Plants such as Rhodiola rosea, Panax ginseng, and Ginkgo biloba form the basis of countless health and wellness products. However, most of these compounds are still obtained through wild harvesting, which threatens biodiversity, results in raw materials of varying quality, and exposes consumers to the risk of adulteration.
Precision fermentation- using microorganisms to produce these molecules in bioreactors – is a promising alternative, but today it can take several years to bring a single ingredient to market.
Standing at the intersection of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, biodiversity, sustainability and industrial innovation, ORIGIN will develop an integrated AI-supported platform designed to accelerate the path from natural molecules to sustainable, fermentation-based ingredients. The project aims to reduce development timelines to two to three years.
“If Europe wants to remain competitive in the next generation of industry, we need to close the gap between scientific excellence and industrial scale. ORIGIN is designed precisely for that: to combine AI, biotechnology, fermentation and sustainability into an integrated European platform for producing high-value natural ingredients. ORIGIN is not only about better molecules — it is about building technological capacity, resilience and industrial leadership in Europe,” says Paulo Maia, Project Coordinator and Director of Innovation of SilicoLife, the Portuguese biotechnology company coordinating the project.
To achieve this, the ORIGIN consortium will address several scientific and technological challenges, such as discovering new microbial enzymes by analysing one of the world’s largest genomic databases (more than 10 billion sequences), in accordance with the Nagoya Protocol; designing and optimizing, using AI, the best pathways for producing each molecule within industrial microorganisms, and rapidly testing the solutions in four different industrial microorganisms.
“The contribution of NOVA in this project spans from scientific research, with 3 groups involved, as well as citizen science and communication. It is thus a great opportunity to engage in a project at the forefront of innovation in Europe, developing and deploying advanced tools and deep biotech for generating societal and economic impact,” says Isabel Rocha, Vice-Rector at NOVA University Lisbon and lab head at ITQB NOVA.
The ORIGIN consortium brings together seven partners from six countries: SilicoLife (coordinator) and Nova University Lisbon in Portugal, Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in Denmark, CSIC in Spain, BaseCamp Research in the United Kingdom, EPFL in Switzerland, and dsm-firmenich in the Netherlands.
