Biotechnology
Biotechnology is changing the world and sparking a deep tech industrial revolution. It promises to transform manufacturing, create medicines and produce materials with novel properties. Biotech will bring new biofuels and more renewable energy production. It could redefine food production, agriculture, healthcare, climate tech and more.
You might want to understand how it will impact your business. You might already be in biotech but want to overcome a technology challenge. Or you might want to navigate a successful path through the growing bioeconomy. In any event, CC is uniquely placed to help you seize tangible commercial advantage.
What we do
But you need more than good technology. To get to market, you need robust, realistic strategies and guidance. Our technology consultants will help you explore opportunities, test ideas and manage your innovation investment to deliver the right outcome for you.
Industrial biotechnology
Progress depends on understanding new biomanufacturing processes – from biocatalysts to fermentation and microorganisms. Next comes the need to navigate complex regulatory hurdles.
We’ll guide you on the path to new supply chain economics and business models. And if you’re already engaged in bio transformation but hitting a snag, our biotech consultancy services cover biology, AI, manufacturing and product development.
Biotechnology in medicine
These emerging fields promise new and more effective treatments with fewer side effects, such as immune system response. They’ll also allow better and earlier prevention of disease, with more efficient and accurate diagnosis by analysing the genetic material of patients.
The biggest challenge in medical discovery is cost. Clinical trials are long and require massive investment. Therapies are often too costly for widespread use and face regulatory hurdles.
We’ll help you rise to the challenges. We have experts in precision medicine, omics, cell and gene therapy and more. A powerful combination of skills and expertise in AI, data analysis and gene editing. And a state-of-the art synthetic biology lab that can greatly improve efficiency in medical biotechnology.
Engineering biology
Engineering biology, (or synthetic biology), is an approach and toolset in biotechnology. As an enabler and accelerator for biotechnology more broadly, it has the potential to unlock a bio revolution.
It offers exciting new opportunities to sense, organise and process matter efficiently and cleanly using AI-driven biological manipulation, automation, measurement and process control.
Moving experimentation from in-vitro to in-silico simulation promises to reduce costs dramatically in biotech applications. In engineering biology, large language models are used for the interpretation of data and generative AI is applied to create virtual data sets to test modifications and sequences without the cost of test tube experimentation.
With our state-of-the-art engineering biology lab and deep industry knowledge and expertise, Cambridge Consultants can help businesses identify opportunities and develop robust strategies to realise this potential.
We understand the challenges of bringing innovative bio-designed products to market and have the broad knowledge and capabilities to help you with robust quality control, consistent product delivery and competitive cost.
Agricultural biotechnology
As part of this, ag bio looks to deliver ways to minimise waste and offers alternatives to synthetic chemicals, some of which have unwanted side effects. Such issues have become increasingly important in the face of changing consumer demands and ever-tightening regulations.
CC focuses on the engineering architecture that enables biologists and organisations to bring their innovations to market in a commercially viable way.
We can guide you on methods to develop biological treatments more effectively by drawing on our experience of delivering innovative breakthroughs at the intersection of engineering, biology and advanced computation.
Additionally, our technology advisory services offer strategic guidance for building new digital farming platforms to complement novel biological treatments.
What is biotechnology?
Biotech promises to help solve some of the biggest global challenges – from climate change and health to food security and resource management. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to radical bio-based solutions is the task of scaling up innovation from the lab to commercial reality. Our advice is to identify the most commercial and impactful application early on.
This is the way to gain confidence and propel commercial advantage. And this is where radical, deep tech innovation will drive down cost.
How we can help you
Engineering biology
Engineering biology (often referred to as synthetic biology) is an approach and toolset in biotechnology. As an enabler and accelerator for biotechnology more broadly, it has the potential to unlock a bio revolution and offers exciting new opportunities to sense, organise and process matter efficiently and cleanly using AI-driven biological manipulation, automation, measurement and process control. With our state-of-the-art engineering biology lab and deep industry knowledge and expertise, CC can help businesses identify opportunities and develop robust strategies to realise this potential.
Strategic planning and market analysis
Ideas are the easier part; making them a reality is harder. To get to market, you need robust, realistic strategies and a firm understanding of designing, building, and testing biological systems. We advise on the engineering challenges of bringing bio-designed products to market, and have capabilities in areas such as chemical processes, microfluidics, sensing, data capture and AI to help you with consistent product delivery and competitive cost.
Technical advice and research
There are many challenges in engineering for biology – but problem solving is our specialty. We are a deep tech consultancy that can draw on a wide range of disciplines, from scientific and engineering skills to product and process design expertise. With a team of 800-plus, consisting of multidisciplinary engineers, technologists, designers and consultants, problem solving is in our DNA.
Featured insights
Our expertise
With our unique blend of capabilities at the exciting intersection of biology, engineering and computation, we are able to develop complex devices, services and technologies.
