Innovate UK, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh, awarded the Scottish startup a £224,000 grant, which followed the announcement of its £100,000 SMART grant from Scottish Enterprise.
GBL is using the grants to accelerate the creation of its biomanufacturing platform for producing high-value plant metabolites.
These metabolites, essential in various sectors like pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, typically require resource-intensive extraction. However, as CEO Dr. David McElroy told NutraIngredients, GBL’s platform aims to offer a more sustainable and efficient alternative, reducing environmental impact and enhancing accessibility.
“These recent grants contribute towards the realization of that goal by helping us identify gene targets within product-specific plant cell culture lines that can be modified to increase the yield of the specific target ingredient being made within each product cell line,” he said to NutraIngredients.
“Increasing the yield of plant natural products enabled by these recent grants will help us realize our long-term goal of improving people’s lives through their access to sustainable and reliably produced plant ingredient products.”
Advantage point
GBL currently serves various industries, including personal care, cosmetics, nutraceuticals, food, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture.
It uses primary vascular stem cells (VSCs) from plants, which differ from the dedifferentiated plant cells commonly used by others.
According to McElroy, these VSCs have several advantages for natural product manufacturing, including greater resistance to production stresses, better suitability for long-term storage, and higher yield of the desired product.
Climate change poses significant challenges to traditional harvesting methods for high-value plant metabolites, leading to drier conditions, reduced water and land availability, and increased fungal pests, all of which reduce plant yields.
Green Bioactives' Plant Cell Culture Technology aims to offer a solution by using bioreactors to grow plant cells under optimized conditions, free from climate-related stresses, ensuring consistent and efficient production of targeted plant ingredients.
Growing plant cells in bioreactors ensure consistent, sustainable, and local production, unlike traditional methods that involve lengthy growth periods and environmentally harmful harvesting practices, McElroy explained.
How does it work?
The Plant Cell Culture Technology platform involves several key steps.
Plant materials from species capable of producing the desired natural product are identified, and then stem cell tissues are isolated from these plants and are cultured on solid media with specific plant hormones to encourage cell proliferation, forming a mass of cells called a callus.
Technicians then transfer the callus into a liquid, where it grows into a cell suspension culture, increasing cellular biomass. Next, stressor agents mimic natural conditions that prompt the plant to produce protective compounds.
Technicians finally purify and separate the target ingredients from the other components in the liquid cell suspension culture, using them for product formation.
Product portfolio
The firm's portfolio includes two ingredients for topical skin care products: GBL-Skin Liquorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra) providing the antioxidant benefits of licorice plant to promote skin brightening properties; and GBL-Skin² Saponin (Quillaja saponaria), produced from cells of the Chilean Soap Bark Tree to act as a natural emulsifier for use in cosmetic products.
It also includes GBL-Memory1, a patented ingredient complex combining 200mg of Fructooligosaccharides with 400mg of L-theanine, developed to offer improvement in cognitive function, specifically memory.