Explore the Agenda
7:30 am Registration & Light Breakfast
8:30 am Chair’s Opening Remarks
Aligning on Risk in Partnerships for Growth
8:45 am Panel Discussion: Balancing Commercial & Scientific Risk to Accelerate Commercialisation
- Outlining what large food companies are prioritising for innovative ingredients to align with their innovation pipelines
- Exploring ingredient and product cost dynamics through the lens of a strategic partnership, identifying where fermentation technologies have the most viability and competitive potential through life cycle analyses
- Discussing real-world collaborations where transformative R&D has complemented corporate goals
9:30 am Navigating the Complexities of Co-Owned Ventures to Safeguard Strategic Partnerships
- Examining the different models of industry stakeholder collaboration to maximise the outcomes for both parties
- Learning from successes and failures to ensure sustained collaboration
- Sharing how to build credibility in relationships between strategic partners
10:00 am Scaling Up Downstream Processes to Ensure Efficiency & Reduce Risk
- Scaling up downstream processes like centrifugation and filtration to industrial scale comes with a number of challenges
- This talk will touch upon industrial scale cell separation and address ways of ensuring high efficiency in industrial scale purification of food ingredients produced by precision fermentation
- The risks associated with scaling up will be elaborated on, both from a technical and a commercial perspective
10:30 am Morning Break & Speed Networking
Keeping the End in Mind: Ensuring Scalable R&D
11:30 am Mapping Process Flow to Define Key Parameters that Determine End-Product Quality
- Identifying the key process aspects that drive variability and defining the permissible parameter boundaries at different scales that still create a high-quality ingredient
- Ensuring process design is sufficiently robust to allow for potential ingredient deviation
- Translating lab-based data through to pilot scale to enable targeted experimentation
12:00 pm Fermentation Meets Regulation: Mapping the U.S. Regulatory Path for Novel Proteins
- Understanding best practices for introducing novel proteins to the U.S. market
- Navigating the technical and scientific requirements to establish GRAS status
- Aligning regulatory strategy to avoid common pitfalls and stay ahead of evolving FDA expectations
12:30 pm Ensuring Compatibility Between Strain & Process Design to Improve Scalability & Stability
- Matching strain robustness with the expected agitation, aeration, and reactor configuration
- Understanding the impact of changing fermentation conditions throughout scaling on a strain
- Exploring how to co-develop strain engineering and bioprocessing to achieve stable high titres
1:00 pm Networking Lunch
Unlocking Value Through Side Stream Innovation
2:00 pm Enhancing Understanding of Practical & Logistical Considerations of Side Stream Valorisation
Describing the necessary pre-treatment of side streams to make them fermentable, and the energy and infrastructure requirements to achieve this
Understanding how the consistent, year-round availability of the feedstock enables continuous and economically viable fermentation, highlighting strategic alignment with commodity supply chains
Examining how micro-organisms can be flexible to different side streams
2:30 pm Digital Twins for Alternative Proteins
- Identifying the technology gaps that will enable the alternative protein industry to scale
- Demonstrating the value of digital solutions in R&D, engineering and operations
- Showcasing a fermentation digital twin
2:45 pm Demonstrating Real-World Examples of Side Stream Valorisation to Create New Ingredients
- Ensuring micro-organisms are suited to the substrates of a specific side stream
- Outlining how to tailor the process to create a desirable product
- Exploring regulatory considerations around the labelling of the final ingredient, depending on the inputs, such as of gluten and dairy components
3:15 pm Evaluating the Use of Dairy Side Streams as an Input for Precision Fermentation
- Developing efficient processing and fractionation approaches to extract value from every carbon source of a dairy side stream
- Exploring the potential applications for different proteins derived from precision fermentation, and where it can provide added value
3:45 pm Afternoon Networking Break
Creating High Value Ingredients Through Precision Fermentation
4:30 pm Exploring Opportunities to Improve the Structure & Functionality of Precision Fermentation-Derived Caseins
- Discussing why precision fermentation has, thus far, been unable to replicate bioidentical micelles that enable the formation of dairy structure
- Identifying strain engineering approaches to improve the formation of missing structural motifs
- Supporting the complex protein-folding steps of casein by providing the right mineral composition
- Ensuring the low heat treatment step gives a good surface charge