RD-11.15-16.2022-Capra-Biosciences

ANDREW MAGYAR: Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here today. I'm Andrew Magyar. I have my PhD in material science from MIT, and I'm the co-founder and chief technology officer of Capra Biosciences. At Capra Biosciences, we're revolutionizing chemical production using a new kind of bioreactor technology that I'll tell you a little bit about.

And so one of the things in biotechnology that people are really focused on is replacing petrochemicals. How can we make more sustainable solutions to not just fuels, but all of the chemicals that we use in daily life? Today, almost every one of you will touch in some way, somewhere, around 6,000 different chemicals that are coming from petroleum. And so as we're thinking about these solutions, we really need things that are going to scale.

And today, much of the products that are bio-based are coming from sugars or corn oils that have the potential to really negatively impact food availability and other things, as we try to scale these. Today, this is a big problem, so we need to think about how do we make big solutions to this?

And the way Capra is approaching this is with a new kind of bioreactor technology. Rather than using traditional fermentation to produce chemicals from sugars, our technology uses biofilms. So you might not think a lot about biofilms. They're things like dental plaque, or the bane of medical devices' existence. One of the big things about biofilms and why they're negative in a lot of applications is because they're persistent.

And so for our technology, we're able to use this persistence and robustness to use more complex carbon sources. So we can take things like anaerobically digested food waste or byproducts of agricultural processes and use those as the carbon input into our technology. And so our company has really codesigned this new organism with a new kind of bioreactor technology that enables continuous flow synthesis, and this makes the technology that is completely modular.

So on the left-hand-- is that left? I don't know. So the CAD image is of our reactor module when it's completed. So it will have 10 synthesis columns and one extraction column. So we have a proprietary extraction technology that integrates with our reactor. So we're basically able to continuously produce products and pull them out of the reactor in a really scalable way.

So we actually think about this technology a little bit like a data center. So when you go into a data center, you don't have one giant hard drive. You have lots of individual unit hard drives. This reactor unit is going to be a few hundred liters, and you'll basically be able to multiplex these to scale up product. And this allows you to build these sort of truly distributed manufacturing solutions all over the globe near these locally available feedstocks that can really help to improve supply chain reliability and security.

So our initial use case is retinol, which is a high value cosmetic ingredient. And it's something that's really interesting because it's made from petroleum today, even though it's actually a natural product. And we picked this, in part, because starting with products with a known consumer demand is really important when you're building a new technology solution. And so we're scaling over about the next year to pilot production, where we'll have about a metric ton of total production and have sales revenue by late 2023.

This is really a platform technology, though. We're currently also developing a number of lubricants for industrial applications. And this is something that addresses a much larger market, and we see as a really important product space for reducing energy requirements and making really important petroleum replacements.

So we're looking at partnerships across the chemical industry to help expand our product pipeline. Like I said, this is a platform technology. And we see this as really-- as we expand this product pipeline, we're able to move more quickly into different products and different spaces, particularly companies that work in the lubricant space for this product development, and then also initial customers in the cosmetics and personal care space, as well as chemical distributors. And we're excited to partner with companies across the globe.

So find me at the booth outside later. I appreciate all your time.