Greener, more sustainable platforms for high-value recombinant protein production

The greenerRPP project aims to markedly enhance the EU’s capacity for the production of secreted high-quality recombinant proteins, especially industrial enzymes and therapeutic proteins (biotherapeutics). The combined markets are in excess of $330 billion p.a., and the products are of massive significance for healthcare and a sustainable bio-based economy. greenerRPP will address urgent problems in these industries, such as difficult-to-express proteins and the rapidly-emerging issue of 'sustainability' in the European biotechnology industry. It will deliver improvements in yield and process design that increase the industry's effectiveness while simultaneously reducing high current levels of waste. It will deliver industrial enzymes that reduce energy and raw material costs in countless industrial and domestic settings. To achieve this, we will develop powerful new microbial and mammalian cell platforms that produce recombinant proteins in unusually high quantities and in unparalleled quality, and bring to market a suite of super-producing platforms.

A comprehensive training programme will equip greenerRPP ESRs with the interdisciplinary and intersectoral skills required to be future leaders in these industries, while emphasising sustainability and gender-diversity dimension principles at every level. Finally, the programme addresses the stark global inequality in this biotechnology sector: recombinant protein production is largely carried out in (or outsourced by) high-income countries, placing low/middle income countries at a massive disadvantage. greenerRPP includes a series of South East Asian Institutions as Associated Partners, to develop a global network with a knowledge exchange-secondment programme that boosts these countries' own manufacturing programmes. greenerRPP ESRs will thus enhance a European industrial sector that has never been more important to society, while making it 'greener' and reaching out to lower income countries.