Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BREEDER (Adaptative laboratory experiment at industrial scale)

Teaser

By 2050, there will be 10 billion humans on earth. In a context of climate change and resources getting scarce, we must adopt sustainable alternatives to attend our essential needs. Living cells, and notably micro-organisms, have a great potential to tackle that challenge...

Summary

By 2050, there will be 10 billion humans on earth. In a context of climate change and resources getting scarce, we must adopt sustainable alternatives to attend our essential needs. Living cells, and notably micro-organisms, have a great potential to tackle that challenge. However, living systems are complex and difficult to engineer. There exist no predictive model for them. Besides, because of regulation or end-user acceptance, GMO are banned for certain applications, which makes impossible the use of certain techniques for the engineering of microbial cells.
Adaptive evolution harnesses natural selection and ca serve as a powerful driving force to reduce costs and delay in biotechnology R&D. As living systems must adapt to changing environment, a progressive change in the context of proliferation can be used to direct evolution towards industrial needs.
Altar has developed an unique technology for automated cultivation of microbial populations in conditions controlled by algorithms. Cultivation conditions are automatically adjusted to the actual adaptation of the microbial population. This technology has proven track record in industrial and academic projects over the last years.
The overall objectives include the development of novel selection regimes, the scaling-up of Altar\'s service activities and the integration of genomic characterization in order to complete the offer portfolio.

Work performed

Regarding technical feasibility, a refactored cultivation module was designed, constructed and validated. The purpose of refactoring the cultivation module is twofold: 1/ accelerate the evolution by implementing advanced selection protocolsand allowing for pluggable features such as automated mutagenesis or fluidic coupling to third party devices to enrich our value proposition; 2/ enable industrial scale-up by easing the integration in a production platform, and by lowering mean downtime and operational costs.
The refactored cultivation module has been prototyped and validated. It is now ready to support the implementation of advanced proprietary selection protocols involving the coupling of multiple cultivation modules. Downtime and maintenance costs will be reduced thanks to the improved monitoring of modules and ease of part replacements. The cost of ownership has been kept in line with the current design despite of the added features and sensors, and assembly time is reduced by 50%.
Altar has established contact with two companies specialized in industrialization and manufacturing of special-purpose machines and obtained from them general recommendations, guidance, timing and budgets.

As for commercial feasibility, an opportunity study was conducted by Altar with the support of company specialized in innovation and development of new businesses. According to the persons interviewed during the study, Altar technology is of general interest for all market segments covered (energy, health, cosmetics, feed, food, agronomy), whereas the food industry demonstrated to be the most receptive because Altar technology could be used to develop no-GMO strains. The size of the market was estimated to approximately 7M€ for the food industry only.
The study has led to a series a different recommendations regarding business model, pricing, addition of external services, some of which having been already taken into account by Altar during the period covered by the report.
Whereas the sequencing of evolved strains is usually performed by Altar\'s customers, it could be useful to add this service to Altar\'s portfolio. In addition to business opportunity, this would create valuable information to continuously improve Altar\'s technology. During the period, Altar had in-depth discussions with sequencing equipment manufacturers, bioinformatic developers, sequencing subcontractors and public research institutes having proprietary bioinformatic pipelines in order to analyse the different alternatives in terms of technology and distribution between outsourcing and internalization.

The business plan was revised on the basis of learnings obtained during the project.Sales’ revenues are expected to originate from the different offers described above and to generate approx. 17.7 M€ revenues by 2024, generating an EBITDA close to 40% by this year in a scenario where approximately 75% of BREEDER’s capacity is sold.

Final results

The refactored module has been duplicated and can now be used to implement the novel selection protocols. Experimental data will be generated soon that will serve for the patent application.
By 2024, the company is expected to hire 37 persons. It will have supported over 100 academic and industrial projects aiming at developing sustainable solutions for essential needs : alternative proteins, health (novel antibiotics and probiotics), biological alternatives to pesticides and fertilizers (biostimulation and biocontrol), bio based chemicals, biofuels and materials.
The company will offer preferential conditions to academic institutions to foster Research and Development in Europe and the sharing of information which will significantly contribute to knowledge on living systems and accelerate the development of synthetic and industrial biotechnology. This will be achieved by scaling-up a business which is currently profitable and that will return to profitability already by 2023.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.altar.bio/ecosystem/.