In this episode of Biotech Bulls & Breakthroughs, John Gagliano sits down with Michael Heltzen, CEO of eXoZymes, to discuss the revolutionary move toward cell-free biomanufacturing. Discover how eXoZymes is using AI to bypass the limitations of living cells, engineering "super-enzymes" through brute-force evolution, and bringing high-purity natural compounds like NCT to the mass market.

eXoZymes Disclaimer
This content references an independent investment research report prepared and published by a third-party organization, Biotech Bulls & Breakthroughs. The views, opinions, estimates, forecasts, and conclusions expressed in the report are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views or positions of eXoZymes. While select members of the management team from eXoZymes were interviewed as part of the creation of this content, eXoZymes did not commission, contribute to, or review the content prior to its publication. The inclusion of this content on our website is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an endorsement, guarantee, or representation of its accuracy, completeness, or relevance. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own due diligence and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

Video transcript

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome once again to another episode of Biotech Bulls and Breakthroughs. Today is Wednesday, April 8, 2026. We're really excited to have Michael Heltzen on the line from eXoZymes, which is actually a publicly traded company that trades on NASDAQ and specializes in biomanufacturing actually without using cells.

The enzymes operate outside the cells and we're going to get into a little bit on why that's important and sort of what the company does that is unique and why we think people should care about this. So welcome, Michael.

Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having me. I look forward to the conversation. Absolutely. So if you wouldn't mind, just for the folks on the call, just kind of give a quick background on yourself.

I know that you're the CEO, but what is your background? How did you come to do what you're doing at eXoZymes? Yeah, absolutely. Born and raised back in Denmark. That's where the accent is from. I basically early on in life had a personality of being like super curious.

I needed to know how everything worked. I had to take everything apart and see if I could reassemble it. I just had a mind-blowing experience when my dad brought home a computer and the whole computational world opened up.

So I was one of these kids that started coding relatively early on. And I was actually struggling a little bit between like I love biology, I love nature. And then at the same time, there's this whole computational world.

So for a long time, I thought I had to choose one or the other. And it wasn't until I ran into a guy that said that he and his brother wanted to start a bioinformatics startup. And I was literally like getting a shock.

I was like, that's the true passion area in one word. And I had already started figuring out at that point, that was my really early 20s, that I was probably on the entrepreneurial spectrum of having kind of like a want and a need for going and building new things and trying to overcome some of the big problems the world is facing.

So all of that basically crystallized and I became one of the first guys in the startup 'CLC bio' that became, that's a journey of its own, but basically became the largest bioinformatics platform for next race and sequencing.

And here 20 years later, it's still in use and it's called QIAGEN Bioinformatics. That was where the exit ended up being. So my career had been basically teaming up with scientists that have had large technology breakthroughs and capabilities and then commercializing those.

And my journey in that, those last 20 years have basically been by first genomics, then later on more multiomics, but always with an element of machine learning, bioinformatics and now AI. And that's basically why I was invited in to our company here back some years ago, because I'm a strategist and translator of technology breakthroughs to the commercial business.

And I had a thesis on we could also apply AI to that whole cell-free world and basically make it even faster and better. And that's what we have done. And that's who we are today. Yeah, that's great. And obviously, you know, certainly something that we're hearing quite a bit about and we'll get into a little bit as far as the machine learning and the AI piece, because that's definitely something that, you know, we've been talking about now, obviously, since the AI boom and continues to just, you know, evolve at an exponential rate.

So I would love to hear a little bit more about that. But I guess just, you know, for you guys, just as from a company standpoint as a whole, could you just tell me a little bit more about specifically what it is that you guys do, what your general mission is? Yep.

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. And why does eXoZymes matter? Basically, we can make natural product-inspired compounds and things that the world otherwise doesn't have access to. So there's so many small molecules and chemistries from nature that we kind of have access to in trace amounts and we kind of therefore know of.

And people have been playing around with it from a health benefit or other benefit product perspectives. But it just comes down to, like, you can't isolate enough of it in nature. You can't make it with petrochemistry.

And synthetic biology, despite that that was the big promise, like, five, ten years ago, have turned out to not really work at scale. And a number of other things we can get into a little later. But basically, we are a new generation of biomanufacturing methodology that allows us to be in that space in between all the possibilities of nature, but having basically engineering-level control.

