The Technology Strategy Board has offered grant funding totalling £1.82 million to the nine UK-led projects and four of these will also be supported by Innovation Norway, which is providing additional funding of £400,000 to the Norwegian businesses that are taking part.
“Industrial biotechnology can help the chemical industry move away from a dependency on oil to a future based on renewable and biological substances. Through these projects we are helping innovative British businesses to develop early-stage biotechnology projects into pilots and to turn pilots into commercially viable processes,” explains David Bott, Director of Innovation Programmes at the Technology Strategy Board.
"The enthusiasm shown by UK organisations to work internationally and, in this case, partner with Norwegian companies, demonstrates that international collaboration can bring exciting project opportunities for UK business,” he adds The four full-scale collaborative R&D projects will be led by Chirotech Technology Ltd (2 projects), Ingenza Ltd and Unilever. The five feasibility projects will be led by Aquapharm Biodiscovery Ltd, Biocatalysts Ltd, Centre for Process Innovation Ltd, C-Tech Innovation Ltd and GlycoMar Ltd.
The projects will look at how industrial biotechnology and/or biorefining can be competitively applied to the production of high value chemicals and will see collaboration between industrial biotechnology developers, higher education institutions and the chemicals sector.
Innovation Norway’s involvement follows the signing in 2011 of an agreement between the UK and Norway that encourages UK-Norwegian projects incorporating industrial biotechnology and/or bio-refining.
This new funding brings the total investment by the Technology Strategy Board since September 2009 in R&D using industrial biotechnology to make new or existing chemicals to £7 million, in 42 projects. These projects may use demonstration facilities in the UK, such as the newly-opened High Value Manufacturing Catapult centre.
“We believe that industrial biotechnology can contribute significantly to the shift from a chemical industry based on oil to one based on renewable and biological substances. Industrial biotechnology can help to reduce carbon emissions – the World Wildlife Fund estimated in 2009 that this could amount to a reduction of 2.5 billion tonnes by 2030,” said the Technology Strategy Board in a statement.
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