Lessons from the First Generation of Bio-Fabrication at Scale

The first generation of bio-fabrication has crossed an important threshold, as it moves from speculative promise into the far more difficult terrain of proof, operations, and survival. The story of biomaterials has been largely understood through the language of replacement; of leather made obsolete by mycelium, of petrochemicals eclipsed by fermentation tanks, and of an industrial system finally outgrown. The reality emerging now is one that is so much more nuanced, more infrastructural, and, in many ways, more interesting. Instead of fully bio manufactured materials sweeping away existing systems, what we are instead seeing as a stronger proof of concept and transition, is the rise of hybrid models; biological processes stitched into industrial supply chains, and living systems treated not as precision layers within a complex manufacturing world.

This shift is a sign of a technology maturing into contact with reality.

Consider MycoWorks , long one of the poster children of the mycelium leather movement. The company’s early vision was bold and vertically integrated, as they pioneered the development of tightly controlled, end-to-end growth of mycelium sheets, produced in proprietary facilities, positioned as a direct replacement for animal leather at scale. In 2024 and 2025, however, the company underwent a significant restructuring, moving away from the idea that it must own and control every stage of biological production. Instead, MycoWorks has been repositioning itself around a more modular model — focusing on its core intellectual property, finishing processes, and partnerships, while becoming more flexible about sourcing and production structures.

This is not a retreat from ambition as much as a confrontation with the economics of scale. Growing living materials is capital-intensive, slow, and biologically fickle. Unlike petrochemical processes, which thrive on standardisation and brute-force throughput, biological systems introduce variance, sensitivity, and temporal fragility into the heart of manufacturing. The fantasy that a single company could both invent a new material paradigm and simultaneously rebuild the entire industrial stack beneath it was always a heroic one. So, MycoWorks’ shift signals a maturation and pragmatically powerful next phase; the recognition that the future of biomaterials will be built by adapting and slowly re-patterning a broader industry.

A similar philosophy underpins the approach of Modern Synthesis, who we have discussed before, as one of the most conceptually rigorous players in the biomaterials field. Rather than presenting itself as a “materials company” in the conventional sense, Modern Synthesis frames biology as a manufacturing process layer: a way of using bacterial cellulose growth to bind and assemble existing fibres into new composite structures. The point is not to create a miraculous new substance that demands a new supply chain, but to slot biological assembly into the textile systems that already exist—spinning, weaving, coating, finishing—while fundamentally altering how those systems behave.

This is a crucial inversion of the original biotech narrative. Instead of asking the world to reorganise itself around biology, Modern Synthesis asks how biology can be made legible to the world as it is. Their partnerships with established manufacturers are a strategic recognition that scale emerges from compatibility.

A third instructive example, which similarly we’ve discussed in a different context, comes from Spiber, the Japanese company behind Brewed Protein™, which has spent more than a decade developing fermentation-based structural proteins designed to replace or augment materials like silk, wool, and synthetics. Unlike many Western biomaterials startups, Spiber has been relentlessly focused on integration rather than disruption theatre. Its partnerships with companies like Goldwin and its increasing alignment with existing textile production pipelines point to a long-game strategy: make the material behave enough like what industry already knows, and industry will gradually reorganise itself around it.

What unites these three cases is technical ingenuity, and a shared philosophical pivot as lessons from the first generations of bio-fabrics; namely, the move away from biotech as a fanciful and truthfully, abstract spectacle, and toward biotech as infrastructure that has frequent, realistic use cases across industries.

The first wave of biomaterials was powered by a kind of ecological messianism, and an understandable reaction to the violence and exhaustion of petrochemical modernity. Still, we have to understand that materials do not exist in isolation. They are embedded in machines, labour systems, logistics networks, regulatory regimes, cultural expectations, and financial instruments. To propose a new material without proposing a credible pathway through this thicket is to propose, effectively, a miracle – and miracles, in industrial contexts, are notoriously bad at scaling.

The deeper lesson of this first generation is that material innovation is a question of assimilation. Fashion, in particular, offers a brutally clarifying lens on this. The industry is one of the most complex, distributed, and time-sensitive manufacturing systems on earth. Fibres must move across continents, be spun, dyed, finished, cut, sewn, shipped, merchandised, and sold on cycles that leave little room for biological unpredictability. Any biomaterial that cannot learn to speak this language — of tolerances, lead times, failure rates, and margins — will remain a boutique curiosity.

And, the inverse is also true. When biology does begin to speak this language, it does something far more interesting than replace existing materials; it starts to reprogram what those materials can be.

This is where the notion of biotech as a “precision layer” becomes so compelling. Instead of imagining a future in which everything is grown, we can imagine a future in which growth is strategically deployed: to bind, to repair, to reinforce, to adapt, to sense, to respond. Enzymes already do this in garment care. Probiotics already do this in cleaning systems, and bacterial cellulose, mycelium, and fermentation proteins can do this in structural materials. The revolution, perhaps, is not in making everything alive; instead, It is in letting aliveness infiltrate systems that have been dead for a very long time.

Venture capital, for a time, was intoxicated by the idea of the “category killer” biomaterial — the leather replacement, the plastic replacement, the cotton replacement. Replacement is an extraordinarily expensive ambition, and it requires technical success, and geopolitical, logistical, and cultural realignment. The quieter, more durable path is substitution by degrees: incremental adoption, hybrid products, partial integrations that accumulate into systemic change. Seen this way, the current wave of restructurings, partnerships, and strategic narrowing across the biomaterials sector is a really critical phase change, as we watch the field move from adolescence into adulthood.

For fashion, this implies a future that will not be marked by a single miraculous material, but by a slow, compounding shift in how materials are made, finished, cared for, and understood. The most important biotech innovations of the next decade may not even be visible to consumers; perhaps they will live in binders, coatings, finishes, repair systems, and process chemistry — in the middle layers of production where most of the industry’s true environmental impact actually resides.

The first generation of bio-fabrication taught us how hard this is. The second generation is teaching us how it might actually work. In the end, this is a much more interesting and hopeful story than replacement ever was.