Industrial biotechnology infrastructure

The biotechnological revolution is rapidly transforming industrial processes in the chemical, material, energy, food and pharmaceutical industries – altering consumers' everyday lives. Biotechnology will disrupt how we produce raw materials for various goods. We at VTT create cell factories that, for example, produce the desired cell biomass, chemicals and proteins for enzyme, food, and pharmaceutical applications.

VTT’s industrial biotechnology infrastructure is for developing cell factories and production concepts to produce proteins, biomaterials and biochemicals. Our crucial research equipment is for automated synthetic biology and metabolic engineering, analytics for biomolecules and other metabolites, and fermentation and downstream processes. Our state-of-the-art research and piloting facilities provide for efficient genetic code design for organisms, the development of new and efficient production hosts, and scaling of production processes. The facilities enable research and innovation from the laboratory to pilot scale.

With automation and robotics, we can generate and screen large amounts of organisms with different genetic modifications, usinq equipment such as our microtiter-level pipetting robot.

We have equipment for molecular biology workand for micro-level bioreactor simulation. For example, we can evaluate fermentation performance at micro-level before taking the process to an actual bioreactor and therefore, save resources. From bioreactor cultivations we can gather a lot of relevant data, for example, about gas and nutrient intake,which are important when optimising the process.We can scale up the process as we have bioreactors of different sizes, ranging from 0.25 litres to up to 1200 litres. We also have downstream process equipment to explore potential purification methods.

The industrial biotechnology infrastructure is located in Espoo.