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2 State of play: Importance of Blue Biotechnology 2.1 Value chain of Blue Biotechnology Although applications of marine biotechnology may be extremely diverse, the first steps of the supply chains all rely on the discovery of new marine organisms, the identification of interesting molecules and the definition of growing protocols allowing the development of potential commercial usages of these molecules. A generic value or product development chain of marine biotechnology products and services is presented in Figure 2.1. Figure 2.1 Generic value chain of marine biotechnology Key components of the value chain that have been identified include: 1. Discovery and bioprospecting: investigating environments and collecting living organisms from these environments; making extracts of organisms; isolating genes from organisms; identifying active gene products; preliminary de-replication; establishing preliminary evidence for activity in some kind of lab-bench test; establishing uniqueness and proprietary position; 2. Research and development: taking extracts or fractions of extracts and identifying the molecular components; isolating specific genes and gene products and identifying their nature; de-replication of molecules and gene sequences/products; molecular characterisation of active molecules; structural identification; confirmation of proprietary position; synthetic strategies; validation of preliminary bioactivity in further tests; 3. Product development: sustainable production strategies; chemical synthesis; gene isolation, transfer to an industrially-utile organism and effective expression; demonstration of scale-up; stabilisation of production process; preliminary demonstration of cost-efficiency; Life Cycle Analyses; enough material to confirm and extend activity profile, to justify scale-up; 4. Up-scaling and commercialisation: industrial-scale and economic production of target organisms or molecules; validated and stabilised extraction, purification and derivatisation processes for target molecules, materials; positive economics for production; 5. Marketing and selling: Based on the end-products of the process, for example pharmaceuticals, enzymes, hydrocolloids, nutraceuticals, cosmetic ingredients, biomimetic materials etc. The value chains appear to become sub-sector specific at the product development stage, prior to that (i.e. discovery/bioprospecting and R&D, and some elements of product development) appear common to all marine biotechnology applications and are a pre-requisite to the application of marine biotechnology in a particular industry. Product development is often a lengthy process and specific to the biotechnology or industrial sub-sector for which the application is destined. However once a product has reached the stage at which up-scaling and commercialisation is required the 'blue' component is reduced and stakeholders/actors involved are no longer specific to marine biotechnology but are part of other biotechnology or industry sectors. Therefore these stages are not an area of focus for this study. Study in support of Impact Assessment work on Blue Biotechnology 5

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