10.10.23-Showcase-Seoul-Capra_Bioscience

ANDREW MAGYAR: Good afternoon. It's really great to be here at LG Science Park today. So I started Capra Biosciences in 2020 with my co-founder, Elizabeth Onderko, who is Capra's CEO. And really, in some ways the origins of Capra go all the way back to when I was at MIT.

So I did my PhD in materials science in 2009, finishing in 2009. And during this time, really the synthetic biology revolution was happening, really centered at MIT, so thinking about how you engineer organisms to make products. And fast forward back to 2020, my co-founder and I were talking about, OK, looking at the world around us, why are there not more of the products that we use in daily life that are actually being produced by biology?

And really the challenge we saw here is that while we could do all of these amazing things with the biology, we hadn't advanced the hardware, the bioreactors that we use to actually produce the chemicals. And so that's really what Capra Biosciences is focused on.

So chemicals are a really big industry, so, you know, $4.7 trillion globally in terms of basically the economic impact. But also they contribute a large amount to greenhouse gas emissions. And so when we're trying to think about how do we disrupt a really big industry like this, we kind of have to think about where we're going to get, say, the carbon that's going to replace all of the carbon that's coming from petroleum.

And so, you know, petrochemicals, there's about 650 million metric tons of these that are produced every year. And if we think about how a lot of biotechnology is tackling this problem today, they're looking at sugars to replace this. And there's only about 100 million metric tons of sugar produced every year. So that it's really sort of a scale imbalance.

On the other hand, there's about 930 million metric tons of food waste. And this itself is a big problem for climate change. So there's significant greenhouse gas emissions from food waste itself, from the methane when it's put into a landfill. And so at Capra, we really look at these two almost being a solution for each other, where if we can take food waste and use biotechnology to convert this into the new chemicals that we need today, it's really a tremendous opportunity.

And to do this, again, we view bioreactor technology as being an important part of that story. So how does Capra's bioreactor technology work? So it really all starts with the combination of a unique microorganism, so a marine bacterium, and the hardware, so we think that really this interdisciplinary interface. So much like some of the secret behind a lot of these innovation ecosystems is that you have different parts of LG coming together and interfacing with each other, we have engineers and biologists working together at Capra and designing on the whole.

And so we have this organism with unique properties, and we're designing a modular reactor to take advantage of those, and to really change the process of biomanufacturing. So basically how it works is you'll see two columns here. There's a taller column and a shorter column.

It's a continuous manufacturing process. And we basically feed the organism feedstocks. So this could be anaerobically digested food waste. It could be brewery waste, something like this. And then we leverage this really unique property of the organism, that it's actually tolerant to organic solvents.

So we're able to basically put it through an organic solvent, extract the product, and the organism survives. So we just continuously recycle. We feed the organism. We extract the product.

And then we couple it into downstream processing, all on this modular skid. And when all of this comes together, it means that we have a technology that has significantly better economics for infrastructure than current biomanufacturing. So we don't have to have a lot of the expenses that come with making hydrophobic ingredients in particular today.

Our first product is retinol. So I didn't actually know the story about LG and how this giant company started with a face cream. So it's actually, you know, next time we have an investor that says to us like, well, this is a small market to begin with, I'm definitely going to give the example of LG. So right now we're scaling up with retinol.

So most retinol today is made from natural gas. And while it's a vitamin, it's a natural product. So we see this as a really great market to start out with. And we're currently scaling to a metric ton per year pilot that we'll be building in the next year. We have actually LOIs now that signal interest in twofold are our entire pilot capacity.

That's really just the start, though. Much like LG has grown enormously, we have a whole suite of products that we're looking at. So some of these are actives, other vitamins, things that can be used as sun protectants, as well as emollients. We've learned from conversations with customers in the cosmetic space that emollients are something that there are really great needs for non-petroleum alternatives.

And from there, much bigger markets. So aviation and industrial lubricants and intermediate. So these intermediates could be things like BTX, benzene, toluene, and xylene replacements. So aromatic compounds that companies like LG can use to make other products.

So what we're looking for is relationships to help us expand our product pipeline, or to produce products that you're looking to make more sustainably. Right now in Korea, we have investment from GS Futures, which is the US-based venture arm of the GS Group. And actually I'm going to be going down and visiting one of their big biodiesel facilities down in Yaizu after this conference. So we can actually use glycerol from biodiesel plants as a feedstock in our process as well.

As I mentioned, for partnerships, we're really interested in developing sustainable replacements in collaboration with other companies. So it's going to be really challenging for us completely on our own to go out and build the future of sustainable chemicals. And we're also super-excited to interface with companies that may have interest in buying our retinol.

Please find me out at the booth later. And I look forward to meeting all of you and talking further. Thank you very much.