Biotechnology technology focus

Heinzen, Ch., Berger, A., and Marison, I., Use of vibration technology for jet break-up for encapsulation of cells and liquids, in Fundamentals of Cell Immobilisation Biotechnology, Series Focus on Biotechnology, Vol. 8A, Nedovic, V., and Willaert, R., Eds., Kluwer Academic Publisher, Dordrecht-Boston-London, 2004, 257-275. 

The small NBS program in chemical engineering should receive substantially greater funding to fulfill critical needs for evaluated data and predictive models. The committee supports NBS plans to focus on data needs in emerging technology areas such as biotechnology and advanced materials. 

The plant-based production of vaccines is a potentially transformative technology, but the use of a similar technology for agricultural biotechnology has stimulated significant public debate, especially focused on genetically modified foods (GM foods). 

The chapters that follow are based on lectures presented at the Idecat conference on Catalysis for Renewables , Rolduc, The Netherlands, which had been organized to discuss different technology options and related catalytic advances or challenges. Whereas the main focus is on biomass related catalytic technologies, lectures on fossil fuel technology as well as solar and biotechnological conversion paths were also included. 

At its outset, the new technology was the province of a host of small companies that typically focused on one or a few potential products. Scriabiane (1999) estimates that there were 1,308 such firms in the United States in 1996 (p. 271). Of these, only 260 were public corporations. Many startup firms had their roots in university science. Another survey reported that fully 1,100 new biotechnology companies were created between 1980 and 1994 from licenses granted by universities (p. 272). 

Comprehensive descriptions of the basic unit operations commonly used in the production of biotechnology products are available in the literature (14). This section focuses on the typical unit operations currently used for production of biological molecules in cell culture and the technologies used for the purification of pharmaceutical proteins. For each of these operations, laboratory and pilot scale experiments provide the basis for scale-up, particularly to define the expected range of process operating parameters. 

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