Expert Interview: Deepti Tanjore

Aliyah (00:04):

Hi, this is Aliyah Kovner from Berkeley Lab’s Strategic Communications Team. I’m here today with Deepti Tanjore, Director of the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit, or ABPDU for short, and we’re gonna spend some time talking about how her team helps bring innovative biology-based products to market. Hi Deepti, thanks for being here. So to start, tell me a little bit about the ABPDU’S mission.

Deepti (00:26):

Thank you, Aliyah, for this opportunity to talk about the ABPDU. Our mission is simple. We are here to support and promote domestic biomanufacturing. We do this by, one, making national lab expertise and equipment available to the industry, especially startups and small businesses. Two, develop the necessary workforce for manufacturing activities within the us and three, pursuing fundamental research to offer disruptive technologies that give us an advantage in domestic manufacturing for the long term, as in several decades to come. We were originally funded with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money in 2009, and the original mission was to support the Department of Energy’s Bioenergy research centers by scaling up their biofuel and bioproducts lab scale innovation into larger bioreactors. However, around 2014, after having worked with all the bio research centers, we realized that we could do more and there was a similar need in the industry, a need for scale up expertise and equipment, especially from small businesses and startups in the us. So we made a pivot and started supporting industrial collaborators in the bioindustrial tech area. So far we’ve helped over 90 companies scale their technologies and put 20 products in the market.

Aliyah (01:40):

So what are some of the challenges of launching a new bio product that the ABPDU can come in and help with?

Deepti (01:46):

One of the biggest challenges in scale up is that the scientific work that is conducted by researchers is often conducted at milliliters and even nanoliter scales. So the technologies are often not tested in bioreactor, which is more representative of commercial-scale production. That environment is completely different due to mixing aeration and other factors. So often enough what I think we offer is an education to entrepreneurs who develop the technologies at milliliter scale into what commercial scale production looks like. This allows them to go back and re-engineer their technology for manufacturing.

Aliyah (02:22):

Are there other facilities nationwide that offer these kinds of resources?

Deepti (02:26):

There are certainly other facilities in the U.S. That do offer scale-up capabilities. Some of them close to or even higher than 10,000 liters scale, and they do so very well. I think the one key difference that makes what ABPDU offers unique is the focus on testing a novel technology at a smaller scale of 300 liters or less, while mimicking the conditions at a scale larger than 10,000 liters, perhaps even higher than a hundred thousand liters. For example, we have half liter pressurable bioreactors that can mimic the conditions of the lower layers of a hundred thousand liter reactor, where the tall water column puts the culture at the bottom under tremendous pressure. So if a company can learn how the culture behaves at a hundred thousand liter scale by spending a few thousands of dollars instead of few millions, that’s a huge advantage. What we do is we really lay out the first steps towards scale up and manufacturing and make sure that entrepreneurs can change what needs to be changed with the lowest possible resources and smallest amount of time needed, and then these entities could go off and scale up across the country.

Aliyah (03:32):

Nice. So you offer a unique part of the scale-up spectrum.

Deepti (03:35):

That’s right. That’s been our niche opportunity space.

Aliyah (03:39):

What past collaborations, um, have been particularly interesting and enjoyable for you and your colleagues? If you could give us a few examples.

Deepti (03:45):

Yes, of course. We work with a variety of stakeholders in the community. Everyone from small businesses to large companies, to academic collaborators and other national labs. I will pick two examples. One with a small business and another with an academic lab. Okay. So the first one is with a company called checkerspot. Checkerspot received seedling money of around $40,000 in 2016 from the Department of Energy when they co-wrote a proposal with ABPDU. They were a three people company at the time, and they generated prototypes of a few liters of specialized oils at the ABPDU to go into a variety of products. Since then, because they’ve reduced the risk of scale up at the ABPDU, they were able to raise over a hundred million dollars from private investors and now they’re producing these oils that go into many products from oils that help improve the performance of skis, customized skis to oils that are, uh, analogs of human breast milk fat that go into baby formula.

Deepti (04:47):

So currently baby formula that which we use to feed babies does not have these important oils. So, uh, industry definitely does some very fantastic work, uh, with ABPDU, but I also want to focus a little bit on a academic project we have with uc, Berkeley, where we developed advanced quantum sensing capabilities to understand what goes on at the intracellular level in bioreactors. We do not have this kind of technology off the shelf to purchase from microbial, fermentation based biomanufacturing, which really puts us at a huge, huge disadvantage. And this type of academic research and the publications that come out of it gives us an opportunity to disrupt the way we currently do biomanufacturing today.

Aliyah (05:31):

Great. So that work can go into helping refine, you know, all the other collaborations that you do once developed.

Deepti (05:38):

That’s exactly right. So this research work will turn into a unique capability in a couple of years, which will be available at the ABPDU to help all small businesses that we are working with in reducing their costs associated with scale-up and manufacturing, and also make sure that they can rapidly commercialize their synthetic biology technologies.

Aliyah (05:58):

So the ABPDU has been going strong for almost 15 years now. Um, what do you think it’s gonna look like in the next five to 10 years?

Deepti (06:04):

That’s a very good question. The Quantum Sensing research project I mentioned to you earlier is a part of, uh, overall research concept that we are calling the Science of Scale-Up. When we think of manufacturing in the U.S. we really think that the technologies are very mature here. In reality, there are several problems that we can address with fundamental research. For example, rare earth elements are actually not that rare. They’re all around us, but they’re in very dilute format. We can use biology to take mine tailings and concentrate these critical rare earth elements out of the dilute feedstock. At the ABPDU, we’re working with a few different academic collaborators and companies on this particular topic separately, we are also working on converting local agricultural waste from rural communities in the U.S., So biomanufacturing can exist in the U.S. Around these particular feedstocks. We’re going after such problems where we give us an advantage for domestic biomanufacturing to help improve our supply chain resilience.

Aliyah (07:06):

So to close out, what is the number one thing that you would like the public to know about the ABPDU?

Deepti (07:12):

I would say that we are here to perform the fundamental scientific research needed to support and promote bio innovation and biomanufacturing within the U.S. The bioeconomy is a $4 trillion market expected to grow to 30 trillion in 2050. The U.S. has a great opportunity to take a big share of the bioeconomy in the world market at both bench-scale innovation and commercial-scale manufacturing. I’m confident ABPDU can do this because so far the total investment that has gone into ABPDU is around $59 million over close to 15 years. But the private funding that the companies that worked with ABPDU raised has been close to $3 billion.

Aliyah (07:55):

Oh, wow.

Deepti (07:55):

Yeah. So I want the public to know that ABPDU is here to support entrepreneurs in recognizing and overcoming their scale-up challenges. We are here to conduct the fundamental research that industry may not be interested in pursuing, but is necessary to disrupt current biomanufacturing practices and make them more suitable for domestic manufacturing in the U.S. We are here to help students train on equipment and develop the expert workforce needed to fill all the jobs that biomanufacturing will create in the U.S. The ABPDU already plays the role of being a hub for entrepreneurs, academic researchers, government agencies, and private investors, and we want to continue to do so in the coming years as well.

Aliyah (08:37):

Thank you so much Deepti for talking with me today. To learn more about Berkeley Lab’s work supporting the bioeconomy, visit abpdu.lbl.gov. This is Aliyah Kovner from the Strategic Communications Team at Berkeley Lab.