New Wave Biotech joins forces with CPI to break through lipid extraction bottleneck

New Wave Biotech has announced a partnership with CPI, the UK’s national translational research and innovation organization, to address one of industrial biotechnology’s most persistent hurdles – lipid extraction. The collaboration will combine CPI’s downstream processing expertise with New Wave Biotech’s hybrid AI-powered simulation platform to optimize solvent and non-solvent extraction methods, aiming to enhance scalability, cost efficiency, and sustainability.

The project comes as demand for lipid-based ingredients continues to surge across food, feed, personal care, and healthcare applications. Lipids play a central role in products ranging from baked goods and chocolate to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics recently reported a 5.1% increase in food prices over the past year, highlighting the growing urgency to improve supply chain resilience and affordability. More efficient lipid processing could directly influence both sustainability and consumer prices.

For over a decade, lipid extraction has remained a costly and complex bottleneck in biomanufacturing. Solvent-based methods dominate the market but rely on large volumes of toxic, flammable chemicals that require energy-intensive recovery processes. On the other hand, non-solvent extraction techniques offer a cleaner and safer alternative but often fall short in consistency and cost-effectiveness. This combination of technical and economic challenges has slowed progress toward scaling sustainable replacements for ingredients such as palm oil, cocoa butter, and animal fats.

By integrating New Wave Biotech’s AI-driven modeling tools, CPI aims to overcome these limitations. The technology enables researchers to run thousands of virtual simulations that assess performance, cost, and environmental impact before running physical experiments. This approach reduces trial-and-error, shortens development timelines, and provides a clearer view of trade-offs between efficiency, cost, and sustainability.

“We’re excited to work with CPI to optimize lipid bioprocesses, which are essential for scaling many of the next generation of sustainable products,” commented Nix Hall, CTO of New Wave Biotech. “Lipid costs are visible in everything from food to cosmetics, and solving this challenge is key to making alternatives affordable and accessible. By combining predictive accuracy with techno-economic and sustainability insights, our platform helps innovators cut down on trial and error and move faster towards solutions that benefit both industry and consumers.”

Stephen Wright, Manager - Downstream Processing at CPI, said the collaboration would strengthen the organization’s ability to help clients scale sustainable production methods. “Partnering with New Wave Biotech gives us powerful new tools to help clients scale sustainable products,” he said. “Unlike many AI/ML tools that need huge datasets, this platform achieves high accuracy from minimal data, allowing us to identify the best downstream routes much earlier and with greater confidence.”

The project also represents a step forward in bridging digital and biological innovation. While much of the biotechnology sector’s focus has been on strain development and upstream productivity, downstream processes such as extraction and purification often account for the majority of production costs. The use of predictive modeling to optimize these stages offers a way to accelerate commercialization and reduce costs at scale.

The collaboration will also explore applications in intracellular bioprocesses, expanding the use of digital-first methods beyond lipid extraction to other complex biological systems. By simulating intracellular conditions and extraction efficiencies in silico, CPI can identify process parameters that maximize yield and quality while minimizing waste and environmental impact.

The partnership builds on previous research showing that New Wave Biotech’s platform can predict results from a single dataset with up to four times the accuracy of industry norms. This capability enables users to generate reliable insights without the need for large experimental datasets, making it particularly valuable in early-stage development where data scarcity is common.

Supported by an Innovate UK grant under the UKRI National Engineering Biology Programme, the project is expected to accelerate the adoption of scalable, sustainable lipid extraction processes across multiple industries. It will also strengthen the UK’s position in engineering biology, where digital tools and data-driven design are increasingly seen as vital to achieving commercial and environmental goals.

By combining AI modeling with applied process expertise, the collaboration between New Wave Biotech and CPI represents a new approach to solving one of biotechnology’s most enduring challenges. If successful, it could help unlock faster, cleaner, and more cost-effective production of lipid-based ingredients – with benefits extending from industrial partners to consumers worldwide.