Two years ago, Prolific machines presented the technology of a unique approach to the production of cells intended for various industries, including meat farming. The Emeryville, California-based company said today that it is ready to bring to market a bioreactor that can enable such development.
Deniz Kent, Max Huisman and Declan Jones founded the company in 2020 to focus on more efficient and sustainable ways of manufacturing food and medicines. This would require culturing and controlling cells without the need to use expensive recombinant proteins to produce cells.
Today’s cell biology processes are used to produce all the pieces from antibodies for immunotherapy to dietary proteins found in infant formula.
But molecular methods are expensive (dearer than gram of gold). And it’s hard to control them. Kent gave the example of adding creamer to coffee, which moves randomly because it dissolves, meaning the cells go where they need, when they need. Current methods are imprecise – the cell growth you get today is probably not what you get tomorrow or a yr from now, Kent said. Additionally, it is difficult to optimize cell growth because it is not in a format that machines can understand.
“For the last few decades, we have been controlling cells with molecules,” Kent said. “These molecules can be chemicals or proteins. We add these molecules to the bioreactors and hope for the best.”
Prolific Machines believes it has a way to move from these particles to something better: light. Light is now used in a wide range of applications, from making food from microalgae, as Brevel does, to detecting pollutants, as Spore.bio does.
Light solves most cell growth problems, Kent said. It’s a low cost commodity, you’ll be able to place the light where you would like, you’ll be able to turn it on and off as needed, and the light might be the same today and might be many years from now. You also can split light waves for use in different use cases. Additionally, machines understand light because it is simply electrons flowing on a circuit board that go to an LED, Kent said.
Prolific Machines’ bioreactors are customer-ready and will enable them to more efficiently bio-produce high-value bio-based products, including dietary proteins, disease-treatment antibodies and whole cuts of cultured meat.
The company offers genetic tools, essentially strands of DNA that, when exposed to light, do things like eliminate growth aspects or convert one sort of cell into one other sort of cell. It also offers cell lines, one bovine cell substrate for food applications and one Cho cell substrate for pharmaceutical applications. Equipment is then available that introduces light into the bioreactors and measures how that light interacts with the cell. Finally, there is a software component with an algorithm that takes the spectral data and determines the best light pattern to apply.
This was all made possible thanks to recent Series B financing of $55 million. The Series B is led by Ki Tua Fund, the enterprise capital arm of Fonterra Co-operative Group, with participation from groups including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mayfield, SOSV, Shorewind Capital, Darco Capital, Conti Ventures and In-Q-Tel (IQT ). It includes convertible notes and increases Prolific Machines’ existing financing to $86.5 million.
Kent intends to use the recent funds for commercialization and customer acquisition.
“Now we’re moving from proving it works to making it available to people,” he said. “We have started working with some commercial partners, but we have no plans to announce it yet.”