Correction: A previous version of this story gave an incorrect comparison to Belgium’s land area. It is slightly larger than Hawaii’s. The story has been updated.

A Belgian trade delegation’s visit to Augusta on Sunday was short but, literally, sweet. Business and academic representatives from the European nation toured the local Manus Bio sweetener factory to learn more about how the company’s practices can enhance Belgium’s growing biotechnology sector. 

“If you look at Belgium, we are very strong in biotech, but then for industrial biotech production facilities, we don’t have that many,” said Dr. Marjam De Mey, a bioengineer and director of the Center of Synthetic Biology at Ghent University. 

Read more: Augusta plant producing new stevia sweetener touted as environmentally friendly

Also: Manus Bio boosts production, adds 20 jobs at Augusta sweetener plant

Manus Bio, headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., produces flavors, fragrances and other ingredients found in consumer products ranging from food to cosmetics to pharmaceuticals. The Augusta facility produces NutraSweet Natural, a stevia-based sweetener that the company unveiled last year. 

Many other stevia-based sweeteners use Rebaudioside A, or Reb A, an extracted glycoside that gives those sweeteners a bitter aftertaste. NutraSweet Natural uses the extract Reb M, which appears less in stevia but more closely resembles sugar and leaves no aftertaste. 

Gathering the plant extracts used in sweeteners often means growing large amounts of plants, which through sustained land and water use can affect the environment. 

Scalability also poses a problem. A chemical or biological process that can successfully produce a sweetener that fills a test tube might not be feasible to duplicate when trying to fill a 100,000-gallon tank. 

By employing a process called metabolic engineering, Manus Bio uses proprietary methods to recreate natural plant processes that coax microbes to produce plant extracts in amounts that can better supply large-scale production. 

Manus Bio co-founder Dr. Gregory Stephanopoulos, who helped pioneer the field of metabolic engineering, described the Augusta manufacturing plant as the best of its kind in North America.

"It's growing," he told the group of visitors. "It's going to be creating additional facilities for other products as well, and this plant actually is a unique combination of two aspects I mentioned before – an exemplary ability to engineer the microbes and create a capacity to scale up the process and create the plant you see around you. These two things sound simple but they're not easy to do." 

De Mey worked with Manus Bio during its early days as a biotech spinoff company at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, serving as the company’s vice-president of metabolic engineering and fermentation. 

De Mey’s connections to both Manus Bio and the Belgian biotech sector led to the Belgian Economic Mission’s Augusta visit. The hope is that Belgium’s research-minded universities can partner with private investors to duplicate Manus Bio’s success – “to see what’s working, and the challenges they’ve had, to learn from it and not make the same mistakes,” she said. 

Ghent University has conducted “world-class” research in the biotech and industrial biotech fields, said Rik Van de Walle, the school’s rector.  

Belgium’s land area is slightly larger than Hawaii’s and its population is slightly higher than Georgia’s. But the country’s size, Van de Walle said, belies its intellectual capital in biotech and its goal of reducing sustainability footprints. 

In 2020, Belgian companies accounted for almost one-fourth of the total stock market value of Europe's public biotech companies in Europe, according to Flanders Investment and Trade, the organization that supports business development in Belgium's Dutch-speaking northern region. 

“Being small as a country is irrelevant because it’s about the brains of researchers,” he said. “We as universities should not be ivory towers. You need to dare to be selective, to say, ‘Look, these are the fields in which we are aiming to become world-class, to dare to strive for excellence.”