9.26.23-Sustainability-Capra-Biosciences

MARK POOLE: Hello. So my name is Mark Poole. I'm the director of R&D at Capra Biosciences. I'm here to talk to you today about how Capra is making sustainable chemicals and carbon-negative chemicals for everyday life.

So if you are here-- sorry. So if you were here, you'd probably realize that two of the largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions are food waste and petrochemical production. Food waste, if you don't know, it produces around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while petrochemical production produces around 6%. Well, since we can't stop eating food, and we need a lot of those chemicals that are produced in the petrochemical industry for various other industries, we need to come up with a solution. We at Capra believe that biotechnology can provide that solution.

So we at Capra realized that, one, these two problems can solve each other. So a lot of the chemicals that are produced in the petrochemical industry today can actually be produced by biology. So if we can produce them sustainably with biology, we can eliminate those carbon costs. In addition, if we can use food waste as our feedstock, we can also eliminate the feedstock problem.

So more specifically, what is our technology? So Capra has developed a-- quite simply, we produce high-value chemicals with a sustainable feedstock. We have a novel continuous biofilm reactor system that combines fermentation and extraction in one unit. This modular system also allows us to scale up quite quickly. And it also allows us to have fine-tuned control over each part of the process, similar to what's done in wastewater treatment, which is one of the most proven continuous processes today. In addition, the modular scaling allows-- all of these things together allow us to have a system that is much less capital intensive than other typical approaches.

So our first initial use case is retinol. It's a common cosmetic ingredient. It is, in case you didn't know, primarily produced with petrochemicals today. There is a big drive to actually produce this in a sustainable manner, and that's what we are doing at Capra. Our product is completely bio-based. It's a drop-in replacement in current formulations. We've already sent out samples to various different customers across the board. And we're scaling to one metric ton per year at this moment. We also have multiple letters of interest in our entire pilot plant facility.

In addition to retinol, we also are interested in other actives. We've already demonstrated production of retinal and phytoene, which are in the same class. We also can produce emollients, which are good bridge molecules for ultimately larger markets of lubricants and chemical intermediates. Those last two specifically can attribute to a huge amount of carbon offsets if produced biologically.

We have a lot of current collaborators across the industry right now. We are partnered with Boston University on a big bio-made project, which we're really excited about, with some really cutting edge sensors that we're producing. And Next Rung Technologies is helping us with our bio reactor and making it more efficient. We also have a couple of chemical companies that are US-based that we are engaging with and have interests in different sustainable chemicals.

We also are a little bit international. We are engaged with a couple of Japanese companies as well on some R&D deals. And as I just mentioned, we're delivering a lot of our samples to cosmetics brands right now.

So that's our technology. We are interested today if any chemical industry businesses are interested in sustainable products and building any sustainable ingredients. Also, if you have any-- if there are any cosmetic companies out there that you're interested in our products, let us know. Thank you.

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CATARINA MADEIRA: Thank you, Mark, and to all entrepreneurs for the fantastic presentations. Now, we're going to break for lunch. Please make sure to visit them at their booths to learn more about their companies and explore collaborations with them. And we'll be back at 2:30. Thank you.