Amyris the industrial bioscience company, announced an expansion project to add a dedicated flavors and fragrances manufacturing unit to its Brotas industrial fermentation complex in Brazil. This planned expansion enables the company to meet demand for contracted flavors and fragrances molecules for its collaboration partners.

The expansion provides for focused use of the current Brotas industrial fermentation capacity to supply Amyris's current partners and collaborators based on projected demand for Biofene (Amyris-branded farnesene) serving the polymers, nutraceuticals and solvents markets through 2020.

Expected demand will require new farnesene manufacturing capacity beyond the company's current capacity at its Brotas plant. Amyris is in active discussions with current collaborators and partners to provide financing for the project, with construction expected to start in the second half of 2016.

"After several years of application and product development activities in collaboration with our strategic partners, we've now transitioned to the commercialization phase of many applications," said John Melo, Amyris President & CEO. "We are very fortunate that many of our partnerships are focused on solving supply chain challenges by replacing current raw material sources with lower-cost, better-performing, sustainably sourced material. This is enabling us to grow our supply of farnesene into these markets at a faster rate than we expected."

Continued Melo, "We expect to have five or more high performance fragrance molecules scaled as we complete 2016 and this, combined with strong farnesene demand, has enabled us to initiate a project for a dedicated flavors & fragrances operation at Brotas. We are very excited for our Brazilian operation as this will result in our plant becoming one of the largest providers of flavors and fragrances ingredients to the world as we continue to execute and deliver contracted molecules to our partners. This would not be possible without the excellent track record of our manufacturing and engineering teams' ability to meet or exceed our partners' manufacturing requirements at large scale."