New Wave Biotech and CPI Partner to Tackle Long-Standing Lipid Extraction Challenges

• Project comes as demand for lipids rises in food, cosmetics, and personal care, amid volatile market conditions.
• Partnership centres on optimising solvent and non-solvent lipid extraction, addressing both sustainability and commercial viability.
• CPI gains digital tools to model downstream processes, cut trial-and-error, and help clients scale sustainable alternatives faster.

Manchester, 7 October 2025 – New Wave Biotech has partnered with CPI, the UK’s national translational research and innovation organisation, to apply hybrid AI-powered downstream processes simulation to one of industrial biotech’s most persistent bottlenecks: lipid extraction. The project will also extend to intracellular bioprocesses, exploring how digital-first methods can improve scalability across multiple applications.

Demand for lipid-based ingredients is rising across food, feed, personal care, and healthcare. Lipids are central to everyday essentials, from baked goods and chocolate to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. In the UK, food security concerns are mounting, with the Office for National Statistics reporting a 5.1% rise in food prices over the past year. Unlocking more efficient downstream lipid processing has a direct impact on affordability, supply resilience, and sustainability for both industry and consumers.

Despite the urgency for efficient lipid extraction, the process has remained a bottleneck for more than a decade. Solvent-based processes are widely used but rely on large volumes of toxic, flammable chemicals and demand energy-intensive recovery. Non-solvent methods, while safer and cleaner, remain costly and inconsistent, slowing efforts to scale sustainable alternatives to palm oil, cocoa butter, and animal fat replacements.

Through this collaboration, New Wave Biotech will provide CPI with its hybrid AI-powered platform to optimise both solvent and non-solvent lipid extraction. By running thousands of in-silico simulations, CPI can assess performance, cost, and sustainability trade-offs upfront — cutting trial-and-error and helping clients scale faster.

“We’re excited to work with CPI to optimise lipid bioprocesses, which are essential for scaling many of the next generation of sustainable products,”  said Nix Hall, CTO of New Wave Biotech. “Lipid costs are visible in everything from food to cosmetics, and solving this challenge is key to making alternatives affordable and accessible. By combining predictive accuracy with techno-economic and sustainability insights, our platform helps innovators cut down on trial and error and move faster towards solutions that benefit both industry and consumers.”

Stephen Wright, Manager - Downstream Processing at CPI said, “Partnering with New Wave Biotech gives us powerful new tools to help clients scale sustainable products. Unlike many AI/ML tools that need huge datasets, this platform achieves high accuracy from minimal data, allowing us to identify the best downstream routes much earlier and with greater confidence.”

The partnership builds on earlier work where New Wave Biotech’s platform predicted results from a single dataset with up to four times the accuracy of industry norms. Supported by an Innovate UK grant under the UKRI National Engineering Biology Programme, the project will advance scalable, sustainable lipid extraction and enable broader adoption of more efficient bioprocessing at scale.

About New Wave Biotech

New Wave Biotech accelerates biomanufacturing scale-up with hybrid AI simulation, predicting the performance, cost and sustainability of bioprocesses and optimising downstream processing. Based in Manchester and founded in 2022, the team enables in-silico simulations of downstream processing - covering steps such as centrifugation, filtration, and drying - running thousands of virtual trials to explore design space, sensitivities and trade-offs. The platform blends mechanistic models with machine learning to deliver explainable recommendations, so scientific performance, cost and sustainability are considered. The outcome is fewer, smarter experiments, higher product recovery, and clearer investment decisions on equipment and process design. 

To find out more about New Wave Biotech, please visit www.newwavebiotech.com  and connect on LinkedIn.

About CPI

CPI catalyses the adoption of advanced technologies and manufacturing solutions to benefit people, places, and our planet.

We’re a pioneering social enterprise that accelerates the development, scale-up and commercialisation of smart AgriFoodTech, energy storage, HealthTech, materials, and pharma innovations. Through our incredible innovation experts and infrastructure, we look beyond the obvious to transform healthcare and drive towards a sustainable future.

As a trusted partner of industry, academia, government, entrepreneurs and the investment community, we connect the dots within the innovation ecosystem to make great ideas and inventions a reality. We believe by working together we can build a better collective future, and as part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, we facilitate access to world-class organisations to deliver transformation across industries and landscapes. 

Creating lasting global impact from the North of England and Scotland, we invest in people and disruptive technologies to invigorate economies, create circular supply chains and make our world a better place.