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Technical sheet / Ficha técnica (in Portuguese)
Projeto I&DT Empresas em Copromoção

Designação do Projeto / Project title: SISBI – Intelligent decision support system for Industrial Biotechnology
Código do Projeto / Project code: NORTE-01-0247-FEDER-003381

Objetivo Principal / Main aims: 

Desenvolvimento de ferramentas inovadoras de extração e integração de conhecimento, com vista a fornecer um suporte fundamentado a decisões importantes no contexto da Biotecnologia industrial.

Development of an intelligent decision support system for Industrial Biotechnology. This system promotes the development of innovative tools for the extraction and integration of knowledge, to provide an adequate support to reach important decisions in the context of Industrial Biotechnology, as it is the case of the selection of added value compounds, of adequate host microorganisms or of advantageous raw materials to be used in target bioprocesses.

Região de Intervenção / Region: Norte

Entidade Beneficiária / Beneficiary: SILICOLIFE Lda (promoter líder) and University of Minho (co-promotor)

Data de aprovação / Approval date: 21/10/2015

Data de início / Starting date: 01/01/2016

Data de conclusão / Conclusion date: 31/12/2018

Custo total elegível / Total eligible costs:  514.550,40 euros

Press release on Braga, October 28th 2015

SilicoLife and the University of Minho were awarded a national grant for the development of an intelligent decision support system for Industrial Biotechnology in the SISBI project, which will be lead by the company.

This 3-year project will start in the beginning of 2016 and will allow to boost SilicoLife’s current metabolic engineering (ME) capabilities, promoting the development of innovative tools for the extraction and integration of knowledge to provide an adequate support to reach important decisions in the context of Industrial Biotechnology, as it is the case of the selection of added value compounds, of adequate host microorganisms or of advantageous raw materials to be used in target bioprocesses.

With this objective in mind, SISBI will lead to the creation of a knowledge hub including sources of technical and economical data, boosted by powerful data and text mining tools capable of extracting useful knowledge for decision making. The knowledge extracted will be duly integrated with the ME computational systems at the company, for the implementation of intelligent systems for decision support that may take into account all available knowledge to suggest, in a rational way, optimized solutions for the Industrial Biotechnology challenges.

“With this new project, SilicoLife aims to make our metabolic engineering projects even more competitive, both for our clients and partners but also for our own internal cell factory development projects.” said Simão Soares, SilicoLife CEO. “We hope to continue to create innovative solutions used by some of the most relevant players in this sector”.

The project with a budget of over six hundred thousand euro combines the capabilities of SilicoLife and of the Center of Biological Engineering, from the University of Minho, and is co-financed by Portugal 2020, the partnership agreement between Portugal and the European Commission for the promotion of policy economic, social and territorial development in the country.

About SilicoLife

SilicoLife develops state-of-the-art optimization algorithms and uses proprietary computational and modeling tools to accelerate the design of microbial strains, based on metabolic engineering and synthetic biology approaches, shortening the development time and costs of new highly effective processes for the production of specific target compounds such as biofuels, chemicals, food ingredients or biopolymers.  Leading chemical, materials and synthetic biology companies have chosen SilicoLife as development partner to maintain their market edge in increasingly competitive markets. SilicoLife is considered a highly innovative company, included as one of the 40 Hottest Small Companies in the Advanced Bioeconomy by BiofuelsDigest and Startup of the week by Wired UK.