Scotland's dairy industry generates approximately 25,000 tonnes of salt whey annually. Together, Take Root Bio and Heriot-Watt University's International Centre for Brewing and Distilling aimed to develop a waste valorisation pathway for salt whey.

Sustainable Extricko, working with Dr Joanna Sadler, Senior Lecturer in Biotechnology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, has developed a low cost and sustainable process for producing high value molecules from end of life composite materials like carbon and glass fibre. With support from UKRI Innovate UK Launchpad funding and IBioIC’s FlexBIO facility, the partners demonstrated the viability of recovering vanillin and protocatechuic acid, opening a route to circular economy manufacturing at scale.

With funding from Innovate UK’s Launchpad programme and support from IBioIC as the cluster management organisation, SilviBio Limited turned undervalued British wool into a patent pending raw material for peat-free growing media.

With funding from Innovate UK’s Launchpad programme and support from IBioIC as the Cluster Management Organisation, Mercel has proved their seaweed-based binder for laundry sheets, securing an exclusive contract for this technology. They have also opened discussions about related products from around the world.

Research groups at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde are developing treatments for seed potatoes that rely on the use of bacteriocins, non-conventional protein antibiotics that show strong narrow spectrum killing activity against related bacterial species.  They have developed a discovery and testing pipeline for bacteriocins with potential for application in a potato treatment

The University of Glasgow proposed a spin-out, Casdu, to exploit this pipeline to develop, produce (or licence the production of) bacteriocin-based prophylactic treatment(s)

After graduating from the University of Strathclyde with an MChem in Chemistry with Drug Discovery, Ben initially pursued a career in the legal sector. However, keen to return to a scientific environment, he identified our MSc programme as the ideal opportunity to re-enter the field and build on his academic background.

This successful project has advanced Ureaka’s ambitions to reduce carbon emissions of cement and concrete production while permanently storing CO2 towards commercialisation.

Research from the Hoskisson Lab at the University of Strathclyde reveals how multidrug-resistant E. coli use metabolic genes on resistance plasmids to outcompete commensal gut bacteria, even without antibiotic pressure.

Thanks to the MSc programme, Saarah now recognises strong potential for waste valorisation across the cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and plastics industries.

C-Source Renewables and the University of Edinburgh wanted to explore streamlining the biorefinery/bioprocessing route to develop a simple, one-pot bioprocess for the depolymerisation and biological conversion of bread waste into high-value compounds for use in the materials and pharmaceutical industries.

Antimicrobial resistance poses a critical global health threat, demanding new strategies beyond drug discovery. Hoskisson Lab's 3,000-generation evolution experiment with Streptomyces bacteria revealed that a single gene mutation drives faster growth and metabolic specialisation under industrial conditions - a finding that could accelerate the engineering of optimised antibiotic-producing strains and strengthen the pipeline against AMR.

With support from IBioIC, Fermtech partnered with Abertay University on an industry-led project to validate and strengthen its solid-state fermentation platform and accelerate its route to market.

This collaboration enabled the successful tenfold scale-up of nucleotide purification for the University of St Andrews, demonstrating how IBioIC’s facilities and expertise can provide targeted scale-up services to academic partners bridging the gap between laboratory research and preparative bioprocessing.

By partnering with IBioIC on this project, MiAlgae were able to obtain a high-value data set which allowed them to refine their downstream processing strategy and move towards full scale-up operations with confidence.

Polyethelene terephthalate (PET) is a thermoplastic polymer resin which is used extensively across multiple industries including food and drink, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and textiles.

Impact Solutions and the University of Edinburgh wanted to investigate the use of modern synthetic biology methods to design bacteria capable of transforming PET waste into the anti-Parkinson’s drug Levodopa (L-DOPA).

As part of their UKRI Launchpad project for Biomanufacturing in Scotland, NCIMB sought to transition their bench-scale process for producing the enzyme from static flask cultures to a controlled fermentation system suitable for larger-scale enzyme production. To enable this transition, NCIMB subcontracted the fermentation scale-up and enzyme recovery work to the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC), leveraging the FlexBIO facility and technical expertise in bioprocess development and downstream processing.

IBioIC funding enabled Ingenza to utilise the bioinformatics experience of DrChris Wood, University of Edinburgh to supplement its own knowledge in machine learning, while generating focused DNA libraries that maximised the training value of smaller biological data sets.

Our industrial placement was one of the reasons why Sara Pawlikowska decided to chose the IBioIC MSc course.

Vyshnavi chose this MSc as she wanted to deepen her knowledge of advanced biotechnological processes and gain hands-on experience with industry-relevant technologies.

Rebecca wants to drive practical, research-informed solutions that help industries reduce their environmental impact while continuing to grow responsibly and ethically.