Disruptive platform for sustainable and low-cost amino acid production

Serine and Cysteine are two commercially important AAs. However, both present severe limitations regarding their production’s environmental and economic sustainability, which limits their market potential and causing a large negative environmental impact. Supported by advanced patented-metabolic engineering and synthetic biology approaches Cysbio developed a bio-based platform for AA production - AA-Platform - with an unprecedented environmental and economic performance. Through the design of proprietary cell factories (Escherichia coli), Cysbio was able to combine, balance and tune the different metabolic pathways involved in Ser production. The accomplishment of the AA-platform performance is also due to: i) the sustainable and cost-efficient bioconversion of Ser into Cys; ii) efficient and multi-sourced (i.e. can use sources of glucose, maltose or glycerol with limited impact on process’s efficiency); and iii) sustainable upstream and downstream processes. Building from these strong value propositions, this innovative platform yields a significant advantage against competitors’ products and will radically change the market, by creating the cheapest AAs (Ser<2.1 €/Kg and Cys<2.5€/Kg and longer term the target is >1 €/Kg and >2 €/Kg respectively) and in an environmentally sustainable manner. This will allow companies and society at large to replace fossil-based, energy consuming and polluting processes and products with sustainable, bio-based alternatives. Cysbio is currently a small and agile company, whose business strategy is to move quickly into the market by taking a large share of the existing Ser and Cys market segments and by creating a new one, replacing part of Met added in the chicken feed (with a market size of 5.4€Bn) with our sustainable and inexpensive Cys. The BioBAA project is at the core of this strategy and is what drives the company´s mission and future activities for a successful development.