India's chemical industry, which relies on fossil fuels and petrochemicals as feedstocks, is a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for 5-10% of the total emissions. To meet the country's Net-Zero Carbon Economy goal by 2070, a major shift in current manufacturing processes is required. This transition involves adopting less carbon-intensive biomanufacturing processes that utilize sustainable bio-based feedstocks.
Bio-based chemicals, Biopolymers, and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) have gained considerable global traction, with scalable applications across pharmaceuticals, agriculture, food processing, and industrial biotechnology. Their integration into biomanufacturing significantly reduces dependence on petrochemical inputs, enabling cleaner and more resource-efficient production methods. Accordingly,biomanufacturing of bio-based chemicals, biopolymers, and APIs has been included as a key thematic area under the BioE3 Policy.
Under the BioE3 Policy, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), in collaboration with its public sector arm BIRAC, supports research, innovation, and scale up of bio-based chemicals, biopolymers, and APIsin production strains with Freedom-to-operate:
Biomanufacturing of the following shortlisted bio-based chemicals, biopolymers and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) in Production strains with ‘Freedom-to-operate’:
Establishment of Proof-of-concept and early-stage validation in a bioreactor (upto100L) to eventually reach TRL 3-5 with focus on demonstration of bioproduction of metabolites; strain/metabolic engineering for improved yield/titer of the metabolite; and further development of a strain and toolkit to enable biomanufacturing.
Pilot-scale demonstration of technology in a bioreactor above 100 L to eventually reach TRL-7 or above with focus on use of simple sugars to effectively realize bioproduct development; optimization, upscaling and down-streaming of existing technologies, and intensive strain engineering to further increase yield/titer of the bio-based chemical in an already up-scaled process.
To promote indigenous high-performance biomanufacturing of bio-based chemicals, biopolymers, and APIs, the Department has created a “BioE3 Strain Resource Centre for fostering High-Performance Biomanufacturing” (BioE3-SRC) at iBRIC-NCCS Pune. This Biorepository provides Indian researchers access to high-performance, indigenous microbial strains and associated toolkits with ‘freedom-to-operate’ status via the BioE3-SRC web portal (https://nccs.res.in/src) at a nominal cost, upon signing of legal agreements.The use of domestically developed strains will ensure unrestricted commercial control and positions industries to scale sustainably while retaining full economic benefits. This will enable innovators to scale up production rapidly, while safeguarding intellectual property rights and ensuring compliance with all regulatory standards.
Following extensive consultations with various stakeholders from Academia and Industry a list of commercially relevant and nationally important bio-based chemicals, biopolymers and APIs has been prioritized for Biomanufacturing. Subsequently, DBT-BIRAC has issued the first "DBT-BIRAC Joint Call for Proposals on Biomanufacturing of Bio-based chemicals, Biopolymers and APIs in Production strains. This call focuses on Biomanufacturingof the prioritized Bio-Based Chemicals, Biopolymers, and APIs inshortlisted production strains. Proposals against the call were invited under the two categories of Discovery & Application-oriented Integrated Network Research and Bridging the Gaps for Scale-up. Atotal of 197 proposals were received from Academia, Industry and jointly by Industry-Academia. These proposals are under various stages of evaluation. Further, webinars on Biomanufacturing of Biopolymers (March 2025) and Biomanufacturing of APIs were also organized, attracting over 500 participants from academia and industry.
