What are biosolutions?

Biosolutions are products, processes, and services that use living organisms or their components (e.g., bacteria, fungi, enzymes, algae, plant cells, animal cells) to perform functions that are currently dominated by traditional chemistry and conventional manufacturing.

The key word is function: Biosolutions do not describe a single technology but a set of capabilities. They can produce, enhance or enable food ingredients, medicines, materials, and fuels without the use of fossil fuels, often in new, disruptive and combinatorial ways.

They harness biological mechanisms evolved over hundreds of millions of years, mechanisms that are inherently renewable, often biodegradable, and increasingly economically competitive with the synthetic, fossil-based alternatives they replace.

Biology offers in most times safer, more resilient, regionally sourced and competitive solutions to existing and emerging challenges and problems. Biosolutions.

Our current economy is built on fossil fuels. That era is ending. Biosolutions are what comes next: processes powered by living organisms that grow, cycle, and renew rather than extract and deplete.

• Producing synthetic fertilizer to feed the world consumes more energy than most countries generate. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria can replace it pulling what crops need directly from the air.
• Precision fermentation already produces insulin, dairy proteins, and food enzymes without animals or fields, the majority of that produced in Europe, not overseas.
• Industrial enzymes have quietly displaced toxic chemistry in detergents, textiles, and paper for decades.
• Bio-based materials are replacing oil-derived plastics and open completely new areas of application like energy or data storage, self-repairing constructions and new functionalities.
• Where industry has caused damage, environmental biotechnology can repair it and add to it, replace it, or enhance it, allowing transitions and hybrid solutions.

The implications run deeper than sustainability. Europe imports its energy, its fertilizer precursors, and much of its industrial chemistry and the cost of that dependency, in euros and in strategic autonomy, has never been clearer than in the past decade.

Biosolutions represent a paradigm shift: production coupled with biology and converging with AI and automation, on fermentation rather than refining, on scientific capacity rather than resource extraction contributing to a sovereign, resilient and sustainable industry in Europe – likely commencing the beginning of a new industrial age, if we choose to.

Biosolutions span a wide range of technologies, and safety considerations differ significantly between them. What they share is that they are among the most rigorously tested categories of innovation in modern science.

Industrial enzymes, precision fermentation ingredients, and microbial soil treatments have decades of safe commercial use behind them. We eat, drink and consume them every day. The enzymes in today’s detergents and food products have been assessed, approved, and used safely at global scale for generations.

Modern technologies such as New Genomic Techniques, cultivated foods and novel fermentation-derived ingredients go through detailed regulatory assessment before they reach consumers or the environment. In the EU for example, novel food ingredients require safety authorisation from the European Food Safety Authority. Microorganisms intended for environmental release are subject to rigorous risk assessment.

The honest answer is that no technology is without risk, and biosolutions are not exempt from that. What distinguishes the field is the quality of the safety science applied to it and the transparency with which that science is conducted. DTU researchers contribute directly to that work: developing the testing methods, safety frameworks, and analytical tools that regulators and industry rely on to make sound decisions.

Several biosolutions are mature commercial technologies deployed at significant global scale: industrial enzymes in food processing, textiles, paper, and detergents; energy materials like ethanol that makes the E10 in our gasoline, aviation fuel or bio-diesel; fermentation-derived pharmaceutical and food ingredients; microbial soil treatments in agriculture; biological wastewater treatment.

Others are advancing rapidly toward commercial viability such as alternative proteins, bio-based materials, and agricultural biologics, like biological fertilizers or pesticides, for smallholder farmers in low-income markets as well as global crop farmers.

And some, e.g. cultivated meat at commodity scale, advanced biological carbon capture and utilization, fully synthetic biology-designed organisms for industrial use, remain genuine research frontiers with substantial technical and economic challenges still to resolve.

DTU is engaged across the full spectrum, from fundamental discovery to pilot-scale engineering to market-ready application.

Denmark is a world leader in biosolutions. It has been at the forefront of industrial biotechnology for over a century, leads global industrial enzyme production, the third-largest aquafeed industry worldwide, has built one of the world's most advanced pharmaceutical fermentation sectors, and its agricultural and food science is relied upon by industries across the globe.

The skills and infrastructure that produced those industries are precisely what the next wave of biosolutions requires.

DTU sits at the centre of this ecosystem. Ranked as Europe´s best technical university, and consistently ranked among the world's top five biotechnology research institutions, it produces research in biotechnology, fermentation, synthetic biology, and environmental science at the highest international level. The university is also deeply committed to research collaboration with industry, government, and society to translate scientific excellence into solutions that work in the real world.

Few countries are better placed than Denmark to lead the global biosolutions expansion. DTU is its scientific engine and a committed partner in creating a more sustainable society.