FlexBio – IBioIC’s equipment centre at Heriot-Watt. De-risking scale-up of industrial biotechnology (IB) processes. A bit about me, how we work, what we’re done and what we plan to do…

Launched in 2012, the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) has now entered its phase II in funding, where it aims is to stimulate the growth of the IB sector in Scotland to £900 million by 2025. It does this through creating a network of industrial members, helping to fund projects linked with universities, skilling the future workforce and finally…..by providing access to equipment centres to de-risk scale-up.

FlexBio is one of two equipment centres under our management, which over the past year have worked on various microbial processes. A common theme is taking lab-scale flask fermentations, scaling them down through culture improvement, before scaling up into fermenters at 30L scale. Some processes may also need biomass separation through continuous centrifugation and further downstream processing.

Come along to learn about the types of projects we work on with industry, all about the bioeconomy, training courses we run for both industry and academia and our future plans to grow our centres, the equipment within it and the services we offer.