As a part of this initiative calyxt Entered into a research collaboration with a leading global food ingredient manufacturer based in Asia to develop an improved soybean capable of producing an oil as a sustainable commercial alternative to palm oil.
Calyxt, Inc. a plant-based synthetic biotechnology company, today announced the launch of a strategic initiative that will focus the Company on engineering synthetic biology solutions for a diversified base of customers across an expanded group of end markets including the nutraceutical, cosmeceutical, pharmaceutical, advanced materials, and chemical industries.
Central to the strategy is the integration of the Company’s proprietary technology platform, PlantSpring, with its newly commissioned pilot bioreactor, the BioFactory, which together will enable Calyxt to rapidly prototype and produce complex plant-derived compounds without the need for outdoor cropping systems. The Company estimates that, aided by machine learning and artificial intelligence, it will be able to take a customer’s molecule need through Calyxt’s design, engineering, verification, and pilot-level production process within a 36-month period, with commercial scale production to commence thereafter. The final output, based upon the engineering of plant metabolism to mass produce plant-based compounds, is designed to provide customers across industries a safe and more sustainable supply of these compounds for use in a myriad of products and manufacturing processes.
“By leveraging our proprietary PlantSpring technology platform with our newly commissioned pilot bioreactor, the BioFactory, Calyxt has the pieces in place to advance plant-based synthetic biology solutions for important target customers and end markets to help those groups produce more sustainable products toward meeting their corporate sustainability targets,” said Michael A. Carr, President and Chief Executive Officer of Calyxt. “These new potential customers include large corporations within such industries as nutraceuticals, cosmeceuticals, personal care, and pharmaceuticals, as well as companies that manufacture advanced materials and chemicals.”
Mr. Carr added: “Through our engineering of the metabolism of plants, Calyxt unlocks plants’ ability to exponentially multiply production of finite biomolecules into large quantities, enabled within a bioreactor that does not use fermentation or farmland. As a result, Calyxt offers customers the opportunity to target a broad range of plant biomolecules and applications produced through a highly sustainable process, and within a highly efficient timeframe aided by our emerging machine learning and artificial intelligence toolkit. Our efforts are already underway to market our expanded offerings to new target customers.”
PlantSpring Technology Platform: Built on a Decade of Engineering Experience
The Company’s technology platform, newly named PlantSpring, has been built on Calyxt’s experience of more than a decade engineering plant metabolism, its proprietary systems, its tools and technologies, and an expanding set of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. This licensable platform has powered the Calyxt innovation engine, previously focused primarily on the agriculture end market. Together with the BioFactory, this platform opens a wide array of new end markets to Calyxt.
The platform delivers innovation through an efficient process from laboratory to pilot, which includes identification of breakthrough molecules based on customer needs and design strategies to reprogram host cells; engineering of plant cell metabolism to optimally produce targeted molecules; and production of target molecules at pilot scale. Calyxt has developed early-stage artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in PlantSpring, which enable learning and adaptation from knowledge gained from past activity and can be combined with predictive analytics to rapidly prototype and provide feedback, accelerating the time from design to pilot and de-risking the commercial scale-up phase. As a result, Calyxt believes it can develop engineered biomolecules in plants for customers at faster speeds than its competitors in the synthetic biology industry. Calyxt expects to continue to develop its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities end-to-end across the PlantSpring platform and the BioFactory and anticipates this augmentation to continue to drive down development timeframes.
