Two years ago, Prolific Machines unveiled its technology for a unique manufacturing approach to grow cells for industries, including cultivated meat.
In addition, cell growth is hard to optimize because it’s not in a format that machines can understand.
“For the last few decades, the way that we’ve been controlling cells is with molecules,” Kent said.
We add these molecules into the bioreactors and hope for the best.”Prolific Machines’ protein manufacturing bioreactor (Image credit: Prolific Machines) Image Credits: Prolific Machines /Prolific Machines believes it has a way of transitioning away from these molecules to something better: light.
It includes convertible notes and brings Prolific Machines’ total funding to date to $86.5 million.
Last year, Salesforce, the company best known for its cloud sales support software (and Slack), spearheaded a project called ProGen to design proteins using generative AI.
“Many drugs — enzymes and antibodies, for example — consist of proteins,” Madani said.
Fed into a generative AI model, data about proteins can be used to predict entirely new proteins with novel functions.
Other companies and research groups have demonstrated viable ways in which generative AI can be used to predict proteins.
And DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, has a system called AlphaFold that predicts complete protein structures, achieving speed and accuracy far surpassing older, less complex algorithmic methods.
Simply put, Tierra is enabling customers to order proteins online that can make anything from antibodies to growth factor for a food product.
Its reagents are combined with the customer’s protein sequences, and put into a robotic platform to create the proteins.
We profiled Tierra Biosciences in 2018 after it rebranded from Synvitrobio and raised $2.6 million in new financing.
Prior to joining the company, Nemzek was chief commercial officer at Synthego Corp. where he led the commercial expansion and growth of its CRISPR genome engineering business.
The round had participation from new and existing investors, including Prosus Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), Hillspire, Freeflow Ventures, Creative Ventures and Social Capital.
One of the challenges for alternative proteins, particularly plant-based, is developing a product that mimics the taste of traditional meat.
The company is making “hybrid meat, dairy and eggs” it says, by combining traditional animal proteins with plant-based ingredients.
“We use our meat proteins, oils, water and spices to get to our formulation, and that allows us to create a clean-label product,” Even told TechCrunch.
Our meat proteins cook in the same manner, the same temperature range, etc.
Signed contractsAt two years old, Ingrediome is still pretty early, and it will be at least two more years before it can manufacturer enough product to sell to traditional meat companies.
While the food tech investment sector figured itself out last year, Miruku, a New Zealand-based food tech company, was busy getting ahead of molecular farming technology.
Since the seed round, the company made advancements in its proprietary dairy seed system.
Initially, Miruku focused on programming plants to produce dairy proteins that could be extracted from seeds.
That approach has since expanded to leverage interactions between recombinant dairy casein and native plant proteins, with or without improved fatty acid profiles.
It was led by Motion Capital and included seed round investor Movac and new investor NZVC.
Isomorphic Labs, the London-based, drug discovery-focused spin-out of Google AI R&D division DeepMind, today announced that it’s entered into strategic partnerships with two pharmaceutical giants, Eli Lilly and Novartis, to apply AI to discover new medications to treat diseases.
Isomorphic will receive $45 million upfront from Eli Lilly and potentially up to $1.7 billion based on performance milestones, excluding royalties.
Researchers recently used AlphaFold to design and synthesize a potential drug to treat hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common type of primary liver cancer.
The latest version of AlphaFold can generate predictions for nearly all molecules in the Protein Data Bank, the world’s largest open access database of biological molecules, DeepMind announced in late October.
Already, Isomorphic is applying the new AlphaFold model, which it co-designed with DeepMind, to therapeutic drug design, helping to characterize different types of molecular structures important for treating disease.
