Primient Bets 10,000-Liter Fermenters Can Bridge Biotech's 'Valley of Death'

Corn wet miller Primient will open a precision fermentation scale-up facility in Decatur, Illinois, next May, offering fermenters from 1,500 to 10,000 liters to biotech firms that need production data before committing to commercial plants.

The site, called iPROOF (Illinois Pilot Research and Operations Optimization Facility), will sit on Primient's Decatur campus but operate as a separate legal entity with its own management, staff and round-the-clock operations, Tim Fowler, general manager at Primient's biosolutions business, told AgFunderNews.

"iPROOF will operate as an independent, neutral resource that's open to innovators, startups, research organizations, and established companies," Fowler said.

The business model is what Fowler calls a "CDMO plus" operation: fee-for-service access, with room for longer-term strategic partnerships. "Startups using iPROOF can basically pay rent, but they don't have to buy a house. And they don't necessarily have to become customers of Primient."

That neutrality matters for adoption; whether competitors will trust a Primient-owned intermediary remains an open question the company has not yet answered with customers.

Why scale-up infrastructure is scarce

Fowler argues the United States does not lack biotech science — it lacks commercialization capacity. The "valley of death" between lab and commercial production combines three problems, he said:

• Technical failures that only appear as bioreactor sizes increase.
• The need to validate production costs at meaningful scale.
• Investor reluctance to fund infrastructure that would resolve those uncertainties.

"You might be able to get through one of those two problems, but when all three exist in the same space… you have a big problem," Fowler said.

At 10,000 liters, firms can generate reliable process and cost data and produce enough material for customer sampling. Whether that scale is sufficient to prove full commercial economics is a judgment each client will have to make.

Downstream processing as the differentiator

Many startups spend most of their effort upstream on strain development and yield optimization, partly because lab-scale output is too small to test recovery and purification, Fowler said. They can discover late that downstream operations carry heavy technical or cost burdens.

iPROOF addresses this with interchangeable downstream equipment. "You can almost plug and play. So I can wheel one unit out, wheel the other one in, plug it in and try a different approach," Fowler said.

The goal is to optimize upstream and downstream processing at the same time, rather than maximizing yields only to find the product is too expensive to recover. "We can help them create a scalable downstream process because we've got decades of industrial scale manufacturing experience," he said.

A path from 10,000 to 200,000 liters

Primient itself, formed in 2022 after Tate & Lyle sold a controlling stake in its Primary Products business to KPS Capital Partners, runs an established biomanufacturing business producing citric acid and bio-based propanediol, plus a dedicated biosolutions division.

Its Decatur campus houses a dormant fermentation facility, Building 99, that could be restarted with additional investment. "There's a fermentation facility ready to go… It's got walls. It's got power, equipment. Call that a fast start opportunity for someone who's looking to scale quickly," Fowler said.

The company also holds land, utilities and corn-derived feedstock access at Lafayette, Indiana, and Loudon, Tennessee, where partners could build or co-locate their own plants — a ready answer for clients who outgrow iPROOF.

Where the commercial upside lies

iPROOF is open to a broad range of bioproducts, but Primient targets higher-value renewable chemicals, biopolymers, surfactants, specialty chemicals, and molecules such as polyunsaturated fatty acids and terpenes for flavors and fragrances. Food ingredients like dairy proteins and ag biologicals are secondary interests.

Primient screens opportunities on three criteria: market size, margin potential and growth; technical and commercial maturity; and fit with its existing assets.

"Not because Primient would necessarily sell the products, but because a partner who's been selling bioproducts for a long time is probably a more value-added partner… than a CDMO that might understand the manufacturing side but doesn't really understand all the rest of the challenges a biotech innovator is going to face," Fowler said.

The first test comes next May, when iPROOF opens its fermenters and the market shows whether startups will rent scale from a corn miller rather than build it themselves.