This week, Slack Capital - an Australian investment research publication - has released an investment report on eXoZymes, accompanied by multiple interviews with our management team. This interview with our co-founder and VP of Research, Tyler Korman, PhD, focuses on the science behind our platform.
The full investment report is available here and completely free. The investment report is also available in audio format, via YouTube or Spotify.
eXoZymes Disclaimer
This content references an independent investment research report prepared and published by a third-party organization, Slack Capital. 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 report, eXoZymes did not commission, contribute to, or review the report prior to its publication. The inclusion of this report 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.
About Slack Capital
Slack Capital is an Australian investment research publication dedicated to uncovering and sharing a select number of high-impact company reports focused on asymmetric investment opportunities, with a primary focus on commodities, deep technology and breakthrough innovations. At the heart of Slack Capital are in-depth, free company reports, often the result of over 50 hours of research, where all available information on a company is meticulously compiled and filtered into a centralised report. These reports provide an extensive understanding, often including direct conversations with a company’s management team. They serve as the foundation of an investment thesis and sharpen conviction. Please read and understand Slack Capital's General Investment Disclaimer here. More on Slack Capital here.
Video transcript below
James | Slack Capital:
Today I sit down with Tyler Korman, the VP of research at eXoZymes and co-founder of the company. We discuss the scientific terms and concepts of the platform and its three distinct phases, and the conversation is left quite broad and open for all to understand.
If you want to find out more information about the company or what we discuss today, I'll provide a link below to my Company Report over on my Substack.
Enjoy the conversation.
Tyler | eXoZymes:
My name's Tyler Korman. I'm the VP of research here at eXoZymes. So, I started back in college and I thought I was going to be an organic chemist, and I couldn't stand the fumes. So pretty quickly I turned my focus to studying enzymes because that's what made sense to me. And almost the rest is history.
So started off doing some basic science, figuring out how enzymes work. And then when I went to graduate school at UC Irvine in the late 90s, early 2000s, structure-based drug design was really hot. So, you'd figure out what an enzyme looked like and then the idea was that once you knew that you could design drugs that fit into that enzyme and then inhibited it or did whatever. There were a number of companies in San Diego that were doing that. I thought that was really cool.
And when I was interviewing actually during orientation, there was a professor who said, well, I'm actually studying the enzymes that make drugs in nature. So, it was a completely different aspect. There's pathways in bacteria and fungi that actually make these compounds that are most of the drugs that we use today or at least the basis of and I was like, oh man, that's what I want to do. Exactly that. It was structure-based drug design from a different aspect because these enzymes, these pathways already made these really interesting natural products.
I spent the next four years studying what those enzymes look like. And then moved over once I finished my PhD to UCLA and I wanted to work on even more applied projects. So, a lot of the stuff that I had been doing was still basic science, you’re figuring out what something looks like and how it does it. It's still a little bit in the weeds. And so, I met Jim Bowie and Jim said, I've got this project, we have money from the Department of Energy, but I've never worked on it before. And that was similar to what I had done in grad school. I was the first grad student of an assistant professor and she's like, here you go. Go learn how to do it. You don't have any resources and support. And I was like, okay, that sounds great.
So similar thing, we started off trying to engineer enzymes to make biodiesel, both cell-free and in vivo because at that point SynBio and that whole metabolic engineering frontier was kind of in full bloom. And we always were able to do things that worked just well enough to publish, but it was going to be really hard and take many years and many millions of dollars to get anything commercial. And there was an aha moment where we had been doing that for maybe a year or two. And Jim Bowie, came out of his office and he said, what if we just got rid of the cells, that would solve so many problems.
And so, I fell back on my background in natural product metabolism from grad school and said, all these bugs break down sugars and turned it into building blocks and energy. We could use that and then just link it up to some other pathway to then make something interesting. And so that's where it started.
We got some more support from the Department of Energy and within a couple of years we had Paul Opgenorth, who's one of my other co-founders, he joined the lab as a grad student, and we basically built out all the systems that you need to drive these multi-step metabolic pathways cell free to have them run for long periods of time because that's the goal, you don't want something that just works for a little bit and then you publish and so be it. Like you want something that's going to be robust, that's going to work for a long period of time, you can just walk away from it after you add things together and that's the that's the ideal.
So, we set about trying to figure out how you could get that to happen. It took us a little bit, but we were both lucky and good, which is a good combination sometimes. We were smart enough to know when we were when we had been lucky with some of the developments and then started applying it to really applied problems, biofuels, especially chemicals, pharma, like APIs. And once we got there because we could make different types of classes of compounds that once we knew we could make one, we could branch off and make other things. And so that's kind of how the terpene story turned into a cannabinoid story because they share some commonalities.
And that was the hook that we used to raise money. Paul and I and Jim spun this out end of 2019. Finally, raised some money and then the rest is history. We've been supported by the US Federal Government from a number a number of agencies, which has been really nice to continue to work on Isobutanol, but also through the NIH to develop next generation APIs and things like that. So yeah, it’s been quite the ride.
