Dakota BioWorx launches new facility in Brookings
BROOKINGS, S.D. — A new nonprofit based in Brookings is working to help agricultural innovations come to life and to put South Dakota on the map in the bioprocessing industry.
Dakota BioWorx comes from a coalition of a number of academic institutions and agricultural organizations across the state including South Dakota State University, South Dakota School of Mines, POET, South Dakota Corn Growers, South Dakota Soybean Checkoff, the Research Park of SDSU, and South Dakota Biotech.
The new facility, which is located in the POET Bioproducts Institute at the SDSU Research Park, houses six bioprocessing labs, multiple bioreactors, includes downstream processing, fermentation capacity and a high bay pilot plant that aims to scale ideas to get closer to commercial success.
Craig Arnold, the chief executive officer of Dakota BioWorx, said the coalition's mission is to fill the facility with new businesses that provide jobs and add value to South Dakota's agriculture and bioprocessing industries.
"They all came together with the goal of, how do we create value-added ag products," Arnold said. "And then also, how do we create businesses that result in opportunities for the next generation — for the generation of our kids that actually want to stay in South Dakota? This is their home, but they feel like they have to move somewhere else to find an interesting and challenging job."
Many of the products produced at DakotaBioWorx will be byproducts of agricultural commodities produced in South Dakota, helping strengthen markets for some of the state's most produced crops such as corn and soybeans.
"They'll be plant based materials, perhaps alternative proteins, and a bunch of different potential products that can come from it. We operate on basically the premise that the people that make the money are the ones that put the corn flakes in the box," Arnold said. "So how do we go from just shipping commodities, which is certainly very noble, but how do we go from that and then use some more of these agricultural byproducts to make other high value products."
According to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the global bioeconomy is projected to reach a value of $7.7 trillion by 2030. Neil Connors, chief scientific officer for Dakota BioWorx, said the new facility will help fill a void in pilot scale bioprocess development.
"There are very few facilities like this in the United States that have the scope of offerings that Dakota BioWorx has at the small-scale, through the scale-up labs," Connors said. "Then through this piloting facility, where companies, startup companies predominantly, have an opportunity to demonstrate scalability of their bioprocesses, which is a very critical milestone in the history or the development of a small company."
Connors said the end products made at Dakota BioWorx will largely depend on the client and what product they are looking for.
"It could be whole microbes that we would ferment, that would be used in an agricultural application. We would grow them up to a suitable density of cells, harvest them, maybe spray dry them, and that's the product," Connors said. "Other companies might be interested in producing proteins or enzymes using expression systems. We would again grow those organisms that are that protein at these scales, and they might be interested in a liquid product for that enzyme, maybe a spray dried product. Others might be interested in biopolymers."
RELCO is a Willmar, Minnesota, based engineering and manufacturing company that specializes in the dairy and food industries. Ross Henjum, process engineer supervisor at RELCO, said the company's spray dryer is an addition to the Dakota BioWorx processing facility and uses thermal energy generated from electricity at the plant to remove water from different products.
"This small-scale design allows the companies working with Bioworks to test products that have maybe never been spray-dried before, to find out if it's feasible and what kind of operating parameters are needed to make it a viable process," Henjum said.
Henjum said RELCO is excited for their partnership with Dakota BioWorx.
"We enjoy working with other Midwest companies to grow the ag industry," Henjum said. "RELCO built itself largely on the dairy industry, supplying solutions to dairy customers, but we enjoy working with customers outside of that and seeing how our technology can be applied in other areas."
While Dakota BioWorx is in the process of getting up and running, Arnold said the goal is to get other companies in the facility to continue their research.
"There'll be companies that launch and they build facilities here adjacent to us, because we can continue the research that they're going to need for various products that they want to produce," Arnold said.
