Biodata Digital Platform for quality control and analysis of biological materials

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

Bioindustries have an urgent need for chemical quality control of biological raw materials and bioproducts. The chemical composition of renewable biological raw materials is highly varying resulting in a high variability of bioprocesses and unstable bio-product quality involving high losses. Currently, the quality control is performed sporadic by external services by traditional chemical analysis, which are time consuming and expensive resulting in costs and losses from 1 to 10 million NOK per company/per year depending on the size of the company. In the BIOSDATA system, chemical fingerprints of test samples (biological raw materials or bioproducts) obtained by cheap infrared spectroscopy scanners are compared to the known chemical fingerprints of compounds and biomaterials in the spectral database. The machine learning algorithms estimate the quality of the biological raw materials and bioproducts in real time, with superior precision and high throughput allowing for routine quality control in industry. We estimate that BIOSDATA can reduce the additional costs and losses caused by unstable processes and unreliable product qualities by at least 20% in a typical Norwegian bioindustry company. The actual commercialization will be done through an NMBU spin-off company (SpecInnova AS) that has been founded for this specific purpose in August 2019, with the inventors and developers of the technology as key staff. Parallel to the validation, demonstration and verification of the technology, the BIOSDATA project will develop the business model, IP strategy, marketing plan and further business development strategy for the spin-off company. This will be done in close collaboration between the spin-off and the best commercialization experts at NMBU business school, TTO (ARD Innovation AS) and incubator (Inkubator Ås AS). Towards the end of the project, agreements will be negotiated with the first international distributor (CBS-KNAW, Westerdijk Institute, Netherlands).