Imagine growing a product like a plant, but you can tell it exactly what shape to take and how to behave. By pairing fungi with specially designed bacteria, the team creates a living material that can sense its environment and even process simple information. It is like building a biological computer that can be grown from agricultural waste and then safely dissolved when no longer needed.
Traditional manufacturing of materials is resource-heavy and produces non-biodegradable waste. There is a lack of scalable, autonomous ways to produce materials that can sense and respond to their environment.
A Growth Composing (GC) fabrication platform using robotically controlled spray nozzles and bioprinting to create living mycelium-bacterial materials with embedded genetic circuits.
If you are a packaging manufacturer dealing with plastic waste and high carbon footprints — this project developed mycelium-based ELMs that use agricultural side streams as feedstock. This allows for the creation of biodegradable containers that can be triggered to degrade quickly via kill switches.
If you are a construction firm dealing with rigid, non-adaptive building components — this project developed a Growth Composing technology that steers hyphal growth using air-flow. This enables the production of living building materials that respond to environmental cues like temperature and light.
If you are a fashion brand dealing with the environmental impact of synthetic leather — this project developed synthetic fungal-bacterial consortia to grow multi-cellular materials. These materials can be engineered for specific morphologies and advanced functionalities throughout their life cycle.
Based on available project data, specific cost per unit is not provided, but the project emphasizes the use of low-cost agricultural and industrial side streams as feedstock to ensure economic viability.
Yes, the project developed a modular fabrication platform called Growth Composing (GC) specifically to make upscaling feasible for high-volume production.
Based on available project data, there are no specific details regarding patents or licensing agreements provided in the summary.
The project includes a dedicated objective to probe emerging ethical, social, and environmental issues to align the technology with regulatory requirements.
The project period runs from 2022-11-01 to 2026-10-31, suggesting that full results and potential prototypes will be finalized by late 2026.
The consortium is purely academic, consisting of 7 university partners from 6 different countries. There are 0 industry partners and 0 SMEs involved, indicating that the project is currently focused on high-risk, high-reward fundamental research rather than immediate commercial deployment.
Contact the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (DET KONGELIGE DANSKE KUNST-AKADEMISSKOLER)
Contact us to find potential academic partners for bio-manufacturing pilots.
