Our Network

More Information on:

Member companies and academic partners within IBioIC's Network also offer technical consultancy, as well as access to specialist facilities and equipment.

Biopilots UK combines the nation’s leading expertise and facilities to help businesses develop and scale-up new sustainable processes to commercialise products from biomass, including: plants, algae, by-products and waste products.  

Due to the varied nature of the raw materials, or feedstocks, there is no “one size fits all” approach, rather a series of technologies that must be trialled and combined to maximise the opportunity.  

Find out more about each of the Biopilots UK Partners below, or contact our Technical Team for direct referral. 

The Biorenewables Development Centre (BDC) is a an open-access R&D facility, based at the University of York, working at the interface between academia and industry to convert plants, microbes and biowastes into profitable biorenewable products.  

With biologists, chemists, and business specialists, the BDC Team offers a unique combination of multi-disciplinary expertise coupled with pilot-scale processing capabilities in one coordinated centre. 

Covering a broad spectrum of biorefining technologies, from feedstock assessment to product evaluation, the team specialise in making the most of our biorenewable materials; helping ideas to survive the valley of death; and de-risking the innovation process. 

For further information on BDC’s bioprocessing facilities, see their website: http://www.biorenewables.org 

CPI have extensive expertise in scaling biotechnologies for multiple markets and industry sectors.  They provide a broad service offering to efficiently support commercialisation of your biotechnological innovations, whilst minimising both risk and cost.  Overall, biotechnology projects are supported from inception to commercial scale, through fully tailored services and an extensive knowledge of bioprocess innovation. 

For further information on CPI’s bioprocessing scale-up facilities see their website: https://www.uk-cpi.com 

BEACON is a joint collaboration between Aberystwyth, Bangor and Swansea Universities and the University of South Wales, with unique facilities at each. The main aim is to use the concept of biorefining to work with end user companies, in order to identify a wide range of products from plant material, which are tailored to their requirements. 

The biorefinery concept uses non-food crop feedstocks in much the same way that oil refineries use crude oil to produce a broad spectrum of commodity products. It seeks to give manufacturing companies a commercial advantage in the marketing of these renewable products as well, in the future environmental and economic sustainability of their businesses through application of these developing technologies. 

For further information on Beacon’s facilities, see their website: http://beaconwales.org 

CelluComp is unique in being able to offer several laboratory based services and expertise for the optimisation of production, scale-up opportunities, formulation improvements and product application testing. 

The company have the capability to provide a complete and affordable solution from optimisation of production processes to product formulations. 

To find out more about the services Cellucomp provide, click here. 

GSK - The Biotechnology & Environmental Shared Services (BESS) group, sited at GSK Worthing are involved in the discovery and manufacture of pharmaceutically relevant fermentation products, using a variety of microorganisms including Streptomyces. GSK have started to use genome sequencing to guide metabolic engineering and applied this to Streptomyces manufacture. 

Through years of experience of working on in-house projects they are now able to apply in-house sets of methodologies, including genome mining, strain optimisation, fermentation and pathway engineering, to apply to numerous cell types.  Using a complete set of laboratory to pilot scale technologies they are capable of full optimisation of your upstream and downstream processing on your behalf, linked closely to an impressive range of analytical testing.      

To find out more about the services GSK BESS provide, click here. 

Edinburgh Genome Foundry: DNA Design and Assembly 

The Edinburgh Genome Foundry (EGF) is a national facility based at the University of Edinburgh that specialises in the assembly of genetic constructs for academic and industrial customers to equip cells with new or improved functions.  

They deliver high-throughput projects involving long constructs (>5kbp), constructs comprising large numbers of genetic parts, or combinatorial libraries. Our platform is agnostic on the host chassis; to date we have assembled constructs for use in bacteria, yeast, algae and mammalian cells. 

To find out more, click here or contact the facility manager, Dr Rennos Fragkoudis 

Edinomics: Cell Analysis 

Edinomics is a specialist facility based at the University of Edinburgh that provides proteomics and metabolomics services for qualitative and quantitative analysis. It applies analytical approaches on biological samples to probe cellular components (proteins or metabolites) to help researchers better understanding the underlying mechanisms that lead to biologically observed phenotypes.  

For further information click here or contact the facility manager Dr Tessa Moses. 

Edinburgh Protein Production Facility: Protein Production and Characterisation 

The Edinburgh Protein Production Facility offers rapid solutions to the production of proteins and the biophysical characterisation of their ligands. The facility has bacterial, yeast, mammalian and baculovirus expression platforms and can deliver a wide range of biophysical characterisations.  

For further information click here or contact the manager Dr Martin Wear.