CPI is leading the charge towards a more sustainable biotechnology industry by ensuring we deliver projects with cost-effective, productive, and environmentally friendly processes and operations.
Industrial biotechnology heals people with new pharmaceuticals, fuels nations with energy, and feeds the world with novel foods and animal feed. Biotechnology supports circular supply chains and sustainable innovations by utilising resources more efficiently, minimising waste, and offering bio-based alternatives to new and existing chemicals and materials.
When designing new biotech processes and plants, we try to use raw materials that come from sustainable sources, including evaluating waste feedstocks where possible. We look at where energy savings can be made by shortening process times or implementing continuous processing for improved outputs. We look at minimising water usage and ensure that we choose the most appropriate equipment to minimise energy expenditure.
We also identify opportunities to make processes more resource efficient. Our expertise in biotechnology stretches from product design to commercialisation, and we ensure that processes are well-characterised and developed before they are scaled up, for greater efficiency and sustainability.
In the midst of climate breakdown, our food production system needs a radical overhaul if we’re to responsibly protect our planet and its resources. We’re supporting innovations that will reduce the environmental impact of our food production system. For example, our partnership with Azotic Technologies delivered a natural nitrogen fixation technology that addresses the overuse of synthetic fertiliser, benefitting both farmers and our soil ecosystems.
We are also enabling the innovative use of carbon dioxide to produce food and animal feed in the form of alternative proteins, with the potential to ensure animals are healthier and reduce emissions from livestock production.
Discover how our Grand Challenge on Sustainable Packaging is developing bio-based materials and other smart packaging solutions to reduce environmental impact.
See how we’re harnessing natural substances, derived from a range of sources — from bacteria to spiders — to keep our soil healthy with eco-friendly biocontrol products.
Alternative protein sources are a healthy option for both people and the planet; find out how CPI is exploring a range of sustainable substitutes to mass meat production.
Next steps
CASE STUDY
Cells to sirlion
We worked with 3D Bio-Tissues, a biotech start-up and spin-out from Newcastle University, to create eco-friendly, chemically defined, animal-free, and cost-effective growth media products marketed under the City-Mix™ brand. These supplements help yield a viable, ethical, environmentally friendly and delicious alternative product to traditional resource-intensive meat production.
CASE STUDY
Protecting plants with spider safeguard
We helped scale up the production of a selective biopesticide developed from spider venom. The use of biopesticides like those developed in the EcoStack project could maintain or improve crop yields while reducing harm to pollinating insects, humans, non-crop plants, and other wildlife: keeping our important biodiversity and ecosystem healthy whilst boosting food resources.
I was delighted to join CPI in June 2022 and build on our success in supporting companies to commercialise innovative health technologies.
With an ageing society and spiralling healthcare costs, innovations in HealthTech are needed to ensure we maintain and improve the levels of care provided. We are committed to enabling transformative technologies to reach the market faster, improve preventive healthcare, drive earlier diagnosis, and deliver better treatment outcomes. But many barriers prevent HealthTech innovators from developing and scaling their innovations, including challenges related to technology, supply chain, regulatory processes and commercial adoption.
Our work enables innovators to scale up technologies faster and connects actors across the HealthTech ecosystem to drive open innovation – including large corporations, investors, government, regulators, and industry bodies.
One example of how we do this is our 5G testbed, developed with Cellnex for hospitals. Working with innovators, we’re looking at opportunities to improve patient outcomes and support healthcare workers.
In October 2022, we outlined the regulatory challenges and opportunities for UK HealthTech and published a diagnostics roadmap based on workshops and surveys with HealthTech stakeholders and over 350 SMEs. It revealed that about one in five companies now target the USA for launch, thanks to its large market potential and more favourable regulatory environment.
The report helped the British HealthTech community to collectively shape key recommendations that central and local government is already acting upon.
Our offer to deep tech innovators is multi-disciplinary technical and product development for their innovations – including digital, electronics, photonics, formulation, nanotechnologies, materials, biotechnology, and biologics. We’re also in the unique position of being able to guide them through the regulatory journey.
Learn how CPI’s unique range of capabilities is supporting the development of novel in vitro diagnostic medical devices and helping bring them to market.
Next steps
CASE STUDY
Regulatory support for UK HealthTech SMEs
Funded by Innovate UK, we worked with ABHI to deliver a UK-first programme that helped HealthTech SMEs to access much-needed regulatory support. Programme funds directly supported over 270 companies and helped many more through training and by highlighting the main challenges of SMEs to the UK Government.
