CHALLENGES IN COMMERCIAL BIOTECHNOLOGY .1. PRODUCT, PROCESS, AND MARKET DISCOVERY

This chapter describes the challenges in commercial biotechnology. A process is a sequence of operations or steps resulting in the production of a certain product or in a particular treatment or raw materials. A technical field dealing with bioprocessing is called bioprocess engineering or bioprocessing. Most biotechnological processes consist of a chemical reaction process section (fermentation, or bioreaction section) and of a subsequent product recovery section. A process system can be defined by addressing the interrelated and interdependent nature of elements of a process. It can be arbitrarily defined as consisting of the upstream and downstream segments, including those of fermentation, cell recovery, and product recovery processing. Each process system interacts with its environment by means of mass, energy, and information flows. A set of elements and flows determines the internal structure of the process system. Such elements are then described as structural elements. Time and space conglomerates of elements, having a certain common similarity, are called subsystems. © 1995 Academic Press Inc.