Potential Hurdles

Process-related

1. Inability to engineer organism to produce projected amounts of target compounds

Our process requires a significant rerouting of carbon flow in our organism. While our process is economically viable at the yields currently obtained in literature, reaching the profitability we have projected will require a significant yield improvement. Fortunately, it has been shown in other biotech ventures that yields can be dramatically increased given enough time and funding. The first example of this problem being overcome is in the history of penicillin in which the secondary metabolite was produced at yields 3 orders of magnitude from its initial discovery through directed research. The company Amyris has been able to commercially produce the compounds artemisinin for malarial treatment and biofene for biofuel and synthetic rubber production. Genencor has achieved high production rates and yields of isoprene which have allowed them to begin planning commercial production facilities in Brazil. Isobutanol, a compound not native to biological metabolism and a potential gasoline replacement, has been produced in commercially viable yields by engineered bacteria and is the basis for the company Gevo. The common factor in these examples is the ability of directed metabolic research to sufficiently reroute carbon flow in an organism to produce a desired end product. It is also worth noting that all of the compounds given in these examples are high volume low value products which require much higher rates and yields than our compounds, which are low volume high value chemicals. This is why our business plan allots for significant time and funding in the development phase and why we are confident in the success of our product.

2. Product recovery inefficiencies

As in many biotech ventures, including ethanol production, often one of the largest costs is product recovery and purification. As we would be supplying to highly regulated markets, our product purity would have to be quite high. This is one of the main reasons that ethanol in the United States is subsidized currently. Management of this risk is done in part by the previous point in which research and development stages would increase the carbon flow to our product. This would increase the yields of our product and lower recovery costs. Also in the scale up phase, our team would be looking into a multitude of recovery techniques in order to find the optimal cost effective method in which to progress with the project. Finally the last point that protects this process is the market value of our products. As our product is a low volume high value commodity, it allows us to invest more in the recovery stage than other biotech ventures such as those previously stated.

3. Feedstock quality

The feedstock we plan to employ in our process is one of the many reasons that we have a competitive edge in the market. However, a potential bottleneck in our process would be fluctuating quality of our feedstock obtained. The main way to circumvent this is to establish our commercial production facility at a recycling plant that has relatively low variability in their waste stream. As we relieve the recycling company of a costly burden and introduce an alternate stream of revenue, this allows us the freedom of choice in planning production at a facility that suits our requirements. Another strategy to deal with feedstock composition is to implement quality control protocols. These protocols will allow us to monitor the makeup of the incoming waste stream to be utilized and permit us to tailor conversion aspects to increase efficiencies and overall productivity and profitability of our enterprise.