From Diagnostics to Dinner: How Skills from Medical Testing are Fueling the Future of Food
When Jenni Tommila first started working with raw materials for diagnostic tests, she never imagined that the same skillset would one day help her shape the future of food. But there she is—applying everything she learned from the world of diagnostics to the exciting frontier of precision fermentation in food industry. Now Jenni works at Solar Foods Oyj as Molecular Biology Specialist and explains her journey and transition from health industry to food technology. Let’s go!
In diagnostics, raw materials are the unsung heroes. We’re talking about antibodies, control antigens, enzymes, base matrices —components that need to be reliable, pure, and consistent, because people’s health depends on it. My job was to understand how these materials behaved, how to source or engineer them, and how to scale up their use while maintaining quality. That work was deeply technical, detail-oriented, and demanded a mindset focused on traceability, reproducibility, and biological function.
A bit over a year ago I saw a job advertisement that was just too fascinating to ignore. Fast-forward to today, and together with the HYDROCOW consortium I’m intensively working on engineering hydrogen oxidizing bacterium Xanthobacter sp. SoF1 to produce and secrete food-grade proteins in a system that is completely decoupled from agriculture. This may seem worlds away from medical diagnostics, but essentially both fields rely on microorganisms or cells to produce biological compounds in a safe, effective and consistent way. Growth properties, active metabolic pathways, media components—these are all crucial and need to be investigated for optimal production, not to even mention the twists and turns in downstream processing.
“And if there's one thing I’ve learned, it’s that no skill is ever wasted. Sometimes, what you mastered in one domain becomes your secret advantage in the next.”
So, I’ve found that the skills I developed in diagnostics—selecting the right raw materials, optimizing reactions, managing quality systems—translate beautifully into the new field of food technology. For example:
Sourcing critical components: Whether it’s a recombinant control protein or a commercial extraction kit, I know how to assess suppliers and build systems that ensure quality from batch to batch. Designing new experiments, building protocols and creating SOPs is part of the everyday work in R&D.
Scaling biological processes: Moving from lab-scale experiments to manufacturing is tricky. But diagnostics taught me how to plan for scale and validate early— small conditions changes can have huge and sometimes surprising effects. Also, in both fields cross-functional collaboration is equally important — successful production requires tight collaboration between R&D, manufacturing, QA/QC, supply chain, and regulatory affairs.
Building quality into biology: In diagnostics, there’s no room for variability and quality is of the utmost importance. That mindset is in general crucial in precision fermentation, where every input into the bioprocess must be tightly controlled to yield consistent results. In R&D work orientation to detail helps to build hypothesis and draw conclusions in a life of a non-model organism which is not trivial. Laboratory diligence and carefulness, traceability and proper documentation ensure traceability and reliability of the results. Products must finally be compliant with relevant standards which gives guidelines how everyday work is executed. Quality coupled with curious and inventive mindset make a perfect match.
Ultimately, I see both fields as part of a larger story: how biology, when harnessed thoughtfully, can solve big problems. In diagnostics, we use biology to detect disease earlier and more accurately. In food industry, we use it to create a more sustainable, ethical food system.
It’s been a surprising journey—but also a logical one considering my desire to have an impact to global wellbeing and enthusiasm towards unravelling the mysteries of molecular biology. And if there's one thing I’ve learned, it’s that no skill is ever wasted. Sometimes, what you mastered in one domain becomes your secret advantage in the next.
Jenni Tommila
Molecular Biology Specialist, Solar Foods Oyj