How does Bio-intelligent Manufacturing Change the Future?
From：
Zhonglin International Group Date：12-22 16 Belong to：Industry Related
When corn is no longer just a staple food but can be converted into high-performance aviation fuel through microbial "cell factories"; when the treatment of chronic diseases shifts from daily injections to just one shot per month; when agricultural straw, via biotransformation, achieves nutritional value comparable to corn and becomes a new feed source—these are not distant sci-fi scenarios, but an ongoing industrial revolution. The core driving force behind this revolution is Bio-intelligent Manufacturing, an in-depth integration of artificial intelligence, automation technology and synthetic biology.
Bio-intelligent Manufacturing is not a simple extension of traditional biotechnology. It marks a new era for humanity’s understanding and manipulation of life systems, evolving from "trial-and-error exploration" to "rational design" and "intelligent creation". By engineering living organisms into highly engineered "living machines", and designing and optimizing them with data and algorithms, we are ushering in a new era of green manufacturing that uses renewable biomass as raw materials and cells as micro-factories. The industry widely recognizes that biomanufacturing has the potential to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution and will profoundly restructure the entire material production system, spanning from medicine and healthcare to materials and chemical engineering, and even agriculture and food. By 2050, biomanufacturing is expected to generate an economic value of up to 30 trillion US dollars, accounting for one-third of global manufacturing output.I. Technological Core: From "Life Dark Matter" to "Intelligent Cell Factories"
The leap forward of Bio-intelligent Manufacturing is rooted in the fundamental transformation of its underlying technological paradigm. Traditional biomanufacturing is like groping in the dark, while modern Bio-intelligent Manufacturing strives to illuminate the treasure trove of "life dark matter" and achieve precise, efficient and large-scale production through intelligent equipment.First is the data and AI-driven exploration and rational design of "life dark matter". In microbial genomes, there are a large number of silent biosynthetic gene clusters that hold the potential to synthesize countless new natural products, known as life dark matter. In the past, activating and utilizing these gene clusters was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Today, research teams represented by Professor Luo Xiaozhou’s group at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, are systematically solving this problem by deeply integrating synthetic biochemistry principles with machine learning algorithms. Their independently developed AI-assisted platforms, such as the enzyme kinetics prediction tool UniKP, can accurately predict catalytic performance solely based on an enzyme’s amino acid sequence and substrate structure, shifting the screening of key components from "blind trial and error" to "rational calculation". Applying this strategy, the team has newly identified more than 16,000 types of "life dark matter" in microorganisms, and efficiently synthesized high-value products such as jasmonates and α-linolenic acid, with yields increased by dozens of times. This signifies that the core of biomanufacturing—the design and optimization of metabolic pathways—has entered a predictable, programmable digital age.
Second is the intelligence of equipment and automation of production processes. Even the finest design requires advanced "production equipment" to be realized. The core equipment of biomanufacturing is the bioreactor, and its performance directly determines the success of scaling from laboratory "cell factories" to industrial "production workshops". China’s research institutions have achieved breakthroughs in key equipment. For example, the microbial parallel bioreactor developed by the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has broken through the core technologies of miniaturization and high parallelism. A single operator can simultaneously control 12 reaction tanks for condition screening, tripling efficiency compared with traditional models. More importantly, the equipment is evolving toward full automation and intelligence, aiming to achieve unmanned operation throughout the entire process—from tank filling and sterilization to feeding and monitoring. This greatly reduces labor costs and operational errors, laying a solid foundation for the rapid development and stable scaling of biomanufacturing processes.
