A major startup facility for biotech companies is coming to Ames. 

BioMADE, a project run by the U.S. Department of Defense, aims to create more science-based companies by offering them needed infrastructure and support. 

In partnership with the Iowa Economic Development Authority, BioConnect Iowa, Iowa State University and others, a scale-up facility for bioindustrial manufacturing will be constructed at the ISU Research Park. More specifically, it will be a multiuse fermentation facility at ISU’s BioCentury Research Farm. 

The $40 million project, a DOD Manufacturing Innovation Institute, was announced in August. BioMADE will contribute $20 million to the project and operate it in partnership with ISU. IEDA approved a $10 million grant to help fund the project. BioMADE is working on identifying cost-share sources for the last $10 million.

The 15,000-square-foot building will be designed to complement other Iowa-based facilities, such as ISU’s Center for Crops Utilization Research, to increase the speed at which companies can move through technological development and scale-up processes. The facility will include 5,000-liter and 10,000-liter fermenters and downstream processing equipment, enabling companies to scale up fermentation-based technologies using Iowa’s agricultural feedstocks. It’s expected to open in early 2028.

There are two other BioMADE facilities in the works, one in Hayward, Calif., and the other in Maple Grove, Minn., near BioMADE’s Twin Cities headquarters. BioMADE is supported in part by memberships from leading scientific companies, small businesses, startups, research universities, community colleges, nonprofits and government representatives. 

The Business Record sat down with Jack Starr, chief manufacturing officer at BioMADE, who is based in Minneapolis, to talk about plans for the Iowa BioMADE facility. Starr earned a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from Iowa State University and a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining BioMADE, he worked at Cargill on process development, piloting and deployment of advanced solutions for manufacturing. He also spent 10 years at NatureWorks, a Cargill project that seeks new uses of carbohydrates from plants as feedstock for more sustainable plastics. 

Starr said BioMADE will provide mid-stage biotech startups with research and development space, a type of infrastructure that is rare in the U.S. and gives other countries a competitive advantage. His responses have been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Can you explain, in layman’s terms, what BioMADE is?

BioMADE was put together by the federal government to try and accelerate commercialization of biotechnology, particularly in the industrial space, not in pharmaceuticals, but making materials, food, chemicals, things that we use every day. 

That was my background at Cargill, where I worked on the NatureWorks PLA [polylactic acid] and with that we ended up building a very large plant over in Blair, Neb., just across the river. 

BioMADE really has three pillars that we’re working on. One would be technology and innovation, particularly toward scale up. Typically it’s a 50/50 split between the federal government funds and the company funds, or the consortium that wins that, and they go off and do science to make their processes more robust upon scale. 

Then we have EWD: education and workforce development. If you look at the trends and the forecasts on how labor may change, we need people with skills ranging from the trades all the way to degreed people, maybe even a few advanced degrees, to do the science that we’re doing. Like in 2007 to 2011, when the ethanol industry grew so rapidly, we definitely hired a lot of people that didn’t have a whole lot of experience in biomanufacturing. The idea is, if we can build that talent pipeline, it will help make the overall industry more successful. We bring jobs to this site, but the real economic development comes with the development of these much larger plants. 

The third pillar is the piloting infrastructure. We have three sites identified: Minnesota, California and Iowa, and are working toward putting steel in the ground and getting the engineering design together to be able to get those facilities up and running.

Can we talk more about scale up? That’s such a fascinating process that is not the easiest thing to do. You need the skills and expertise, but there also seems to be a special sauce in there to make everything gel together. Can you talk about that process and what you plan to do to encourage it?

Scale up is an important step in the overall commercialization, for sure. The team that we’re bringing to our operations in Minnesota, California and Iowa will be people that have long-term experience in the industry. They will be able to work with customers using what I call leading-edge industry knowledge. Not trade secrets, but this is what state of the art is for biomanufacturing, and bring that to, probably the most needed would be to a startup with maybe 15 to 20 employees. And some of the capabilities that we’re looking at are unique to Iowa and unique to some of my past employers. 

Biomanufacturing is a niche sector. Where are you finding the companies and people doing this work? Are you finding them at Iowa State or elsewhere?

Certainly Iowa State, between its agricultural space and its engineering space, they have a lot to offer. If you look at the ethanol business, it’s pretty widely dispersed across Iowa and would be growing these types of people who could work at our facility, as well as work at any spin out of commercialization. That’s one dynamic that Iowa, because of its strength in biomanufacturing, ethanol and the corn wet milling business, has a lot of the pieces that put together a real nice economic package as a company would go forward to commercialize.

