Chemical companies Unibio and BioVerde Tech have announced a strategic collaboration to develop biomanufacturing processes for the production of sustainable chemicals.
Under the agreement, BioVerde will use Unibio’s U-Loop vertical loop gas fermentation technology platform together with BioVerde’s genetically engineered strains of Methylococcus capsulatus. The collaboration aims to convert methane into a range of value-added chemical products through advanced microbial fermentation.
Initial development efforts will focus on intermediates – molecular entities or compounds formed during a multi-step chemical reaction that are then consumed to produce the final product, acting as bridges between reactants and products – relevant to the synthetic rubber value chain, including pathways toward bio-based butadiene, a key building block used in both synthetic rubber and engineering plastics such as ABS.
By combining Unibio’s proven, fermentation reactor design with BioVerde’s metabolic engineering capabilities, the partners intend to develop scalable processes capable of producing specialty chemicals, intermediates and other bio-based products with significantly lower environmental impact compared with conventional petrochemical production.
“Unibio’s U-Loop vertical loop gas fermentation platform enables highly efficient gas-to-material conversion at industrial scale,” said David Henstrom, CEO at Unibio. “By partnering with BioVerde and leveraging their expertise in developing high-performance microbial strains, we can expand the application of our technology beyond protein production into a broader portfolio of sustainable chemicals.”
The companies will initially focus on process development across laboratory, demonstration and pilot scales to systematically de-risk scale-up, with the goal of enabling commercial-scale manufacturing facilities.
“Our focus is to establish methane as a low-cost, low-carbon feedstock for the production of industrial chemical intermediates, beginning with pathways relevant to the synthetic rubber value chain,” said David Witte, CEO of BioVerde. “By combining our engineered production strains and proprietary downstream processing with Unibio’s reactor platform, we are advancing a scalable route to economically competitive and lower-carbon chemical manufacturing.”
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