Europe is global leader in biomanufacturing but with other parts of the world making big gains it needs to act fast to ‘safeguard and further improve its competitiveness,” according to a new paper from the European Association of Bioindustries, EuropaBio.
Biomanufacturing has an essential role in the development of sustainable routes for manufacturing, and according to EuropaBio “a global race is underway to produce innovative and scalable products that will change the current outlook for health, chemical and food industries.”
Describing Europe’s biomanufacturing ecosystem attractiveness as “threatened,” EuropaBio’s paper: Biomanufacturing: Europe’s Industrial Future says that there are a number of reasons for this including insufficiently effective or timely technology transfer, long time to market, regulatory complexity and market fragmentation.
“The EU has robust regulations which ensure safety and quality. However, its process and implementation often fail to meet commercially viable timelines so the EU can benefit from new technologies as an early adopter,” the paper says. By way of example, the report says that biotech applications in food, such as fermentation products, can take up to six years to be reviewed under the Novel Food Regulation. In the US or Singapore, a similar process takes around one year.
This hampers the commercialisation of Europe’s research, where the bloc is a global leader. While Europe leads in the area high-quality biotech publications, it is lagging in terms of share of patents, which is led by the US, with China making gains. EuropaBio presents data which it says indicates that scientific research produced in Europe has either not been linked to commercial purposes or has seen its commercial application elsewhere. The report notes that only one third of patents registered in the EU universities are commercially utilised.
Europe does have significant biomanufacturing capacity. It is estimated to have twice the precision fermentation capacity of the US and a total of 2,362 biorefineries, but this position is being undermined by several factors, including the high price of feedstock and energy.
Raw materials such as first-generation sugars for industrial applications in biomaterials or food ingredients are more expensive than elsewhere due the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy regulations and lower availability, the paper says.
The paper notes: “Europe must ensure that investments at the EU and Member State levels are coherent and lead to a concerted industrial capacity and skilled workforce, avoiding duplication of infrastructures, mitigating fragmentation or concentration, and ultimately building strong and strategic biomanufacturing hubs.”
The European Commission is pursuing an EU bioeconomy strategy which is set to be reviewed by the end of this year. The review will take account of the bioeconomy’s links to biomanufacturing and biotechnology as a route to building the EU’s economy.
The review is embedded in a series of targeted EU actions to boost biotechnology and biomanufacturing which were announced during March 2024. The actions included: leveraging research and boosting innovation, streamlining regulatory pathways and stimulating market demand.
Further reading:
• Synthesised sugars for biomanufacturing set to reduce impact on agriculture
• Croda releases first biotechnology report
• Unilever invests in biotech partnership for alternative cleaning ingredients
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