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In the 80’s the cell factory concept was fully established through the intensive public and private investment. The factories of cells have been exploited for the controlled production of interest for food, pharma and biotech industries.
The principle of controlled biological production as a convenient source of difficult to obtain molecules deeply penetrated the industrial tissue, soon becoming a widespread platform aiming at cost effective large production.

The first generation which was mainly composed from bacterium Escherichia coli ant Saccharomyces cerevisae were soon replaced by engineered variants. Resulting from the application of untargeted mutagenesis and phenotypic selection, conventional genetic modification, and by systems metabolic engineering that integrates metabolic engineering with systems biology and synthetic biology. New strains had much enhanced performance and have been progressively developed.

Mammalian and insect cells have been used for production of high quality proteins and other microbial species. On the other hand a set of food grade lactic acid bacteria are under development as emerging platforms in food microbiology and also as a new source of metabolites and proteins.

The physiological diversity of the microbial world offers an intricacy of biosynthetic pathways from which novel bio-products, including nano- or micro-structured. Still, many substances and materials of industrial interest are nowadays produced by chemical synthesis, and the number of proteins approved for therapeutic use hardly reaches 200, a figure much lower than that initially presumed. However, both environmental concerns and medical and industrial needs strongly push towards a fully sustainable bio-production of a larger spectrum of substances.

Then some questions arise like how much limited is the economic feasibility of microbial production or have the cell factories reached a plateau in their development.

Systems metabolic engineering offers a set of methodological and strategic tools for the design and
optimization of metabolic and gene regulatory networks for the efficient production of chemicals and materials from plastics to high value materials.
Furthermore, creation of new metabolic pathways and fine tuning of the existing ones have become possible.