CASE STUDY
Wearable physiotherapy for stroke rehabilitation
We worked with KnitRegen to develop smart technology to help individuals regain body movement following brain injury, via a wearable device that can be integrated into clothing. We helped develop product concepts for large scale manufacturing, mechanical and electronic designs, as well as developing the initial prototypes.
Whether it’s glass, metal, textiles, composites, chemicals, or soft materials – such as liquids and polymers – very few formulations on the market today are designed with circularity in mind.
But this unsustainable path must be altered. We need to innovate from the very start of the formulation process to shift towards reducing waste, improving biodegradability, and minimising the carbon footprint of manufacturing. Our broad range of expertise in chemistry, materials science and chemical engineering helps our partners manufacture materials, and then develop processes that make those materials more sustainable. We work across a spectrum of industry sectors from food to pharmaceuticals and in collaboration with academia, government, and enterprises ranging from start-ups to large corporates.
Enabling the circular economy is an important driver for us. We develop sustainable recycling technologies for existing materials or design recyclability into new materials. Recycling the complex composite materials used, for example, in wind turbine blades, is becoming essential. Developing the right processes to recycle these significant future waste streams and avoid landfill is vital to ensure renewable energy is truly sustainable.
We’re also supporting work on recycling waste electronic materials – so-called WEEE waste – using deep eutectic solvents to leach out valuable, scarce materials, such as gold and copper for reuse. Current WEEE recycling processes are very energy intensive, but the process our partner, DEScycle, aims to deliver is a much lower energy, lower carbon approach. We’re excited to support with scaling up this process to offer a revolutionary alternative to outdated recycling techniques.
Our expertise in polymer formulation delivers innovative solutions that are helping to reduce environmental impact for our partners in everything from packaging applications to tree planting. We’ve also recently grown our expertise in formulating nature-based polymers using seaweed, for example, and other biodegradable products.
Another key area for us is energy materials, where we’re supporting sustainable transport initiatives – in particular, electric vehicles. CPI can formulate battery materials, test them, and even look at pilot scale manufacture. In addition, we support the training infrastructure needed to provide skilled workers for these future industry sectors.
And this is where place-based innovation comes in. We’re working with universities, the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC), and with other members of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, like WMG, to develop end-to-end capability in the UK – and in the North East in particular – for supporting companies to innovate. It’s an exciting time.
Discover how CPI is helping disruptive deep tech company DEScycle to pioneer a low-cost, clean recycling technology.
Our process engineering expertise in novel chemistries, formulation, and coatings is advancing battery materials for use in electric vehicles. Find out how.
Next steps
CASE STUDY
Taking flight with sustainable aviation fuel
We collaborated on the FastAceJet programme to develop novel processes to create sustainable aviation fuels by recycling waste carbon dioxide and hydrogen. This research could place the UK at the heart of the sustainable jet fuel industry, bringing economic opportunities and high value jobs to the UK.
CASE STUDY
Biopolymers reduce forestry plastic pollution
Tree planting is responsible for introducing up to 700 tonnes of plastic pollution into forests globally each year. Our expertise in formulation of biopolymers and processing helped Chestnut Bio develop a 3D printed tree guard system that functions for up to 5 years before biodegrading naturally.
Managing Director, Medicines Manufacturing, Biologics, and Quality, CPI
We’re trying to take the pharma industry to the next level of sustainability. Our ambitious Grand Challenge (GC) model is looking to deliver a step change in today’s technology and digital approaches within the pharma supply chain.
These GCs not only reduce the carbon footprints of pharma manufacturing but also deliver better compliance, performance, and productivity benefits.
GC1 focuses on continuous manufacture of tablets: the batch manufacture of tablets is a century-old process that in some cases can be incredibly wasteful of the active ingredient. But continuous direct compression reduces active ingredient wastage from 30% to less than 5%. A digital twin of that technology is allowing pharma to build predictive models to build confidence in the adoption of this new technology.
In GC2, just-in-time manufacturing for clinical trials will streamline the complex clinical trial supply chain. With Pharmacy Automation for Clinical Efficiency (PACE) technology, we’re helping the right patients get the right medicines at the right time.
