DMC Biotech Com­pletes Suc­cess­ful Pilot of L‑alanine

DMC Bio­tech­no­lo­gies has suc­cess­fully pro­duced its lead product, L‑alanine at pilot scale. Com­mer­cial key per­form­ance met­rics were achieved and per­form­ance from the bench scale was also demon­strated at 3 m³ scale fer­ment­a­tion and for each of the down­stream puri­fic­a­tion unit oper­a­tions. The robust­ness of DMC’s Dynam­ic Meta­bol­ic Con­trol tech­no­logy to the pro­cess envir­on­ment was also val­id­ated. The pre­dict­ab­il­ity of the DMC pro­cess has been demon­strated from high through­put screen­ing to com­mer­cially rel­ev­ant scale. Kilo­gram-sized samples of on-spe­cific­a­tion product are cur­rently being provided to poten­tial cus­tom­ers, pav­ing the way to com­mer­cial launch later this year. No fur­ther strain improve­ment or pro­cess engin­eer­ing is required. Dur­ing the exe­cu­tion of the fer­ment­a­tion, a tech­nic­al fail­ure of an inlet valve in the pilot plant res­ul­ted in a mater­i­al devi­ation from the pro­tocol. This type of mech­an­ic­al issue is com­mon­place in the real world of indus­tri­al fer­ment­a­tion. The DMC strain and pro­cess were not mater­i­ally affected by this devi­ation and the tar­get met­rics were still achieved because of the robust­ness of the tech­no­logy and the timely response by BPF’s oper­at­ors. In con­trast, most of the cur­rent biopro­cesses today would have been un-recov­er­able to this type of devi­ation. Raimo van der Linden, Busi­ness Devel­op­ment Man­ager, Biopro­cess Pilot Facil­ity (BPF) said, ​“We recre­ate real life indus­tri­al con­di­tions at BPF and help com­pan­ies such as DMC val­id­ate their tech­no­logy at pilot scale. The robust­ness of DMC’s pro­cess was thor­oughly chal­lenged dur­ing this work. The demon­stra­tion of robust­ness to the pro­cess envir­on­ment is truly game-chan­ging for the field of indus­tri­al bio­tech­no­logy.” Matt Lipscomb, Ph.D., CEO & Co-Founder of DMC said, ​“Suc­cess­ful pilot scale pro­duc­tion is an import­ant step towards full com­mer­cial­iz­a­tion of L‑alanine which will hap­pen later this year. We knew our Dynam­ic Meta­bol­ic Con­trol pro­cess was robust. It has been fur­ther proven through real-world oper­at­ing con­di­tions at BPF’s pilot plant.” Source: DMC Biotech, Press release, 06.02.2020