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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IBISBA 1.0 (Industrial Biotechnology Innovation and Synthetic Biology Accelerator)

Teaser

Industrial biotechnology (IB) is a Key Enabling Technology (KET) of the bioeconomy, being well positioned to play a role analogous to that of industrial chemistry in the fossil-based economy. Like many KETs, IB figures among Europe\'s strengths, although other world competitors...

Summary

Industrial biotechnology (IB) is a Key Enabling Technology (KET) of the bioeconomy, being well positioned to play a role analogous to that of industrial chemistry in the fossil-based economy. Like many KETs, IB figures among Europe\'s strengths, although other world competitors are menacing that position. Moreover, although IB is growing quickly, it is so far incapable of delivering to the majority of commercial sectors in which it could be deployed.

In addition to strong competition from the fossil-based sector, many biobased products are handicapped by slow, costly R&D pipelines that, despite long development timelines, still deliver high risk IB-based processes. Moreover, although Europe\'s IB sector is flourishing, being characterized by excellent public laboratories, many SMEs and some world leading multinationals, IB is still widely perceived as a technology that is difficult to deploy. Therefore, it is vital to federate IB\'s public and private players, and provide support for early stage R&D that will ultimately favour accelerated R&D pipelines and the delivery of de-risked bioprocess concepts that can be better taken up and moved to higher (above 6-9) TRL levels by industry.

To reach the long-term goal of creating a European distributed research infrastructure for the IB sector, IBISBA 1.0 will:

• Create a network of infrastructure capable of working together using some common, basic business processes, including the use of standard operating procedures and harmonized practices
• Provide transnational access to an array of state of the art facilities and thus contribute to optimizing European investments
• Create and implement some elements of future experimental business processes (e.g. workflows) and an e-registry for FAIR knowledge assets
• Perform a demonstration R&D project that will illustrate how the use of harmonized practices and a common conceptual framework can provide integrated R&D services that support translational research pipelines and faster bioprocess development.

Work performed

The first 18-month period has been dedicated to initiating the project, translating the work plan into actual actions and devising and deploying some of the first project results. This phase has been performed, taking into account the fact that the project\'s consortium considers IBISBA 1.0 as a first step in a much longer process that will ultimately deliver a coordinated pan-European research infrastructure.

Regarding the challenge of building the IBISBA 1.0 network, the first period has provided the opportunity to perform foundational work. This consists of a:

1. series of internal meetings and one Expert Advisory Board meeting. These meetings provided the basis to discuss harmonization issues and generally raise awareness among the partners of the importance of standardized processes as a means to enhance dialogue, facilitate collaboration and deliver quality services.
2. common vision document, which forms the basis to structure future community actions, devise efficient external communication messages and create a service catalogue
3. communication toolbox, including a visual identity and various support media (a website, documents, flyers, presentations, videos etc).
4. the mock-up of the service catalogue and one-stop shop, which will be deployed in September 2019.

To support the network, one joint research action has successfully delivered a:
5. series of workflow nodes and workflows that are intended to be used to execute and monitor R&D Design-Build-Test-Learn cycles.
6. web-based registry (https://hub.ibisba.eu) for project knowledge assets (workflows, data sets, models, reports etc). This registry, which ensures the application of FAIR principles to knowledge assets, is operational and already contains project assets.
7. a meta-protocol description editor (TasCu) has been developed as a template for a BPM system.

A second joint research action that is building a demonstration project has:
8. defined the target molecule, studied the potential production pathways, designed the experimental strategies
9. selected two microbial host systems for production, performed strain design and initiated experimental work.
Finally, to deliver open access to the infrastructure within the IBISBA 1.0 network, the consortium has:
9. launched two calls for projects and received 18 project proposals. These proposals cover a variety of topics and arise from both European member states, associated countries and SMEs.
10. so far five projects have been selected for access to infrastructure using a selection process that operates according to good international practices. The five projects are from the first call and project selection for the second call is underway.

Final results

\"A recent article mentions IBISBA (Kitney et al. 2019. Trends in Biotech https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2019.03.017). It states that in IB \"\"no one technology is at fault, but it is the failure to integrate several technologies that defeats commercialization\"\". The article goes on to say that \"\"the public biofoundry is one such facility where public and private sector needs intersect, but there are few of these worldwide.\"\" Adding to this, it is relevant to note that innovation projects often fade away after the initial fundamental and applied research phases, simply because they fail to cross the Innovation Death Valley, which is the TRL range that separates early ideas and concepts from industrial uptake. By initiating the creation of a network of research infrastructure with a view to supporting translational research (a concept usually reserved to clinical research), IBISBA 1.0 responds to the above challenges and opens up radically new ways to support the development of IB through the assembly and integration of technologies within a distributed biofoundry that will cross TRL scales 2-5 and support R&D project pipelines.

To support progress towards goals beyond IBISBA 1.0, project\'s consortium has initiated the process of harmonizing practices, standardizing protocols and defining operational workflows that can be shared and used for the common execution of experimental procedures. Such inter-organization coordination is extremely rare and constitutes an original organizational innovation at this stage.

Underpinning the future integrated operation of the IBISBA network is work on the development of e-tools (workflows, workflow nodes, the IBISBAHub etc). The ultimate ambition is to deploy a Business Process Management and Execution system that provides the means to execute workflows, monitor and audit business activity across the network of infrastructure and link knowledge assets and domains. Therefore, the potential impact of work performed so far is the creation of a first-of-a-kind BPM system for a European distributed infrastructure. To ensure that work in IBISBA 1.0, (i) remains on an impact trajectory, and (ii) will benefit beyond the IBISBA 1.0 consortium, the IBISBAHub is serving as a prototype of the EOSC Life workflow collaboratory.
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Website & more info

More info: https://www.ibisba.eu/.