And that's why we can apply AI to it, because it's like what one chance leads to a feature change. And we can calculate our way through and plan our way through and then learn from where we are right and where we are wrong so we become better and better at it.

But why does it matter? Let me give you our flagship product pitch. Really short here. We are able to make a small molecule called NCT. It boosts metabolism. That means turns fat into energy. That's really the short version of it.

So it's a potential small molecule the same way GLP-1s have basically helped the world have a conversation about weight and weight loss and metabolic health. The difference is that where GLP-1s, they basically mask or turn down your hunger signal and a number of other signals, kind of like bowel movement and muscle growth and other things.

You end up with basically less of things where what our approach, the drug receptor that NCT basically hits is the one that controls activity of mitochondria. That is your powerhouse of the cell. And therefore, basically turns up the activity level of mitochondria.

Hence, burns more fat, creates more energy. Very interesting. So, you know, hearing a lot of interesting things there. So would it be fair to say that, you know, within this space, you guys are almost competing with some of the GLP-1 drugs that are out there? Is that a fair assessment? So we're still relatively young in that journey.

But what is unique about NCT, because it's a natural product, is that we can take the natural product version, the exact same molecule as you find out in nature. And there's a pathway to make it a nutraceutical.

That is over-the-counter supplement instead of a drug and disease kind of conversation. So that's the first route to a market for revenue and impact on the world. In parallel to that, as you will understand a little bit later in the conversation when I unpack how we actually do these things, we're in a very unique position to take natural products and make natural product-inspired molecules.

That is still completely new chemistry from an IP point of view. But the reality is that we borrow evolution's worth of time up to this time point. And then we basically speed run evolution forward and say, what would the more optimal small molecule look like? And then we're in a unique position to build that.

Because that is just optimizing on the enzyme step by step and giving it different building blocks. So it ends up with a slightly different end product that is more potent, more bioavailable, less side effects, whatever it is we're engineering up against.

Yeah, absolutely. No, that sounds fantastic. And my understanding was that there was some preliminary results from the pilot. I know we were talking about this a little before the call that came out earlier this year.

Did you want to touch on that at all? Yeah. Yeah. So basically, that was NCT exactly. We have been basically building our bio solution here at the headquarters here in the lab and shown to ourselves that we can make this very, very pure, highly efficient bio solution.

But one thing is that we can do it with all of our specialized people. Can we hand it over to someone that doesn't have insight to how the technology works in detail? But just want to manufacture it. So we basically did a tech transfer to Cayman Chemicals that, with all fairness, are more sophisticated people in regards to manufacturing things than most.

But we handed it over to them and basically gave them the ingredients and what is needed, but then let them take it from there. And what is pretty unique about cell-free is that, as we also showed in this pilot, is basically that it actually performs equally well or better at scale.

That's the exact opposite of what SynBio basically died on, that you could make things work in a Petri dish and it was all fantastic and you could have big value propositions. And then it comes with a little estrograph in the corner saying, like, you can't get it to scale.

Yeah, yeah. So it almost ended up as a tease sometimes where these very, very big value propositions were born. But the world never got the product. The world never got the opportunity. So with cell-free, because it's much more like a chemical reaction, it's biochemistry, it's the enzymes from inside of the cells that we basically look at from a genetic point of view and say, okay, that's how nature does this.

Let me give a very concrete example so we can kind of follow the journey here. Yeah, that'd be great. In NCT, you've already had because it's, for example, black pepper. The challenge is just that you would have to eat a house full worth of black pepper to get one dose of NCT.

And so it's practically impossible to harvest from nature. It only exists in trace amounts in a couple of different sources. And there's just not enough of it. And the economics of, like, burning all of that black pepper to give you one dose of NCT just doesn't make any sense.

Right. You can't make it in the pure form via pitochemistry. So up until now, it's been a known compound. It's been played around with a lot of researchers. But people can't get it at scale. And they also have a problem with purity.

So basically, we sat down and said, okay, in black pepper, there's basically these six enzymes, some feedstock that is broken down by some breakdown enzymes and then the buildup enzymes that, makes NCT, that's the biochemistry that works inside of a cell.

