company to meet global biomanufacturing needs.
Joe Price will be discussing the spin-out company ‘Evolutor’ and how this new technology platform has been developed in the University’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering by a team of academics, technicians and students working in collaboration.
The platform applies adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) to develop more powerful microbial factories than are currently available for biomanufacturing and biofabrication. Evolutor also aims to focus on enabling the large-scale manufacture of biodegradable plastics that are compatible with nature, and plans to scale into the food sector in the future. Here, meat and dairy proteins that are identical to real animal products can be produced by Evolutor’s advanced microbes instead of cows, pigs or chickens. This has great potential and sustainability benefits in terms of emissions, land use and water use.