Industrial exhaust gas transformed into fish feed, gutter oil converted into aircraft fuel, and crop straw turned into plastic films—biomanufacturing is a disruptive manufacturing paradigm centered on living units such as enzymes and microbial cells as core "production workshops." As an advanced method of molecular material production, biomanufacturing is deeply interconnected with numerous sectors of the national economy, rapidly penetrating industries including food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, materials, and energy, becoming a key driver for advancing new industrialization and strengthening, optimizing, and expanding the real economy.
Industry Development: Growth in Both Scale and Quality
Compared to traditional manufacturing methods reliant on petrochemical raw materials and high energy consumption, biomanufacturing uses renewable biomass as feedstock, featuring mild processes, low pollution, high energy efficiency, and strong sustainability, making it a quintessential example of green manufacturing and the circular economy.
Li Boyang, Director of the Consumer Goods Industry Research Institute at CCID Consulting, explained that biomanufacturing reduces carbon emissions across multiple stages—including raw materials, processes, and recycling—by directly producing target products through microbes, enzymes, and cells, significantly improving material conversion efficiency.
In recent years, rapid cost reductions and improved efficiency in gene editing, sequencing, and strain design have enabled large-scale production of bulk replacement and innovative products. Currently, China's biomanufacturing industry generates over 1.1 trillion yuan in annual output value, accounting for more than 70% of global fermentation capacity. The subsectors of bio-based foods and biopharmaceuticals each exceed 400 billion yuan in annual output.
Li Boyang noted that the expansion in scale and improvement in quality of biomanufacturing are closely tied to industrial integration, technological convergence, and application-driven development, giving China multiple advantages in this field.
In terms of industrial systems, China’s manufacturing value-added accounts for nearly 30% of the global total, making it the only country in the world with complete coverage across all 41 UN industrial categories, 207 medium categories, and 666 subcategories. Comprehensive supporting infrastructure—including R&D, equipment manufacturing, and service-oriented manufacturing—related to core biomanufacturing processes such as fermentation, process engineering, separation and purification, and testing and inspection provides a solid foundation for large-scale industrial development.
Regarding application scenarios, China’s vast territory and large economic scale have fostered diverse regional industries. Diverse demand exists across sectors such as food, medicine, light industry, textiles, and electronics. Meanwhile, high-quality development continues to advance in agriculture, ecological conservation, urban and rural construction, creating broad opportunities for agricultural bioproducts, microecological preparations, and bio-based materials.
From a market perspective, China has a population exceeding 1.4 billion, resulting in massive domestic demand. Rising household incomes and consumption power have steadily driven growing demand for high-quality, personalized, and nutritious products. This trend, focused on aligning supply with demand, helps stabilize and expand consumption, contributing to a higher-level dynamic balance between supply and demand.
On the industrial front, China leads globally in fermentation capacity, producing over 70% of the world’s amino acids and vitamins. It has accumulated comprehensive engineering capabilities and talent from strain selection to large-scale separation and purification.
Accelerating Empowerment Across Industries
Biomanufacturing is accelerating its empowerment across thousands of industries, providing a crucial industrial foundation for stimulating economic vitality and enriching people’s lives.
In the chemical sector, biomanufacturing is increasingly replacing traditional petrochemical processes. In areas such as food and additives, daily care and cosmetics, high-performance textile fibers, drug active ingredients, and rare natural compounds, biomanufacturing continues to enhance product supply capacity and alignment with market demand, better meeting consumer needs. Innovation remains vibrant in bio-based materials and green energy, with applications continuously expanding into home building materials, construction projects, aerospace, and beyond.
Take the yeast industry as an example. As a natural microorganism, yeast is widely used in fermented foods, brewing, and other fields. Today, the rapid advancement of synthetic biology has made yeast an ideal "factory" for bio-manufacturing.