So we study those genetic codes for those enzymes and say, okay, this is how evolution got us to this point where NCT is possible. What if we brute force the rest of evolution or the next couple of billion years worth of evolution by setting down with basically the protein folding tools that have become available to the world over the last number of years and said, like, okay, this is the genetic code that leads to the enzyme.

What if I want the Superman version of the enzyme that we call exosyme? Enzyme is inside reaction. Exo is outside reaction. So that's why we use that word. And basically, we want these Superman versions of the enzymes that can survive outside of the cell that keeps functioning for a long time and are basically willing to work with the substitution that we do that otherwise the cell typically manages.

So that's why we use cell fermentation, thermodynamics, thermodynamics, thermodynamics, all kinds of things that is in place in a cell, why we have been used cell fermentation up until now as humankind to make biomanufacturing.

But now we're moving outside and we provide those support systems and then we put these exosymes up. But to finish up, how we make an exosyme? So, okay, I have the genetic code. I know that leads to this enzyme.

I have some theses on what an exosyme would look like, what I need to improve. Now I sit down and calculate backwards. I wonder if I made one genetic mutation here, would that lead to an improvement or something that is worse? And then we basically just think that through via large language models or large protein models and come up with a thesis of, let's say, like a thousand mutations that we think will improve this enzyme getting towards the state of being an exosyme.

And that's where a lot of people will then say, like, well, Michael, you have a problem now because now you have a thousand lab experiments to run. You need to put that DNA into a cell, grow up and get enough enzyme that you can take it out and then performance tests to see if you're right.

So predictions are kind of cheap or at least easy to get around versus actually knowing if your prediction was right. So this has been the huge bottleneck in applying AI to a lot of drug discovery and drug development, but specifically for enzymes where it's a specific feature.

So it's not just the structure of the protein you're predicting. It's the feature we're talking about. So it's even harder. But our team basically sat down and took on the challenge. And we are now, because we're so good at cell-free, able to take DNA and express the enzyme without putting it into a cell.

So we have cell-free protein synthesis platforms up and running so that when our computer program or platform predict what an exosyme would look like and which mutations will go there, we can then go and mass parallel build all of those enzymes, performance test the different versions, and feed that data back to the algorithm and say, on this first guess, you were right.

The second guess, you were not right. Now go and learn from why you were not right. And then we can run that circle, reinforcement training style. And that is basically what we call brute forcing evolution, because that is what nature have done until now.

They're just taking one generation lifetime permutation to see if it's better. But if it was better, that would become the prevalent trait of whatever that is. And that way, evolution over billions of years.

So we run a couple of billion years worth of evolution in a matter of a week. Oh, wow. That gives us exosymes. And that's why we can now start building with biochemistry that exists in nature as if it is chemistry, because we control those exosymes to that extreme degree.

And we have the cell-free core platform that we spent a decade, all the way back to when we were an academic project, a decade, figuring out what is it actually an enzymatic pathway needs from a cell, and what can we replace one-to-one with a non-living system? Because the whole living perspective on biomanufacturing is the whole problem.

Like, cells, by definition, only want to produce chemicals they need, only in amounts that they need. So they will try to regulate down everything you ask it to build. So your chemical factory does not want to produce chemicals.

Number two, if you overcome that, you often end up kind of getting the tiders, basically the production up so high that it becomes toxic or deadly for the cells. So you're actually killing your own, you're putting down your own factory, if it's a chemical factory we're talking about.

And then in the last end, because if we have this picture of it being a factory, your end product ends up inside of the walls and the floors and the ceiling. So you have to take the whole goddamn thing apart and isolate out your end product.

So the isolation cost is often higher than the value of the product you're producing. So you will never have a business case. That makes a lot of sense. And that's extremely interesting. I guess one question that comes to mind is, you know, this kind of cell-free approach that you guys are doing.

I mean, it sounds fairly unique. Is there, you know, would you say you guys are like a unique player in that? Or like, who else is kind of doing something similar to what you guys are doing, if anyone? Yep.

So obviously, like, you're right. At the first level, everybody seems to be, everybody is cell-based. And there are use cases where cells are better than cell-free. So obviously, I'm focusing on what works, what unlocks markets, products, business opportunities with this new platform.

So when I talk about it, talk about that perspective only. But all of these problems are real. It is why synthetic biology as a market have not done that well. And I'm being diplomatic right now. Yeah.