Our innovation teams help therapy developers to create custom platforms to enable their biology, and tool providers seeking to bring solutions to market.
We also collaborate with cell and gene therapy development organisations and tool providers to advance drug discovery, cell and gene manufacturing processes and equipment for life-changing therapies around the world.
We understand the extraordinary business potential and practical application of engineering biology. From novel materials to new medicines, data storage to living sensors, bioengineering offers new ways to sense, organise and process matter efficiently and cleanly. With our synthetic biology expertise, you can turn bioengineering theory into practice.
We help synthetic biology start-ups get innovative biodesign products to market. We assist them in scaling-up novel bioengineering processes – ensuring robust quality control, consistent product delivery and competitive cost.
Using our skills in biological manipulation, automation, measurement and process control, we help mature organisations already engaged in synthetic biology to build consistent and predictable processes for the rapid and cost-effective development of new products and services.
CC has a deep understanding of AI and its applications. Our expertise spans Bayesian inference, real-time signal processing and data analysis and is combined with extensive technical skills in areas such as predictive analytics, deep learning, edge AI and empathetic AI.
Our consultants are pushing the boundaries of the human-machine interface to develop edge AI use cases, generative AI models, new supervised machine learning models and types of data analytics.
Our work is unlocking new frontiers in areas such as uncrewed aerial vehicles, synthetic biology, remote monitoring systems, telecoms and beyond.
Our expertise in physics and chemistry underpins everything we do.
With in-house expertise in materials science and knowledge of the structure and composition of wide range of properties we can ensure that all elements of a system’s design use the most appropriate materials.
We can accurately predict the intricate behaviours of fluids and their interaction with physical surfaces and our microfluidics expertise is crucial to many projects. We’re particularly experienced in phase change materials and the handling of hot and cold fluids for beverage systems.
At CC we are the leading the way in intelligent simulation tools, offering a comprehensive suite of services for testing autonomous systems.
Our unique approach utilises synthetic data to create tailored operational environments, run AI algorithms and evaluate sensor performance.
This advanced simulation offers numerous benefits, including the potential for up to 95% reduction in data collection costs, accelerated product development, improved safety and scenario testing.
Markets and technologies evolve rapidly and unpredictably. Very few companies can afford to develop all relevant technologies, so tough choices need to be made. We help identify opportunities to ‘build, borrow or buy’ new technologies in anticipation of market requirements.
Business transformation is typically driven by a combination of internal, industry-related, and external factors, often rooted in technology. And whilst technology-based disruption is nothing new, the speed at which new offerings have built scale has been unprecedented.
The expertise we employ as technology strategy consultants has been in existence at Cambridge Consultants for decades. Because our consultants are engineers and scientists with deep technical insight, they can identify golden opportunities and recommend an innovation portfolio or technology roadmap.
We ensure that not only is the technology is understood but that the business model, market offerings and operations are all set up for success.
Our facilities
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Engineering biology labsOur microbiology lab spaces enable us to genetically modify micro-organisms and characterise them. The CC bioengineering facilities are containment level 2 rated for handling pathogenic strains and our in-house libraries allow rapid modular DNA construct design and assembly. With deep synthetic biology expertise, we are particularly adept at building organisms as biological sensors for healthcare and industrial biotech applications. |
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Life science labsOur suite of restricted class 2 laboratories are specifically designed for the handling and experimentation of pharmaceuticals, licensed substance and biological hazards in a controlled and regulated environment. Instrumentation rooms are equipped with metrology, microscopy and product test equipment for rigorous verification and quality assurance of prototypes and products. |
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AI infrastructureCC’s comprehensive onsite compute infrastructure allows us to explore options and train and test models more rapidly to get better results. We run petaflop-scale, containerised compute on site, with multiple NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning supercomputers and other GPU and FPGA-accelerated servers. This links to petabyte-scale local NetApp storage, project-specific cloud and our continuous integration systems. |
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Physical science labsOur wet and dry labs allow us to perform a wide range of physical science research and development. Specific equipment includes wet and dry benches, fume hoods, malvern mastersizer particle analysis system and UV-VIS spectrometer. We also have specialised equipment for the detection and chemical analysis of a wide range of organic substances down to parts-per-million levels or below. This allows us to determine the make-up of a very wide range of organic materials in solid, liquid or vapour form and investigate flavour and aroma chemistry. |
Our experts
Martin Brock
Chief Technology Officer
Frances Metcalfe
Global Head of Biotechnology
Cassandra Padbury
Associate director, technology strategy and World Economic Forum Fellow
Vishal Sanchania
Commercial director, Biotechnology
Ian Taylor
Senior Consultant in Biotechnology and Bioinnovation
Will Addison
Group Leader - AI and Algorithms
