Strategies for industrial fermentation process optimization

Remaining a leader in industrial enzyme production, Novozymes is meeting the demands of an ever-growing enzyme market through capacity expansions, strain development, and innovative fermentation technique. In recent years, Novozymes is producing a greater quantity and variety of products than ever before. As a result, suboptimal process conditions are often employed in order to meet customer demand, or bring new products to market quickly. This leads to unnecessary costs and capacity burdens which if alleviated would be of great benefit, particularly in the bulk enzyme industry where the per-ton profit margins are much smaller than in the pharmaceutical industry. For these reasons Novozymes maintains a Global Optimization department with divisions in Denmark, the Americas, and China, whose primary function is improving process yield, reducing costs, and liberating capacity. Acting at the interface between R&D and production, Global Optimization focuses on industrial scale process optimization through different strategies including: scale down/up studies, data mining, raw material optimization, and application of knowledge from the greater scientific community. Presented here are a few case studies from successful optimization projects, each highlighting one of the primary functions of Global Optimization.