Growing the Future of Biomanufacturing
For decades, the production of high-value recombinant proteins, whether for medicine or food, has relied heavily on precision fermentation and animal cell cultures. While these methods have their merits, they are expensive, resource-intensive, and often struggle with scalability. But what if there is a way to overcome these limitations?
Now, a new solution is taking root, our chloroplast-based expression system, an approach that transforms plants into biofactories for protein production.
Plants vs. Bioreactors
Let’s start with the obvious: bioreactors are expensive, energy-intensive, and difficult to scale without massive infrastructure investment. Precision fermentation and animal cell culture require expensive nutrients, carefully controlled environments, and constant vigilance against contaminating microbes. These are costly but are essential for consistent yields, and any deviation in process can result in major setbacks.
Molecular farming, protein production in plants, flips this model on its head. While various molecular farming systems exist: transient expression, stable nuclear transformation, and chloroplast engineering, what sets them apart is how efficiently they express proteins, and how reliably they can do so at scale.
The Chloroplast Advantage
At the heart of Bright Biotech’s protein expression platform is chloroplast engineering, a next-gen approach to genetic modification that delivers both precision and performance, precisely inserting value-added genes into chloroplast DNA.
This comes with four key advantages over other molecular farming systems:
Yield: Each leaf cell contains thousands of chloroplasts, each with multiple genome copies. That’s a built-in amplification system, one that allows Bright Biotech to achieve protein yields of 2-5 grams per kilogram of leaf biomass. By comparison, for the proteins we are manufacturing, nuclear transformation or transient expression typically yield only a few hundred milligrams per kilogram of biomass.
Stability: Chloroplasts don’t suffer from the gene silencing mechanisms that often hinder nuclear transformation, ensuring consistent, long-term expression.
Containment: Because chloroplast DNA is inherited maternally, there’s minimal risk of gene escape through pollen; an important consideration for biosafety and regulatory compliance and a key differentiator from nuclear systems.
Scalability: Unlike other molecular farming platforms that rely on transient expression systems, which require reintroducing genetic material for each production cycle, Bright Biotech’s stably transformed lines can be propagated via seeds. This means we can scale production indefinitely without restarting the process each cycle.
Bright Biotech is the only company currently using chloroplast engineering to produce growth factors, a class of proteins essential for regenerative medicine and cultivated meat.
By engineering chloroplasts, we achieve up to 20 times higher growth factor yields per unit biomass compared to precision fermentation, animal cell culture and other plant-based methods, ensuring efficiency and scalability.
Beyond Speed Bumps: Rethinking Production Timelines
One of the most common critiques of plant-based expression systems is speed. Unlike precision fermentation, which can churn out proteins in days, chloroplast expression typically takes months from gene to protein due to the need for full transgene integration and enrichment.
But Bright Biotech is actively addressing this. By optimising plant selection, refining screening and transformation protocols, and enhancing downstream extraction processes, we’re steadily reducing these timelines. Once established, chloroplast lines can be propagated and amplified through seeds, enabling consistent, and highly scalable production.
While speed may not yet rival precision fermentation systems, the scalability, cost-efficiency, and long-term consistency often outweigh speed as a trade-off, especially for high-value proteins where quality and safety matter.
The Regulatory Case for Chloroplast-Based Expression
One of the biggest hurdles for any biotech innovation is navigating the maze of global regulatory frameworks. The beauty of chloroplast-based expression is that it solves many biosafety concerns. Because chloroplast genes are maternally inherited this eliminates the risk of gene escape into the environment via pollen. This makes regulatory approval far smoother compared to conventional genetically modified crops.
In addition, our production currently takes place in controlled indoor environments, which requires far fewer inputs and supports regulatory compliance.
Why Bright Biotech Matters Now
The biotech industry is at a crossroads. Industries from regenerative medicine to cultivated meat urgently need protein production methods that deliver high quality and affordable products consistently with true scalability. Yet, traditional systems are straining under the weight of rising costs, complex logistics, and environmental scrutiny.
Bright Biotech offers a path forward. Our platform offers high yields, stability, robust biosafety, and seed-based scalability, enabling consistent high-quality protein production with fewer resources and raw materials, combined with lower infrastructure and energy requirements.
The question isn’t whether Bright Biotech’s technology can meet these urgent industry needs, it’s how rapidly we can scale it.