Oligonucleotides are an exciting nucleic acid-based technology, but their production is the most inefficient of all drug and vaccine manufacturing processes. With the liquid membrane technology and enzyme bio-catalysis we’re developing in GC3, we could halve the carbon footprint of oligo manufacturing and significantly improve productivity and output.
The Digital Manufacturing Innovation GC focusses on our core digital strategy to drive productivity and carbon efficiency.
Three forthcoming Grand Challenges will look at smart bioprocessing for biologics manufacture, improving lipid nanoparticles to support the bright future of RNA vaccines and therapeutics, and introducing a new process for continuous crystallisation of active ingredients.
Can the pharma industry find solutions that reduce the carbon footprint and cost, while maintaining standards? We believe advanced technology, digital solutions, supply chain excellence, and a combination of facility and energy management solutions can achieve this.
I recently travelled to India, which produces around 40% of the world’s medicines. Sponsored by the British Consulate and the UK Government’s Department of International Trade, we’re supporting the British and Indian science ministers to assess the pharmaceutical supply chain in India and share some of the advanced technologies being developed in the UK. We’re looking at how to evolve the carbon footprint of the Indian pharma industry into scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, and identify where we could help drive change towards net zero.
Globally-recognised standard approaches to measuring the industry’s carbon footprint are limited, making it difficult to compare and contrast technologies and approaches within the pharma industry. Working with the UK Government through the Medicines Manufacturing Industry Partnership (MMIP), we’re helping to map supply chains, standardise measurement systems to demonstrate progress, and partner with key pharma players to drive an even bigger change.
The winner of Bionow’s 2022 Project of the Year Award, our expertise is helping to develop a patient-friendly drug delivery system to target inflammatory bowel disease with fewer adverse side effects.
RNA-based vaccines were a success with COVID-19. Explore how CPI is helping to shape the future of RNA-based therapies to tackle cancer and other serious medical conditions.
CASE STUDY
Digital design accelerates pharma development
We worked on the Digital Design Accelerator Platform to improve the design and development of new pharmaceutical formulations. It takes data from across pharmaceutical development functions to support more consistent product quality, reduce waste and assist faster product development to get better medicines to patients quicker.
CASE STUDY
Scaling up synthetic DNA
We’ve established a long-term partnership with Touchlight to help them produce synthetic DNA at the speed, scale, and purity necessary to support the rapid growth of genetic medicines. The developed platform technology is applicable to many areas of biologics and brings genetic medicines to market five times faster than traditional manufacturing methods.
CPI’s venture capital arm is investing in companies with the potential to develop advanced technologies
that solve global challenges.
CPI Enterprises, the venture capital and investor engagement arm of CPI, connects investors and entrepreneurs across the UK to stimulate the growth of advanced technology companies.
One of our investments is in Q5D, which leverages additive manufacturing and 5-axis robotics to revolutionise the production of wire harnesses that are used in multiple applications, from electric vehicles and aircraft to white goods and consumer electronics. Production of these essential components remains predominantly manual and labour-intensive. As a result, manufacturers have had difficulty meeting rising demand while accommodating supply chain disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine.
We’re working with Q5D to develop model ink formulations for its non-contact additive deposition method, coupling knowledge of material properties with process parameters to provide a better ink selection. We are also rigorously characterising commercially available inks to ensure they fit the required characteristics identified by Q5D for its prototypes and final product designs.
Qkine, a manufacturer of animal-free, bioactive and innovative proteins and growth factors for life science applications, closed a funding round of £4.3 million in support of its proprietary protein production and engineering processes. The company’s route to unique and high-purity products will tackle fundamental biological and production challenges for the fast-growing stem cell, regenerative medicine, and cellular agriculture sectors.
CPI Enterprises is the Commercial Development Partner for DEScycle, a company that is commercialising a revolutionary new approach to the treatment of e-waste. It is using a class of chemicals termed deep eutectic solvents (DES) as an alternative to conventional roasting and smelting operations. Correctly formulated, DES can dissolve different metals in a targeted and less toxic recycling operation, unlocking value in materials that have historically been uneconomic to process.
We’ve invested in DEScycle to help it transition the DES process from lab-scale to commercial plant operation. DEScycle expects its technology to offer a clean, modern alternative to century-old recycling processes, revolutionising how industries transition to a net zero low carbon economy.
Working with CPI is allowing for a smoother and faster development of our new product, from R&D to commercial development expertise. Our technology empowers engineers to rethink wire harnesses for a safe, sustainable, and reliable all-electric, connected future.