Hubei Angel Bio-Group Co., Ltd. has been deeply engaged in bio-manufacturing for 40 years, strengthening its core businesses in yeast and food health while expanding into bio-agriculture and new biotechnologies. Zhang Yan, Chief Engineer at Angel Group, explained that the company is actively developing new biotechnologies represented by synthetic biology, focusing on breakthroughs in key industrial technologies such as microbial protein, functional food ingredients, and agricultural microbial agents, to promote deep integration and commercialization of synthetic biology across bio-agriculture, biomaterials, and biopharmaceuticals.
Zhang Linshan, researcher at the Macroeconomic Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission, believes that bio-manufacturing is poised to achieve pioneering breakthroughs in multiple key areas. By 2030, it is expected to foster a globally competitive trillion-yuan-scale bio-manufacturing industrial cluster: first, large-volume bio-based materials such as polylactic acid and bio-based polyamides, replacing chemical fibers and petrochemical plastics; second, novel foods and feedstuffs like microbial protein, cell-cultured meat, and milk-oligosaccharides, broadening the boundaries of food security; third, high-value biopharmaceuticals leveraging clinical advantages to lead in fields such as engineered live-cell therapies and universal cell treatments; fourth, green agricultural inputs including nitrogen-fixing microbial agents and RNA-based biopesticides, accelerating decarbonization and efficiency improvements in agriculture.
Overcoming Challenges Together
"China's bio-manufacturing industry has a solid foundation, distinctive features, and strong vitality, and will enter a critical development phase during the 15th Five-Year Plan period," said Li Boyang. While the industry thrives, several pressing challenges remain, including urgent needs to enhance innovation and production capacity in core strains, enzyme preparations, and advanced instruments, the lack of a diversified raw material supply system, and insufficient support in standards, talent, and financial tools.
According to Zhang Linshan, scaling up bio-manufacturing still faces multiple bottlenecks. Technologically, key enzyme preparations, core strains, and chassis cells remain highly dependent on foreign sources, with limited self-reliance and controllability, and there are gaps in foundational databases and industrial software. At the engineering level, the intermediate-scale pilot stage between lab research and industrialization remains weak, making quality and consistency control difficult during scale-up, and production costs remain high. In terms of resources, interdisciplinary talent is scarce, and non-grain raw material supply systems have yet to be established. Institutionally, standards and regulatory frameworks are incomplete, and market entry barriers remain high in certain sectors.
Top-level design is continuously improving. In June 2025, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the National Development and Reform Commission jointly issued the "Notice on Cultivating Pilot Platforms for Bio-Manufacturing Intermediate-Scale Testing Capabilities," aiming to establish more than 20 such platforms by 2027, serving over 200 enterprises and incubating more than 400 products. In December 2025, MIIT released the first list of landmark bio-manufacturing products, reinforcing the cultivation and promotion of representative products to create a favorable market environment.
The MIIT plans to target fundamental scientific issues and major engineering bottlenecks in the bio-manufacturing sector, strengthen original innovation and breakthroughs in key technologies, advance coordinated development among industry, academia, research, application, and finance, accelerate the construction of product and enterprise matrices, and expand application scenarios to promote widespread use of bio-manufacturing products in future foods, healthcare, and other fields.
Zhang Linshan recommends that future efforts should focus on advancing foundational technologies such as chassis cells and gene editing to build independent technological systems; establishing national-level pilot platforms and concept validation centers to bridge the industrialization chain; promoting deep integration between AI and bio-manufacturing to address data infrastructure shortcomings. Improve review and approval, standard-setting, and market access policies to establish a sustainable business ecosystem; explore high-value utilization of agricultural waste such as crop straw to overcome raw material constraints.
Li Boyang stated that product evaluation mechanisms and labeling systems should also be strengthened to accelerate the market entry of original innovations; intellectual property protection mechanisms for gene editing, microbial strains, and enzyme preparations need to be improved; local governments should be encouraged to streamline pre-approval procedures for pilot production lines in bio-based chemical industries; leverage the leading role of "key enterprises—specialized supply chains—major product categories" to drive development, and strengthen the cultivation of specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative enterprises and manufacturing champions; enhance the standardization system and actively participate in international standardization efforts; support the development of market-oriented industrial funds and encourage financial institutions to launch more products tailored to enterprise needs.
