The partnership secures commercial in-licensing rights for Biosyntia to develop commercial nutraceuticals made from sugar via a more sustainable, fermentation-based production process.
These ingredients will go onto form the basis of products such as dietary supplements, food and beverage fortification as well as personal care products.
“This partnership with Lantana will enable us to expand our pipeline of new and natural ingredients,” explains Martin Plambech, CEO of Biosyntia.
“Given that it typically requires substantial capital investments to develop and commercialise new bio-based ingredients, we believe that collaborations like this one are the path forward to rapidly increasing the number of commercial bio-based ingredients.”
“At Biosyntia, we are focusing on initiating new collaborations and partnerships with other biotech companies. It enables us to in-license different compounds and fast-track our product pipeline.”
Further terms
Further details of the agreement will see Biosyntia develop the product to scale and eventual commercialisation while Lantana will supply its proprietary microbial engineering platform for natural aromatic compound production.
Lantana’s technology ferments baker’s yeast, where small molecular weight compounds, derived from the aromatic amino acids phenylalanine and tyrosine, can be produced. These include the isoflavonoids as well as anthocyanins.
This fermentation-based approach, similar to brewing beer, allows yeast cultures to produce plant bioactive compounds at levels which are generally 100-1000 times more concentrated than those found in plants.
The natural isoflavonoids made through Lantana’s engineering and fermentation process are associated with a number of human health benefits, such as protecting the body against age and lifestyle-related diseases.
“The collaboration with Biosyntia allows the speedy development of our joint isoflavonoid product line, the first in a wide range of natural aromatic ingredients for the nutraceuticals, dietary supplements and personal care markets,” says Lantana’s CEO Michael Naesby.
“Isoflavonoids are a group of aromatic compounds found in soybean, red clover and other plants,” he adds.
“They have been associated with a wide range of preventive human health benefits, which include protection against age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, hormone-dependent cancer and loss of cognitive function, as well as lifestyle diseases such as diabetes.”
Biosynthia-FGen tie-up
In 2017, Biosyntia, based in Copenhagen, announced a similar partnership with FGen a Basel based biotech firm specialising in droplet-based high throughput screening.
The two companies were to develop microbial strains for the production of a specific B-vitamin, in which Biosyntia would use its multiplex genetic engineering tools for the simultaneous modification of several targets identified as bottlenecks in the vitamin pathway.
The resulting libraries would be analysed by FGen’s nanolitre-reactor platform and candidates with improved productivities would be isolated.
One goal of the collaboration would be the eventual substitution of the current polluting chemical synthesis route by the new sustainable, bio-based vitamin production process.