About Advanced BioManufacturing

Advanced BioManufacturing

Advanced BioManufacturing (ABM) is an international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the science, technology and applications of biomanufacturing. Based in Tianjin, China, it is jointly sponsored by the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the State Key Laboratory of Engineering Biology for Low-Carbon Manufacturing. The journal is published in English as an open-access title hosted on ScienceDirect, with publishing services provided by Elsevier on behalf of KeAi Communications. Its stated vision is to become a leading international flagship journal in the field of biomanufacturing, and its online ISSN is 3118-0213, with copyright held by the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology.

Identity, sponsorship and publishing model

The journal's sponsorship is central to its identity. Its two sponsors are both based in Tianjin: the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology (TIB), a research institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the State Key Laboratory of Engineering Biology for Low-Carbon Manufacturing, one of the national-level innovation platforms hosted at the institute. Copyright in the journal is held by the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, while day-to-day publishing services are provided by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. That arrangement is typical of the KeAi portfolio: the sponsoring institution retains ownership and editorial direction, while KeAi and Elsevier provide the submission system, production workflow and global distribution through ScienceDirect. Because the journal is open access, every published article is immediately and permanently free for anyone to read and download, which the sponsors present as part of the journal's ambition to serve an international readership rather than only a domestic one.

Aims: a flagship for biomanufacturing

In its own aims and scope statement, Advanced BioManufacturing says it focuses on frontier research in synthetic biology, engineering biology and biomanufacturing. It encourages theoretical innovation and interdisciplinary integration, and it promotes what it calls the deep coupling of technological advances with diverse application scenarios. The journal explicitly links that mission to two larger goals: supporting the development of the bioeconomy and supporting the sustainable progress of human society. Those aims explain the breadth of the title. Biomanufacturing — the use of engineered living systems, enzymes and cell factories to make chemicals, materials, fuels, foods and medicines — sits at the meeting point of biology, chemistry, engineering and data science, and the journal is designed to publish across that whole meeting point rather than within a single sub-discipline. Its self-description as a would-be flagship journal signals that it intends to publish agenda-setting work, including reviews and perspectives, alongside original research.

Scope: the nine core areas

The journal lists nine core areas of interest. The first is theoretical innovations and foundational technologies in synthetic biology, covering the basic science on which engineered production systems depend. The second is data science and intelligent design for biomanufacturing, reflecting the growing role of computation, modelling and artificial intelligence in designing strains and processes. The third is process engineering and equipment technologies for biomanufacturing, the scale-up and hardware side of the field. The fourth is biocatalysis and in vitro synthetic biology, including cell-free and enzyme-based production systems. The fifth is chassis engineering and cell factory construction — the design of the microbial or cellular hosts that do the manufacturing. The remaining four areas are organised by application: industrial biomanufacturing, agricultural biomanufacturing, pharmaceutical biomanufacturing, and, finally, safety assessment and standardisation of biomanufacturing. Taken together, the nine areas trace a complete pipeline from foundational theory, through design and process engineering, to sector applications and the safety and standards work needed for real-world deployment.

Article types and readership

Advanced BioManufacturing welcomes four article types: Original Research Articles, Reviews, Perspectives and Short Communications. That mix is deliberate. Research articles report new experimental and engineering results; reviews consolidate fast-moving sub-fields such as cell factory design or biocatalysis; perspectives allow leading researchers to set out arguments about where biomanufacturing should go next; and short communications provide a route for brief, urgent findings. The intended readership follows from the scope: synthetic biologists and metabolic engineers, bioprocess and fermentation engineers, biocatalysis specialists, data scientists working on biological design, and researchers and practitioners in the pharmaceutical, agricultural and industrial biotechnology sectors. Because the journal is in English and distributed on ScienceDirect, that readership is explicitly international, even though the journal's institutional home and sponsorship are Chinese.

The sponsor: Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology

The Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology was jointly established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Tianjin Municipal People's Government, coming into existence on 29 November 2012. Its founding concept, in the institute's own words, is "creating cell factories to develop biological economy", and its work is directed at core and disruptive technologies for the bioindustry in response to demands for green, low-carbon and sustainable development. The institute hosts several national-level platforms, including the National Key Laboratory of Engineering Biology for Low-Carbon Manufacturing — the journal's co-sponsor, also rendered as the State Key Laboratory of Engineering Biology for Low-Carbon Manufacturing — the National Center of Technology Innovation for Synthetic Biology, and the National Research Center of Industrial Enzymes. A journal sponsored by this institute therefore draws directly on one of China's principal concentrations of industrial biotechnology research, and its editorial subject matter mirrors the institute's research programme unusually closely.

Research context behind the journal

The institute's documented achievements illustrate the kind of research the journal exists to publish. In 2021, TIB researchers designed a novel carbon dioxide fixation and conversion pathway and achieved the artificial biosynthesis of starch from carbon dioxide for the first time — a result widely reported as a landmark in biomanufacturing. The institute has since built on that work through its carbon dioxide fixation and bioconversion research, including in vitro biotransformation systems that convert methanol into sugars such as sucrose without relying on crop cultivation. TIB is also the host institute of the National Technology Innovation Center of Synthetic Biology, described as the third National Technology Innovation Center in China and the only one devoted to biotechnology, and it has run an International Training Course on Industrial Synthetic Biotechnology since 2019, training young scientists from multiple countries. This combination — national platforms, internationally visible breakthroughs and training activity — is the research ecosystem from which Advanced BioManufacturing recruits its editors, authors and reviewers.

KeAi and the ScienceDirect platform

KeAi Communications, the journal's publishing partner, is a Beijing-based joint venture co-founded by China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier. Repurposed as an open-access journal publishing service provider in 2013, KeAi has grown a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals across scientific disciplines, all of them open access. KeAi leverages its parent companies' capabilities, including ScienceDirect hosting, Editorial Manager submission handling, data analytics and production services. For a new journal, that infrastructure matters practically: manuscripts are submitted and peer-reviewed through established Elsevier systems, articles receive DOIs in the journal's own series — ABM articles carry the prefix 10.1016/j.abm — and published content is discoverable alongside Elsevier's wider catalogue, which KeAi notes reaches more than 17 million unique ScienceDirect visitors a month. The journal's 2026-dated articles and copyright line confirm it as a newly launched title building its first volumes within that system.

Position in the field and outlook

Advanced BioManufacturing enters a field in which China holds a distinctive position: the sponsors and their community work in a country whose fermentation capacity and synthetic-biology investment are among the largest in the world, and whose national platforms for synthetic biology and industrial enzymes are concentrated in Tianjin. A dedicated, English-language, open-access journal sponsored by the field's national laboratory gives that community a venue of its own for the full biomanufacturing pipeline — theory, intelligent design, process engineering, biocatalysis, cell factories, and industrial, agricultural and pharmaceutical applications, together with safety and standardisation. Its success will depend on the normal tests for a new journal: attracting strong international submissions beyond its home institution, maintaining rigorous peer review, and earning indexing and citation standing over its first volumes. On the evidence of its sponsorship, scope and publishing infrastructure, it has been set up explicitly to attempt exactly that, with the stated ambition of becoming the field's international flagship.