Thread by @ebenbayer

There's a lot of justified concern over whether #fermentation capacity can ever meet the promises of biotech at #scale. It's a real challenge, and one likely to present massive roadblocks to promising new companies, even with immediate action. 🧵

So much of #biotech is about proving that a microbe or genetic alteration can achieve X result in the lab, followed by the promise of what's possible "if you just scale this up…". Naturally, that last bit is where the true value proposition (and difficulty) lies.

Making lots of stuff, even with microscopic agents like yeast, requires gigantic steel tanks, and lots of them. For anything that offers global-scale solutions, we're talking many times more capacity than currently exists. But who's going to own and run all the tanks?

Part of the issue is also that everyone views this as someone else's problem: Focus on designing a cool new organism; a CMO will handle scale. But scale is usually the hardest part, with the most impact on whether a product makes it to market.

My worry is that by always up/outsourcing the steps beyond 10-100 liter batches, promising new molecules may get left behind, trapped by capacity bottlenecks, or encountering setbacks in trying to scale up with consistent quality and economical extraction.

The financial incentive is obvious: avoid extra #capex and massive utilization factor risk for your nascent NewCo. Plus, someone needs to build the tanks.

This logic overlooks the fact that key breakthroughs can be (and often are) discovered at these pricey, gnarly stages of scaling. The associated challenges are tough, but deep insights and better vertical integration are the potential rewards.

I hope to see more thinking 'outside the tank', e.g. by working with new model organisms, and developing new forms of fermentation and indoor farming. Super interesting stuff is happening with moss and salmon, for example (and, of course, fungi).

But also important is being more vertically integrated. At @Ecovative, we have been forced to always build our own scale up infra, as there were no CMOs who knew what to do with us (now we can use existing mushroom farms as a kind of CMO).

This sucked, but it drove a level of technical and process discovery that is unique in this sector. We carefully consider the product we want to launch against the manufacturing systems, at scale, that are available to us.

Early choices in organism design/selection make it possible to leverage the constraints and strengths of downstream capacity. More vertical integration means higher probability of success in launching products where many unknowns are often lurking.

Vertical integration may have more benefits than folks realize, if only in catching potential scale snags. We've learned time and time again how the things that work at lab scale often struggle en route to giga-factory scale. This is true in liquid and solid state fermentation.

Biotech emphasizes 'software' over hardware, but there's benefit (and yes, costs) to doing both. Focusing so heavily on this side of the model (and outsourcing the scale up problem) risks missing big opportunities, even hobbling the field for years to come.

Given biotech's potential to produce new materials/products with properties unprecedented by their chemical contemporaries, it's reasonable to assume consumers pay for those benefits (well enough perhaps to justify owning your own capex).

The innovation in this space is incredible, and I'm sure we'll crack the challenges of scale for fermentation. I'm also certain it's going to require escaping the steel cage of tank-based fermentation, both in terms of ownership and also the tank itself.