New York-based financing and development platform for biomanufacturing facilities, Synonym Bio, has announced the launch of Scaler.
Scaler is a “first-of-its-kind” fully interactive, free online tool enabling synthetic biology companies to project their costs of production and operations at a commercial scale.
In a statement, the company said: “Our goal with Scaler is to promote the growth of biomanufacturing by making it easier for companies to understand what it will require to build and operate at the scale necessary to bring their bioproducts to the mass market”.
Synonym says that Scaler’s straightforward dynamic interface allows any company that is developing a bioproduct through fermentation to overcome the challenge of building and operating profitably at a commercial scale.
By inputting a few production variables, the technology works to instantly provide users with a customised techno-economic analysis with insights into projecting costs to build and operate a facility at scale, identifying a bioproduct’s biggest profitability drivers and understanding levers of commercial adoption.
Scaler’s model is updated frequently to reflect changes to operating and capital costs. Synonym says that Scaler will enable companies to find reliable, market-vetted data that can “jumpstart” their capacity plans, instead of having to rely on a patchwork of expensive and often unreliable data sources.
Synonym’s co-founder and CEO, Edward Shenderovich, said: “When we launched Synonym last year, it seemed obvious that lots more capacity would need to be built quickly to satisfy the demand for bioproducts. And the impediment to large capital projects is always financing. With Scaler, we’re creating a framework for the industry to see biomanufacturing facilities as the transformational asset class it is.”
The Scaler tool complements Capacitor, a comprehensive free directory of global fermentation capacity that Synonym launched last year. Together, Capacitor and Scaler can provide the synthetic biology ecosystem with a powerful, accessible suite of tools to guide companies along their biomanufacturing scale-up journey.
