10.3.23-Showcase-Osaka-Capra_Bioscience

ANDREW MAGYAR: Hi, it's great to be here. Thank you to Takeda for hosting us. I'm Andrew Magyer, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Capra Biosciences. So we are a chemical company that is using waste-based carbon sources to make chemicals more sustainably. I started Capra with my co-founder and our CEO Liz Onderko in 2020, right before the pandemic.

And we've really grown a lot since then. And I'm excited to share with you what we've built. Here we go. So we talked a little bit earlier here about disruption and about how you need to basically build things, and in real estate create ecosystems to move things forward.

The chemical industry is someplace that is really ripe for disruption and ripe for innovation. It's a huge industry. There's almost $4.7 trillion of revenue going into the chemical industry today. And it's also a major contributor to climate change.

So there's about five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions per year from the petrochemical industry. At Capra, we look at this as a solution that can be solved while solving something else as well. So another big contributor to climate change is actually food waste.

So much of the food waste in the world is put into landfills, where it generates methane. So between petrochemicals and food waste, it contributes almost 13% or 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And so what if we could take this food waste and use it to make chemicals?

And so that's what we're looking to do at Capra. And one of the things that in our view is really important to be able to achieve this is new bioreactor technology. So we're using biology to make chemicals from waste-based carbon.

So how do we do this? So for years, biotechnology has used giant fermenters. So these are just really similar technologies to how beer is brewed. It hasn't changed in thousands of years. So I'm sure Takeda has some of these fermenters.

And there's been a lot of innovation, both in the types of organisms that we can use to do biology, as well as just chemical engineering and hardware. And so what we've developed at Capra is a continuous manufacturing process in a modular bioreactor. And this is enabled by our unique microorganism.

So one of the really special things about our microbe is that it can eat all sorts of different kinds of carbon. So many of the processes that are used today in biotechnology rely on yeast and E coli that just eat sugar. Our organism can eat a variety of different carbon sources. That allows us to take waste from distilleries or breweries, ethanol plants, or from anaerobically digested food waste, and put this into our bioreactor, with our organism that's engineered to make a specific product.

And then we couple this with our integrated downstream processing. So we have these bioreactor skids here. Oops, sorry. We have these bioreactor skids here that are modular. And so we just talked in the last presentation about data centers.

So we're based in Northern Virginia. And so in Northern Virginia, about 70% of global internet traffic goes through Virginia. We're surrounded by these data centers. And data centers don't have one giant hard drive. They have lots of little hard drives that cumulatively store all this information.

So we build up our technology modularly too. So we have these reactor units with a number of columns where we grow the organism. And then we circulate it through an extractor, which doesn't kill the organism and takes out hydrophobic chemicals that we produce, and then continuously circulates this process. And this dramatically reduces the overall cost of doing this type of manufacturing.

So based on our techno-economic models, we can see as much as a 75% reduction in production costs, versus current state of the art for fermentative technologies. And a lot of this comes from downstream processing. So typically in biotechnology, you're harvesting cells, you're drying them and extracting products.

We don't have to do that. It's all continuous on the bioreactor skid. Our initial use case is retinol. So this is a high value product that is of great interest in the cosmetic and personal care industry. Today it's made primarily from natural gas.

And it's something that we're really excited to be bringing to market in the next year. We currently have a letter of intent signaling interest for our entire pilot capacity that we'll be building. We from there are moving into a bunch of other markets in the personal care space, and then into industrial lubricants and even chemical intermediates. So these are replacements for things like benzene, xylene, toluene, sort of the core building blocks that chemical companies today use.

But we can build sustainable alternatives to those. Today we have a presence in both Japan and Korea. So we're looking to build manufacturing as a service relationship with large chemical companies. So for us to be able to move into future product spaces, it's really important for us to collaborate. So we can't go in alone and build customer relationships in the direct to consumer space.

We can't target every single chemical ourselves. So we really want to collaborate with companies. And in Japan particularly, the chemical industry is really phenomenal. We currently are engaged with a couple of Japanese chemical companies on potential R&D partnerships. Really, in our partnership asks, we're interested in working with companies that want sustainable replacements for petrochemical-derived ingredients.

We also are excited to find initial customers in cosmetics and personal care to help us bring our products to market. Thank you very much.