Successful proposals will contribute to the Industrial Strategy, Green and Digital transition and Circular Economy Action Plan, as well as to the achievement of European Green Deal objectives. Proposals will also contribute to the EU Bioeconomy Strategy implementation, developing processes with improved environmental performances, maximum resource- and energy-efficiency, and optimal cascading use of bio-based feedstock, aiming for ‘zero waste’ and ‘zero-pollution’ operations.

Project results should contribute to the following expected outcomes:

• (Industrial) biotech or chemical/(industrial) biotech processing routes with improved efficiency compared to established routes, or completely new processing routes that are currently unavailable;
• Cost-competitive bio-based products;
• Improvement of the environmental performance of bio-based processes through resource-efficient valorisation of sustainable biomass feedstock, while addressing (i.e. reduction/elimination) pollution issues in production processes;
• Significant improvement environmental performance across the value chain against specified fossil and/or bio-based benchmarks;
• Improved circularity and resource efficiency via practical application of the circular (bio)economy concept;
• Availability of a broader range of bio-based products meeting market requirements.

Industrial biotech processes often have limitations of scaling up and continuous processing. There is an additional complexity of reduced biocatalyst robustness and poor process metrics, especially when applied in sequence with chemical pre-processing. Industrial biotech processes can be used to replace chemical conversion steps which may pose safety or resource efficiency issues (e.g. necessitating complex reactions with protective groups, hazardous solvents etc.), or may be high in energy demand (heat, pressure) etc. Vice versa, some biotechnological conversion steps can be difficult to scale up because of e.g. substrate inhibition, difficult product removal, co-factor regeneration: in this case, chemical conversion steps can provide improvements.

Proposals under this topic should:

• Identify existing, industrially relevant, bio-based process(es) (upstream and conversion steps) and identify the areas of intervention and bottlenecks to improve process flexibility, robustness, techno-economic feasibility and environmental performance. The proposal should consider the case of developing combined processes using biotech and chemical^[1] approaches synergistically in order to optimise process and/or (bio)catalyst design for obtaining bio-based products.
• Incorporate reactor design (e.g. membrane reactors, small-scale reactors, microfluidics), process design, process control and optimisation as well as catalysis optimisation aspects that are relevant to also enable tandem chemical/biotech processes, and where applicable for optimisation of continuous production approaches (batch2continuous).
• Identify, optimize/engineer and test more active and robust microbial hosts and their enzymes, or other (bio)catalysts, against relevant process conditions (including physical and chemical stressors). The projects should also consider integrating the biofoundry and synthetic biology advances ^[2];
• Ensure and assess productivity, yield, robustness, flexibility of the process.

Overall, modifications and optimisation of the (physico)chemical steps to further optimize chemical/biotech tandem processes are also in scope and could be considered.

Proposals should also describe their contribution to the Specific CBE JU requirements, presented in section 2.2.3.1, and the Cross-cutting elements, highlighted in section 2.2.3.2 of the CBE JU Annual Work Programme 2023^[3].

Where relevant, proposals should seek links with and capitalise on the results of past and ongoing EU funded projects^[4].

[1] Chemical processes include electrochemical processes

[2] Biofoundry concept (integrated molecular biology facility that includes robotic liquid-handling equipment, high-throughput analytical equipment, and the software, personnel and data management systems required to run the equipment and broader biofoundry capabilities.

[3] CBE JU Annual Work Programme 2023 (https://www.cbe.europa.eu/reference-documents)

[4] Proposals should consider ongoing and past projects, especially under BBI JU/CBE JU as well as H2020 but also HEU (Clusters 4 and 6). See also HEU-CBE-JU-IA-03 “Improve fermentation processes (including downstream purification) to final bio-based products”.