Cellular Agriculture Australia on the need for a shared industrial foundation in biomanufacturing

Our friends at Cellular Agriculture Australia recently released a couple of  discussion papers, so we caught up with Jess Freitag from the team to see what it’s all about. Read on to understand what words like biomanufacturing and precision fermentation mean, why Australia doesn’t yet have a national biomanufacturing strategy, and the argument for one.

What is Cellular Agriculture Australia?

We are Australia’s leading non-profit organisation advocating for emerging food production technologies and ingredient innovation, and their integration across the food system. Essentially, our work aims to build the policy, regulatory, and investment settings required to unlock a new generation of food and ingredient production in Australia. Our focus is on the Australian food biomanufacturing sector (cell cultivation, precision fermentation) as well as the diversification of plant protein ingredient supply chains.

Why were the papers written?

These papers were catalysed from the situation in the Middle East and seeing the supply chain shocks happening because of that. We saw the government starting to talk about things like resilience and future proofing supply chains, and suddenly saw a lot of attention placed on biofuels, but there were heaps of other applications of biomanufacturing, some of them being food, as well as chemicals, materials, etc., that weren’t receiving similar levels of government attention.

We brought together a group of biomanufacturing industry constituents, not just focused within our remit of food, including leading companies, academia, infrastructure providers and peak bodies from across the broader biomanufacturing sector. We put together a joint industry letter with two key asks of what the industry needs: a national biomanufacturing strategy, as well as a request for proposals for one or more shared biomanufacturing scale-up hubs.

These two discussion papers were designed as an evidence base to complement those asks, and provide more context to what we were asking for in that letter, and why we see an opportunity to bring together the broader biomanufacturing industry.

What exactly is biomanufacturing?

It’s the use of biological systems — so that can include cells, microorganisms, etc — to manufacture products, including fuels, food ingredients, chemicals, materials and more, at industrial scale . Our main focus is in the context of food, so for example, the use of cell cultivation technology for the production of cultivated meat, [like] Magic Valley.

And there’s a bunch of other technologies that sit within that, but a lot of the technology base, particularly within precision fermentation, is quite broadly applicable to a lot of different areas of biomanufacturing beyond food — like you can use microorganisms to produce chemicals, textiles, fuels, medicines, using a similar process.

And what is precision fermentation?

Precision fermentation uses engineered organisms to produce specific ingredients, including egg and dairy proteins, as well as flavours, colours, fats, and oils. There’s another company called Nourish Ingredients which is producing fats using this method. So in the context of a dairy protein, you don’t have to go and milk a cow to produce it.

In the first paper, you’ve argued for a shared approach to biomanufacturing, rather than just looking at the industries as separate. Why?

It’s been a gradual thing. The sector for food is quite small: there’s only a handful of [food biomanufacturing] companies in Australia, so it’s quite challenging to make a case for government support and policy recognition. The first discussion paper was trying to paint a picture of how within biomanufacturing, there’s a lot of shared technology underpinning all these different application areas.

Things like advanced biofuels and food biomanufacturing — even though they sound very different, and the government sees them as very different separate things — they often share a lot of the same underlying technology and infrastructure. As a result, what these different application areas need to succeed is very similar. We need scale-up infrastructure, more policy coordination and a strategy underpinning the sector. And so by seeing that there are these shared barriers and advocacy asks within the broader biomanufacturing space, it made sense to bring those [industries] together.

And that’s something we found is not generally very well understood outside of academia and researchers — there’s this shared industrial foundation and the government’s investing  in one part of it whilst overlooking the rest.

What’s your key takeaway for readers?

The main one for me is that Australia is behind everyone else. We’re seeing a lot of ambition and coordination in other countries. And it’s not just the US and the EU, [there’s] China, India has done a lot, Japan is doing a bit. There’s heaps happening and Australia is just sitting at a standstill. We’re not seeing any ambition to do more than just invest in specific applications like biofuels and biopharmaceuticals, while other applications are being left behind.

And one of the headline stats we found through the papers’ research process was that 25 national and supranational strategies have been created that explicitly include biomanufacturing as a key priority. So 25 other jurisdictions already have a strategy that either focuses entirely on or encompasses biomanufacturing, but Australia doesn’t. And that’s what I would leave people with: why haven’t we done this already?

So why hasn’t Australia come up with a national biomanufacturing strategy?

There’s probably a lot of different reasons. I think one of the main reasons we’ve come up against in our advocacy work is there’s no champion for it within the Federal government. So whenever we go to government, they’re often interested in biomanufacturing, but they see it as this emerging and niche technology, not a strategic industry of national importance.

Another challenge we’ve encountered more recently is that government policy and investment have increasingly prioritised biofuels, with seemingly limited appetite to extend that focus to the broader biomanufacturing sector. Our sense is that this may partly reflect a lack of awareness of the wider opportunities and benefits of biomanufacturing, as well as a need for stronger evidence to demonstrate its potential economic and strategic value to government.

Why do you believe it’s important to advocate for this work?

For biomanufacturing more broadly, there’s so much potential for us to be able to produce strategically important goods for our economy in a way that’s more self-sufficient [and] sustainable. It’s more independent of other international supply chains and so less vulnerable to things like geopolitical crises. And we can capture more economic value onshore: biomanufacturing uses “feedstocks,” which can include agricultural inputs that are often exported. So one example is sugar — we’re exporting most of the raw sugar we produce and we could be adding value to that onshore and creating more value for Australia’s economy.

For food, the global protein demand is projected to increase in the coming years, and we don’t think we can meet that demand sustainably using current agricultural production methods alone. We need other methods of producing food and ingredients beyond just conventional agriculture, and we see food biomanufacturing manufacturing as a key way we can help meet that demand in a way that’s sustainable and reliable.