So where cell-free is unique, you can argue we were not the first people to liberate the enzyme from the cells. That goes back to at least the 80s, if not much, much earlier, where people started realizing some enzymes can actually be taken out of a cell and still function on the outside.

So the enzymes you have in your washing powder from novosibes, now novosibes, that breaks down dirt and blood. And the different breakdown enzymes that kind of can be produced and harvested and put into detergent is an example of something we had for a long time.

We have had other enzymes we've basically been harvesting from cells. So you can argue one step at a time. It's not that unique anymore. It's been done for generations. Starting to talk about the pathways, so more than one chemical reaction.

That's where most scientists will come and tell you that's not possible. Those pathways will only run inside of a full -functioning cell because there's so many support systems. You need to have something regulating the feedstock, regulating thermodynamics, regulating all the cofactors, regenerating the cofactors.

So all of those things is what our scientific co-founder team basically took on as a challenge back a decade ago at UCLA, basically. They tell the story as a – basically, Jim Bauer, the professor, have these two great students that are now our co-founders here, Paul and Tyler.

And they make a cell-based biofuels system. And they're getting a nice publication out of it, and everybody's celebrating them. But then afterwards, they're saying, like, let's be honest with ourselves.

This is never going to work at scale, and we would really like to build something that makes a positive impact on the world, not just publications. And Jim pushes back a little bit and says, like, well, in that case, just give me the system without the cell because the cell has all the problems.

And he basically slams the door on the way out of the lab and thinks he made a good joke. But the guy sits down and goes, like, huh, what would that actually take? And that becomes basically the research thesis of that lab.

They've done other great things, but this is the big thing that came out of the Bowie lab, basically setting down and unpacking what is it enzymatic cells – or cells-supporting enzymatic pathways does for the pathway.

And what would it take to make those enzymes to what we now call exosymes and exosymes pathways? And it's taking a decade, so it's not been something – it's an overnight success that took a decade. Yeah, that's fantastic.

Obviously, really, really exciting work. I guess one of the other questions that I have, a lot of the listeners on our call are investors in the biotech space, and so they're always eager for new opportunities that present themselves from an investment standpoint.

So, kind of, what are these – how do you feel about the future? You know, what do you think about these innovations that you guys are doing just kind of from a sheer investment standpoint? Yeah, I'm, by nature, very optimistic.

Yeah. So, full disclosure on that. I'm a biotech entrepreneur that likes building solutions to big problems. So, my answer to you are, like, what is the perspective? Well, this is a new form of chemistry that can basically give us abundance in the future.

So, it's pretty big from a long-term perspective. Yeah. I'm also a Danish guy. We are known to be very concrete and very to the point. It doesn't matter if it has a big future potential if we're not executing on it step by step in front of us.

So, this is why, when I came in, I basically narrowed the strategy of the company down to this nutraceutical and pharmaceutical strategy. Let's build natural products we already know is really expensive or really valuable and basically get to market with something that can start generating revenue relatively fast while never giving up on the really big impact potential of taking natural products and enhancing them by this brute force evolution and other optimization tricks we have so we can start making a new generation of small molecules.

Because that is really where I'm short to medium term super focused. There is a large demand for small molecules that is the drug type that pharma knows exactly how to take to market. It's basically the favorite type of drugs.

We just ran out of white space in the small molecule space because there's only so much petrochemistry can do and there's only so much you can isolate from nature. Now, we are reintroducing a new way that means we're expanding the white space of small molecules significantly.

And we are also not just expanding it from the perspective of kind of like more diversity, more different things that can do. But we are now living in an era where we can start talking about what is the small molecule exactly? What should it do? How should it function on its drug receptor? And then that's reverse engineer that small molecule to kind of like then it should look like this to make this small molecule that doesn't exist anywhere and can't make by normal chemistry.

Which enzymes can get us there? Can we basically reverse calculate and say, OK, these are these are the buildup enzymes that need to build these building blocks together. Where could we get those building blocks? What feedstock and what is unique about this platform is that despite here in the beginning, we are going often after natural products so we can basically say, OK, this is how the pathway looks like in nature.

This is the generic code behind it. This is this is not a living system. So we can start taking enzymes from different organisms and plug and play them up against each other. This is chemistry, biochemistry, synthetic biochemistry.