II. Application Landscape: Green Solutions Reshaping Thousands of Industries
The allure of Bio-intelligent Manufacturing lies in the infinite scalability of its application scenarios. It is rapidly penetrating from medicine—a traditional strength—into foundational industries vital to national economy and people’s livelihoods such as materials, energy and agriculture, providing a series of green, efficient and disruptive solutions.In Medicine and Healthcare
Bio-intelligent Manufacturing is driving treatment models toward personalization and long-acting efficacy. Beyond mature genetically engineered insulin, the latest technology can encapsulate drugs in uniformly sized microspheres. By controlling release rates, the antidiabetic drug liraglutide—once requiring daily injections—can now be administered once a month, greatly improving patients’ quality of life. In the cutting-edge field of cell and gene therapy, AI-driven technologies such as stable cell line construction and de novo protein design have become core tools to accelerate the research, development and production of next-generation biopharmaceuticals (e.g., CAR-T cell therapy and monoclonal antibodies). Globally, biopharmaceuticals represented by monoclonal antibodies and recombinant proteins are emerging as the main growth drivers of the next-generation biomanufacturing market, and are expected to account for nearly half of the market by 2035.In Materials and Chemical Engineering
Bio-intelligent Manufacturing is a critical pathway to achieving carbon neutrality and addressing plastic pollution. It has become a global consensus to use microorganisms to synthesize bio-based materials as substitutes for traditional petroleum-based products. The research team led by Professor Chen Guoqiang from Tsinghua University has converted agricultural straw in Xinjiang into feed with nutritional value close to corn. If China’s annual utilization rate of approximately 1 billion tons of straw can be raised from less than 20% to 40%, it will solve the supply of 300 million tons of feed, with momentous significance.In Energy Applications
Bio-intelligent Manufacturing is helping humanity stride into a New Petroleum Era. Future automobiles and aircraft may run on "oil made from carbon dioxide". Certain specialized bacterial strains can "consume" carbon dioxide and "excrete" ethanol or aviation fuel. At present, China has successfully completed commercial test flights using bio-based aviation fuel. Additionally, biomanufacturing can produce high-performance lubricants, tire rubber and other materials, enabling green transportation.III. Market and Challenges: Competition and Barriers in a Trillion-Dollar Track
The vigorous development of technology has directly spawned a large-scale, rapidly growing new industrial blue ocean. Currently, the total scale of China’s biomanufacturing industry has reached 1.1 trillion RMB, with the output of bio-fermentation products accounting for over 70% of the global total. China has achieved parity or even leadership over developed countries in emerging fields such as hyaluronic acid, polylactic acid (PLA) and artificially synthesized starch. Globally, investment and financing in biomanufacturing remain robust, with a compound annual growth rate of approximately 30% since 2015, projected to reach 25 billion US dollars by 2025. Market research institutions forecast that the global next-generation biomanufacturing market will reach 57.6 billion US dollars by 2035, with North America and the Asia-Pacific region as the major growth engines.Nevertheless, the path to the future is not smooth, and the Bio-intelligent Manufacturing industry still faces multiple challenges:
- Dependence on core technologies and equipment: Despite the large overall industrial scale, core biological components such as enzyme preparations and lactic acid bacteria preparations, as well as some high-end bioreactors and separation and purification equipment, still rely heavily on imports, resulting in insufficient independent supply capacity.
- The "Valley of Death" from lab to factory: The biggest industrialization bottleneck is how to stably and economically scale laboratory-proven "cell factories" to ten-thousand-ton industrial production. This involves complex metabolic regulation, process optimization and cost control.
- High costs and complex regulation: Especially in the biopharmaceutical sector, sophisticated production processes drive up therapy costs (some single doses exceed ten thousand US dollars), while stringent drug regulation and patent barriers form high walls to market access.
- Shortage of interdisciplinary talents: A severe lack of interdisciplinary professionals proficient in biology, data science, engineering machinery and industrial management has become a key constraint on industrial innovation.
IV. Future Trends: Toward a Full-Chain Intelligent Industrial Ecosystem
Looking ahead, the development of Bio-intelligent Manufacturing will show distinct trends, ultimately building a synergistic, efficient and deeply integrated new industrial ecosystem.First is the in-depth penetration of AI for Science. Future R&D in Bio-intelligent Manufacturing will rely more on artificial intelligence to mine patterns, predict results and automate design from massive biological data. From gene sequences and protein structures to metabolic pathways and fermentation processes, AI will act as the omnipresent "chief scientist", drastically shortening R&D cycles and even creating entirely new biomolecules and materials not found in nature.
Second is the "linking beads to strengthen chains" and collaborative innovation of the industrial ecosystem. At the national level, a complete ecological chain of "innovation research → transformation support → commercialization" is being systematically constructed. Through the open competition mechanism to select the best candidates to tackle core equipment (e.g., high-performance bioreactors), pilot test platforms are fostered as "accelerators" for achievement transformation, and landmark products are selected to set market "benchmarks". In the future, a closely collaborative model of "research institutions + manufacturing enterprises + application terminals" will take shape, accelerating the translation of technologies from papers to products.
Third is the full digitalization and flexibility of production models. Biomanufacturing plants will evolve into highly intelligent Biofoundries, enabling full-process digital management and flexible production—from strain cultivation and fermentation monitoring to product separation and purification. Real-time sensing and adaptive control ensure high quality and stability of each batch of products, and enable rapid switching between different production lines to meet personalized and diversified market demands.
Bio-intelligent Manufacturing is reshaping life itself into the most exquisite and sustainable productive force on this planet. It is not merely a technology or an industry, but a future-oriented production philosophy: solving development needs with the ways of nature. From curing diseases and addressing climate challenges to safeguarding food security and reshaping industrial materials, Bio-intelligent Manufacturing provides us with a green toolbox based on cells and driven by data.
Despite numerous hurdles in core technologies and industrial scaling, driven by both global green transition and the national strategy of new-quality productive forces, this trillion-dollar track is converging with unprecedented innovation vitality. As rational design illuminates life dark matter and intelligent equipment harnesses micro-scale cell factories, a more efficient, green and sustainable future defined by Bio-intelligent Manufacturing is accelerating from blueprint to reality. This is not only an upgrade of manufacturing, but also a profound revolution concerning how humanity coexists harmoniously with nature and defines the direction of civilizational progress.
