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IB2Market – Bringing innovative industrial biotechnology research to the market (FP7)
IB2Market aims to bring industrial biotechnology from the research lab to the market and to solve the bottle-necks in industrialisation. Specifically, the project targets the development and scale-up of new industrial biotechnology processes that have recently been developed to produce the following compounds:
- Biosurfactants, tensioactive ingredients with a wide range of applications. Specifically, the project targets bola-sophorolipids, a completely new type of biosurfactants.
- Specialty carbohydrates, mainly for pharmaceutical and cosmetic applications. Specifically, the project targets L-fucose and fucosylated oligosaccharides that are very difficult to produce through extraction or chemical synthesis.
For both product lines, the fermentation process and down-stream processing will be optimised and scaled up to 15.000 litre scale. Sufficient amounts of product will be produced for application testing and exploratory marketing, in order to identify the most interesting market segments. The technical, economic and environmental sustainability of the process from biomass to product application will also be assessed, with particular emphasis on identifying and solving the bottlenecks in the innovation chain. A valorisation plan will be drafted to complete the innovation chain. The project will result in the industrialisation and commercialisation of the developed products and processes.
The project consortium has all the required players to move a process from lab scale to industrialisation: an open innovation pilot plant (Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant), a biotech start-up company (Inbiose), marketing companies for surfactants (EOC-surfactants) and specialty carbohydrates (Carbosynth), the RTD organisation that developed the processes at lab-scale (Ghent University), an application developer (Innovhub) and service-providing SMEs (Nova institute and BCNP consultants).
