Marine Biopolymers Limited
Marine Biopolymers Limited (MBL) has structured its business around a marine biorefinery model, mainly using macro-algae as feedstock, in which alginate is the red thread running through the company’s industry leading process for high value multi-component extraction. Marine Biopolymers Limited’s expertise lies in the sustainable sourcing and handling of algal species and in developing in-house, low impact, ecological extraction technologies - particularly for polysaccharides.
The company aims to develop glycol-molecules and biocompounds from a variety of marine organisms, such as bacteria and microalgae, for use in the pharmaceutical, health care and nutraceutical industries.
REALISING THE POTENTIAL OF EXOPOLYSACCHARIDES
MBL’s involvement in the FP7 SeaBioTech project led to the identification of microbial-derived exopolysaccharides recovered from algae feedstock, thus unlocking potential new sources of high value compounds.
The company secured an Industrial Biotechnology Seeding Catalyst Award, in partnership with the University of Strathclyde and IBioIC, to facilitate the completion of the initial feasibility research and aiming to advance production of these compounds to demonstration stage.
The project recently kicked-off within IBioIC’s Rapid Bioprocess Prototyping Centre (RBPC) and will utilise the facilities at SIPBS, University of Strathclyde. The work programme will enable MBL to optimise and reproducibly scale-up the production of exopolysaccharides at larger scale, perform structural and metabolomics analysis of the fermentation and screen for value adding bioactivity.
PARTNERSHIP WITH IBIOIC
Marine Biopolymers Limited’s close relationships with IBioIC and the University of Strathclyde have been invaluable. Bringing together the expertise of academics and industry, as well as open access to the combined facilities, will allow lab scale fundamental research to transition smoothly to an optimised scale-up process. The partnership provides a strong and capable platform, allowing for a research driven approach to efficient commercialisation.
“RBPC has been crucial to the development of our product from beach to biofermentor and the IBioIC technical team have provided invaluable help in developing and funding our feasibility research”
Kirsty Black, Product Development Manager, MBL