10.5.23-Showcase-Tokyo-Capra_Bioscience

ANDREW MAGYAR: It's really my pleasure to be here in Tokyo today. I had an opportunity to explore a little last night, and it's really an amazing city,

So I started my PhD in Material Science in 2003, which was sort of a very different time in the Kendall Square area that we talked about. And one of the things that was happening in this time frame is that really synthetic biology was taking off. And so the founders of Ginkgo Bioworks, which is one of the biggest synthetic biology companies in the US, were at MIT at the same time I was.

So if you fast-forward to 2020 now, my co-founder and I were thinking a lot about the synthetic biology industry and really the challenges to make synthetic biology into something that was commercially relevant and important. And one of the things that really came out to us is the need for new hardware technologies to make chemicals. So what we're doing at Capra Biosciences is making new hardware to make chemicals using biotechnology.

So chemicals are a really huge industry. So it's as much as a $4.7 trillion a year industry. And it's something that's really poised for disruption. There haven't been a huge amount of innovation in the chemicals industry in a long time. And we see biotechnology as presenting this opportunity, not just to make sustainable chemicals, but to also make cheaper and higher performance materials. And of course, in the process of doing this, reducing greenhouse gas emissions substantially.

One of the things we have to think about when we're building a new system for making chemicals using biotechnology is, where is this carbon going to come from? And so a lot of the technologies out there today are focused on sugar and other sorts of feedstocks like that. And one of the challenges there is that there's really a mismatch between the amount of available sugar and the amount of chemicals that are produced.

So there's about 100 million metric tons of sugar produced every year. And most of that goes to food. And if you look at how many petrochemicals there are, that's 650 million metric tons. So there's this sort of a mismatch here.

Something that is on the scale, and something that's really contributing to greenhouse gas emissions today, is food waste. So there's about 930 million metric tons of food waste produced globally annually. And you can see that this is something that's on this similar scale to petrochemicals.

And so what we're aiming to do at Capra is sort of turn these two problems into a common solution. So use food waste in our bioreactor technology to make chemicals. How are we doing that?

So we have a new kind of continuous flow bioreactor technology that's modular and uses a unique marine microorganism that we engineer to produce chemicals. So we leverage a couple of really special properties of this microorganism that allows us to build our technology more like a chemical manufacturing facility, in a lot of ways, than sort of traditional fermentation.

And so how that works is we basically are continuously feeding our organism. So you see here on the photograph, there are two columns. The taller column is where we grow the organism. And then that circulates into the smaller column where we extract our product using organic solvents.

So one of the really special features about this organism is that it can tolerate organic solvents. And so this allows us to basically remove the product without killing the microorganism. And this can dramatically improve the overall scalability and reduce downstream processing for making chemicals.

As I mentioned, our technology is modular. So we basically have these reactor skids that will consist of 10 growth columns and one extractor column. And we integrate, on each of these skids nanofiltration, to make a refined product. So with all of these features combined, we're able to significantly reduce infrastructure costs over traditional fermentation.

And a lot of this comes from this reduced downstream processing. So unlike traditional biomanufacturing, where, oftentimes, scaling the technology is unpredictable, with our reactors, because we're simply multiplexing many of these individual units, we have much more consistent scaling.

Our initial use case is retinol. So retinol of course, is a very commonly used cosmetic ingredient. And it's an interesting initial product because, today, while it's a natural ingredient, it's vitamin A, it's primarily produced from natural gas.

This is really a great use case because there's a lot of interest today in more sustainable solutions in the personal care industry. We currently are scaling to a metric ton per year pilot production and have LOIs signaling interest for actually now 2 times our total pilot capacity.

It's really just the first ingredient in a whole pipeline of products. So our technology really is best suited for hydrophobic ingredients. And we're looking at a number of different active ingredients, including alternative types of retinol as well as things like phytoene that can be UV blockers.

From there, we're moving into emollients, lubricants, and intermediates. So the intermediate markets are particularly interesting. These are replacements for things like benzene, toluene, and xylene, that are sort of the common building blocks in today's chemical industry. This has the potential to allow chemical companies to start with sustainable precursors, but use a lot of the existing infrastructure that they've already built up.

Our strategy in Japan is to develop relationships with manufacturers to have manufacturing as a service. So basically, we can come locate on a facility and produce raw materials from our waste-based feedstocks and sort of sell chemicals directly into the pipelines for chemical companies.

We currently have investment from GS Futures, which is the US-based venture arm of the Korean GS Group. And we're engaged with multiple Japanese chemical companies on potential R&D partnerships for new ingredients.

We'd really love to talk with any of the people out there that are interested in finding sustainable alternatives for chemicals they have today or that have interest in partnering with us on the retinol or other of the products that we have currently in our pipeline. I look forward to meeting you out in the session later today. Thank you very much.