Best Practices In Fermentation Bioprocess Development

Stefan De Kok, the Director of Fermentation at Zymergen, shared his work in biomanufacturing R&D, notably his leadership of the DARPA Living Foundries: 1000 Molecules project, this Culture Biosciences. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project sought to create molecules and materials with unique performance through biomanufacturing. An example of which is Zymergen's high-performance film for electronics applications, Hyaline.

De Kok also emphasized the importance of fermentation expertise in biomanufacturing and the need for a non-sequential approach to process development and strain screening. He stressed the value of techno-economic analysis before beginning lab experiments. De Kok explained the "strain performance S-curve" and the importance of mimicking fermentation conditions when developing a high-throughput strain screen. Read through all of the questions Culture Biosciences posed to De Kok and the advice he was able to provide on work in bioreactors scaling up production, and how his company Zymergen uses Culture to manage demand fluctuations for experiments.