So so we can start saying and we do that sometimes when we have a pathway where there's one of the enzymes that we have a hard time evolving into something strong, fast, good enough. Then we take a step back and say, like, does that chemical reaction happen anywhere else in nature? Oh, over here in this completely different kingdom, there is there's that reaction.

Let's take that enzyme and and optimize from that genetic code. So so it's a it's it's it's the physical manifestation of AI biochemistry that we're talking about here. Yeah, absolutely. That that is extremely exciting.

You know, I guess one kind of final question from my end. I mean, what's what's next for you guys in terms of I mean, anything that you want to talk about that's upcoming as far as milestones or what you guys are working on that, you know, to the extent that you're able to discuss it? What should what should what should folks be aware of in terms of what's coming up next for you? Yeah.

So so we we a little uniquely IPO'd in November 2024. That was basically a time where everybody kept telling us, like, there's no way of IPOing right now as a biotech that doesn't haven't even like you.

We couldn't even have the conversation about when revenue would happen because we hadn't picked a strategy and a product yet. So so so we we were very blessed and lucky that there was a lot of people with scientific insight and insight to to to to IP that that understood how big this tech breakthrough is and how fundamental it is and therefore dare to take a bet on us.

So that's why it was possible for us to make a positive biotech IPO in the year where we were probably the only positive biotech IPO that year. So that's a year and some months ago. So from a platform and a lot of potential, we have now narrowed down to what our strategy is.

We have now basically built our first buyer solution for the flagship product. We are bringing that to market. So we're bringing NCT to market and in these two verticals that we we talked about. So the value inflection points that I think people should keep an eye out for is when we continue that commercial journey of of partnering up with the manufacturing partners and the marketing partners around NCT.

And then over on the clinical side with the biotech pharma company that we're going to end up either doing venturing or licensing out the the the the pharmaceutical use case of NCT. And this is product number one.

We have product number two being built already and we have product number three being built already. And we have a idea management setup where we basically screen for what we call extraordinary business opportunities that lives up to basically top shelf kind of scoring of biggest markets, most value value release, no competing products.

All of these things, all of these things, us uniquely being able to to to to service those markets. So so we want to make a a series of natural product inspired nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals over the coming years.

And I welcome people to follow us. We we try to be open and communicative in regards to our shareholders and potential investors. And we have a lot of videos on our web page that dives into everything from the science to how we go to market with NCT.

Very, very cool. That's that type of transparency is great. And, you know, this has been extremely insightful. I really appreciate the time on this. It's certainly unique and something that I definitely think folks should should take a look into and pay attention to.

Michael, is there anything, any final anything final that you want to you want to discuss before we before we wrap up any any last kind of words? If not, that's fine. But just wanted to give you the opportunity.

I just want to remind people that the future is going to be bright. We will have an abundance of resources. Our dream for the future is that we live in a future where there's enough for everybody. That is why we go to work and do the long days and the tough problem solving is because there are new generations of technology coming up now that really have the potential to do that.

And sometimes when I open the newspapers, it sounds like everything is going down the drain and nothing good will come from from AI. And I'm not saying that there's not problems coming up and that there's not things we should navigate.

But I want to remind people that there's also good things. Like we are an example of how we can do a new generation of chemistry, medicinal chemistry. There will be new medicines that that are unthinkable today coming from from these kind of efforts.

And that makes me happy and positive about the future. Yeah, I really I think that's a really important point. Right. And we see that on our end as well. I mean, the negativity, sort of the the AI apocalypse.

Right. But I mean, to the same point, embracing the technology we you can just tell how powerful it is. And if you use appropriately, particularly in things like drug discovery and medicine. I mean, we are talking about solving problems that, you know, possibly a much more exponential rate than we ever have before, which obviously is is a great thing for humanity.

So I I would concur on that. And I think it's definitely important to remind folks of. So thank you for for mentioning that for everyone on the call. You know, really appreciate you guys listening in again.

Really think this is some exciting stuff and something that everyone should take a look into. And, Michael, once again, you know, I really appreciate the time here. This has been awesome. And thank you for for walking us through everything you guys are doing.

Thank you so much for the opportunity. Yep, absolutely. Have a good one, everyone. Have a good one.

Biotech Bulls & Breakthroughs podcast: The Future of Biomanufacturing with Michael Heltzen