When Biotech Meets Economics: Building Systems that Scale
Lessons from the Advanced Biotech for Sustainability (AB4S) Report: Why building systems that scale means embedding economics into biomanufacturing from day one.
The frontier of biotechnology is not technical – it’s economic.
The AB4S report outlines a growing disconnect in industrial biotech: R&D continues to advance, yet the economics of scale remain unresolved. For many promising innovations, industrial execution is still a leap into uncertainty.
At Arsenale, we see this not as an engineering failure, but as a design failure – one rooted in how the economics of biotech have been treated as secondary, due to the “heritage” of biopharma. To scale, biomanufacturing must be architected for viability from the outset.
Beyond the Lab: Toward Economic Reality
The AB4S report is clear: biomanufacturing is not yet competitive with fossil-based production at scale. Production costs remain too high, time-to-market too long, and infrastructure too fragmented. This isn’t just about biology - it’s about economics embedded into systems.
According to AB4S, “a lack of standardized data, methodologies, and protocols for techno-economic assessments (TEAs) impedes investors, customers, and policymakers from identifying the most promising applications.” Without transparency and comparability, decision-makers are left to navigate uncertainty with little shared grounding.
As a result, viable technologies stall - not for lack of scientific merit, but because the economic scaffolding isn’t there to support them.
The Architecture of Economic Performance
Three systemic gaps emerge:
Inconsistent TEAs: Assessments vary widely in assumptions, scale targets, and cost inputs, creating misalignment across funders and developers.
Redundant infrastructure: Without shared systems, each project builds from scratch – driving up capital costs and elongating timelines.
Deferred viability: Economic modeling is often done too late, after key design decisions have already been locked in.
This fragmented approach to economics contrasts sharply with how the fossil-based industrial model evolved: scale, standardization, and repeatability came first.
AB4S calls for a shift – designing with economics in mind, not treating it as a postscript to innovation.
Arsenale’s Approach: Embedding Viability from Day One
At Arsenale, we see economic performance as a systems-level property—not just the result of better strains or process tweaks. That’s why we design from industrial context outward.
Our platform integrates software-first modeling, micro- and macro-scale reactors, and TEA-informed process design from the start. This allows us to evaluate titer, yield, and rate not just under ideal conditions – but under production-relevant ones.
By standardizing inputs and simulating scale conditions early, we compress the uncertainty that usually surrounds scale-up. And by scaling out infrastructure in modular units, we reduce both CAPEX and OPEX—bringing cost structures into range for real market applications.
Viability is not a variable we hope for. It’s a constraint we design toward.
From Feasibility to Function
AB4S makes the case for a systemic evolution in biotech: one that integrates economic logic into the operating system of industrial biology.
This means not just better TEAs, but shared infrastructure. Not just better tools, but coherent incentives. Not just feasibility, but embedded functionality.
Building systems that scale isn’t just about expanding capacity. It’s about aligning biology, capital, and infrastructure around the same design logic: execution that works.