Can you speak a bit more to the purpose of BioMADE?

Our overall, broad mission is to enhance and enable biomanufacturing at all scales. We have a particular focus, not at benchtop [early stage], but at that intermediate piloting scale, where, here in the U.S., we do not have a very strong domestic infrastructure. We don’t have these pilot plants readily available. We have seen that with our own membership [scientists and biotech startups] who are going over to Europe, going over to Asia to do their piloting. That causes other problems around how intellectual property is addressed. And the customer or the company that’s developing this technology, they’re spending a lot of time flying over the ocean. 

BioMADE is really designed for us to be able to build out that infrastructure and keep these American-grown companies. Let’s not forget that the United States did most of the basic research on how to make these types of products, through yeast or bacteria. It helps us keep all this infrastructure and economic development at home. 

Can you go into a little more detail about why startup biotech companies are going overseas when it comes to commercialization?

The European governments, the EU, has said they thought this was a critical need in Europe as well, and they have built out one large piloting facility and maybe a couple of smaller ones. The one that is most notable sits in the Belgium area. Quite frankly, it’s what we at BioMADE point to to say, ‘This is what Europe is doing.’ We can do the same, and we can capture economic development here in the United States using corn grown in Iowa and the surrounding states of the Corn Belt.

BioMADE will operate facilities in California, Minnesota and Iowa. Will they all function the same or are they each different?

Each of them should have a niche. With Minnesota, we have some unique capabilities around chemicals and materials. Because we have so many members in California, sitting in the San Francisco Bay area as well as San Diego, we felt it was important to get them within close proximity to one of our facilities. Then we’ve got some food-safe aspects in all of our facilities. When we have talked to our colleagues at Iowa State and some of the work that they’ve done to understand what needs are the greatest from the companies in Iowa, I think we’re going to have a little bit more food-safe equipment in that one. 

When you say food-safe, that can mean different things. Can you go into more detail on that?

We would put in processes like a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point program that ensures that the products that we were making are suitable for human consumption. One of the aspects of piloting is not only to get your process correct on the scale up, but oftentimes you are going to pilot in order to make, let’s say, 3,000 to 5,000 pounds, and that material then gets moved to your customer or your customer’s customer in order for them to do their product development. Having larger equipment to be able to make a ton of material is one of the gaps that’s here in the United States. 

The work that is taking place at Cargill’s Eddyville plant uses a chemical made from renewable biomass sources, such as Iowa-based dent corn instead of fossil fuels, to produce a new material that could be used in fashion, packaging and personal care products. Is that the type of project that could be developed at a BioMADE facility?

That’s a great example, yes. Cargill is in a joint venture with HELM to put all the pieces together not only for production, but for distribution of that product. Jill Zullo, our chief operating officer, was involved with setting that up at Cargill before she came to BioMADE. 

It’s very hard for companies to go it alone. Even large companies like Cargill have very often used a joint venture to be able to pull all the skills together for a project like this. That’s why we often, maybe overuse, the word ecosystem. It truly is important for this piloting and commercialization, for people to look beyond their four walls of the laboratory, to ask, ‘How do we get this done in a safe and in a rapid manner?’ Because with all of these projects, time is money. The faster you can get going and get to commercialization, the faster the revenue comes in.

Why did BioMADE select Iowa for a facility?

Iowa has a lot of elements that are very favorable to biomanufacturing. You’ve got a strong agricultural community that really understands how to produce millions, if not billions, of bushels, and that is the raw material. 

You’ve got a corn milling industry that is able to process that corn to make sugars for fermentation. And Iowa sits right in the middle of the Corn Belt, and that’s very favorable. 

Again, we talked a little bit about the workforce development side. Iowa already has a significant number of people working in the biomanufacturing space. Being able to build on that is a good thing, in the way Silicon Valley and the Bay Area has developed into the place to be for chip development and programming. There’s no reason why here in the upper Midwest we can’t develop that same type of production and biomanufacturing ecosystem that makes everybody more successful, because they can find the talent. 

Can you share some of the details of the actual facility that will be built in Iowa?

We would be expecting our first customers to be coming in in early 2028. We’ll have some of the traditional fermenter designs, agitated aerated tank that’s well suited for yeast bacteria. Then we’ll have the set of downstream processing unit operations that are fairly typical, particularly for food, which would include cell separation, tangential flow, filtration, spray drying, crystallization, these types of things to get it in a final product that is usable for our customers.