Innovation in action Bright Biotech From tiny seeds to global changes. Growing the future of medicine and food.

An emerging start-up from Manchester, Bright Biotech, could be on the cusp of making global waves in the medical and food industries.

The company can engineer plants, modifying their DNA to create valuable groups of proteins known as ‘growth factors’, that have a range of potential applications.

In food, Bright Biotech have focussed on the cell-cultivated meat sector, hoping to address the environmental impact of intensive animal agriculture. They can produce growth factor proteins on a much greater scale than traditional fermentation methods, which could finally help to move this industry from the lab to the industrial scale.

In medicine, this could lead to progress in the field of regenerative medicine,  in particular with cell and gene therapy, pioneering treatments to address diseases and in tissue engineering, repairing or replacing damaged or diseased tissues, to harness the body’s natural healing abilities.

Their chloroplast system has a range of competitive advantages over existing technologies. It avoids the ‘silencing’ or epigenetic effects that can be found in many other expression systems including other plant-based systems, instead delivering the consistency that’s needed for producing proteins as part of a standardised medical or food process.

Their method focusses on production scalability and efficiency, involving only scaling-up from seeds, harvesting leaf material, and purifying. And it delivers much higher levels of ‘expression’, that enable them in turn to produce greater quantities of growth factor proteins.

The Bright Biotech approach is also very safe, avoiding the risks of animal pathogens or microbial endotoxins that you can see in traditional fermentation and animal cell culture systems. Whatever genetic modification they do, it doesn’t get transferred through pollen grains but remains within plants because the chloroplast is maternally inherited.

And finally, their method has a lower carbon footprint compared to competing systems, especially microbial fermentation and animal cell culture.

These advantages have given the Bright Biotech team a robust platform, which can meet the stringent requirements of competitive fields like medicine and food. They’ve also generated a huge amount of investment interest, meaning the team may soon be making a big difference in the world.

Now, they’re talking to several potential partners in the life sciences research and development sector, with the ambition of making their products available for global distribution. As Mohammad notes, “it’s been a very exciting journey, and we’re looking forward to what the next year is hiding for us!”