James | Slack Capital:
Thanks for the introduction, Tyler. I always love listening to a good backstory. In terms of your other scientific co-founders, Paul Opgenorth and Jim Bowie, do they come from similar academic backgrounds to yourself or
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Yeah, so Jim actually worked with enzymes. He had some amount of computational background as well. But he had studied membrane proteins and the most basic of basic science. So, he was studying how you would pull a membrane protein apart, like single ones, and so this was a little bit of a deviation. But he was so good technically just understanding how enzymes work and the biophysics of all of it, that it was a match made in heaven.
Paul has a very similar background to mine, he had started off in chemistry as well. He had done more traditional SynBio type work. Before he joined Jim Bowie's lab, he had worked for Jim Liao, you might have heard of. He was I think one of the founders of what eventually became Gevo, the whole in vivo isobutanol technology, that was Jim Liao. And so, he had some experience working on microbes and engineering them to do that. And so, he came at it from a different perspective of he had burnt his fingers on the traditional SynBio approach and how difficult that was. And then came into this cell-free paradigm where it's like, oh my God, this is all so much easier and so much faster. Why aren't we all doing this all the time?
James | Slack Capital:
And I know that you have other best in their field scientists working for the company. So broadly speaking, what are their academic backgrounds?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Yeah so it's always useful to have experience working with enzymes, But at the same time, I think what we've tried to avoid from the beginning is just hiring more of ourselves, Because I think there's a lot of benefit that you end up seeing in overlapping expertise, you have different perspectives, And so we've tried to bring on scientists and people with expertise in various aspects, both in the enzymology and the cell-free space. But even beyond that, so some people who have worked from a more computational perspective.
People who have engineering backgrounds as we're trying to scale these things up and then develop these systems commercially, and so they tend to think about things differently than your traditional PhD level biochemist. And so that chemical engineering approach and perspective is important as well. So, we also have some great chemists as well to kind of marry what's the best use of, you know… whatever given technology, I think at the end of the day.
So, enzymes and enzymatic catalysis is our focus and what we want to use, but we want to make sure that we're using the technology for the application. There's sometimes that chemistry is going to win, or it gets to a really important point very easily. Same thing with nature, so nature can make some things really easily. Usually there's limitations to those approaches. And then we come in and we can use those to then build it all the way.
I think that's what been one of the limitations of the traditional synthetic biology approach is they're trying to force the cells to do everything. And so, I think it ends up being hard and costs a lot of money and be underwhelming. And so, we're trying to at the end of the day is to develop things that work. And so that's always been our focus.
James | Slack Capital:
And that's what I've been so impressed by when I was looking at eXoZymes and writing my report, as well as my previous conversation with Michael Heltzen, the CEO of the company, is that this focus and this mission, which eXoZymes has, has attracted a lot of significant talent. So not only from the scientific team that you just discussed, but also from the business and commercial development point of view. It's a fantastic team and it's really going to drive the company forward.
So now moving into eXoZymes platform, I want to kind of keep this scientific conversation easy to understand for the general listener and general investor. So, before we go into the specifics, can you detail what enzymes are and the associated bio catalysis process?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Sure. So, enzymes are really nice because they do very specific chemistry. So effectively, enzymes do the chemistry of life. So, when you eat a sugar, food or any type of sugar, the enzymes are actually the things that take that, call it a feedstock so that that carbon material and what turns it into the energy that your body needs to live. It turns it into the fat and it builds it into muscle, So the enzymes actually break down that carbon and then build it up into all these things.
You compare that to traditional organic chemistry, which is mostly from petroleum, where there's a lot of things that you can do with chemistry that nature can't do. But at the same time, there are certain transformations and it's dirty generally. So, there's some things that are hard, and you get mixtures of things sometimes.
Working with chemistry enzymes are very specific. People describe it like a lock in a key type of effect where a single enzyme has a single effectively key or substrate that fits into it, and then it converts it into a specific product. So, if you now imagine linking multiple enzymes together, each one with its substrate, it turns it into a product that's then the substrate of the next one, so on and so forth. It's a very specific chain of events that happens where you can now predict converting your input into that final product with very great control and specificity. And so that's the beauty of enzymes.
And then we can leverage all the developments. Numerous people have won Nobel prizes recently for how you now engineer enzymes to do novel things, to act on different substrates or to be more stable. And so there are microbes that grow in these volcanic vents for instance. So, nature has selected for these enzymes that are in these microbes to be very stable. And so, you can use that sometimes as a starting point to say, oh well enzymes can actually be really stable catalysts as well. And so, you can leverage that to make your bio-based catalysis so you can do biological chemistry outside of the context of a cell.
James | Slack Capital:
So, when I spoke to Michael, he briefly described the three distinct phases of the eXoZymes platform:
1 - The design and engineering optimization of the company's enzymes, which they label as Exozymes.
2 - The expression and purification of these Exozymes.
3 - The synthesis of the targeted chemical compound in the bioreactor environment.
So, I'd love to go into a bit more detail about each of these phases and the modern tools that are integrated into these areas.
Tyler | eXoZymes:
So, on the design side, we can leverage a lot of the sequencing that's been done over the past, 10 to 20 years where collection of organisms, be it microbes, be it plants, fungi, all these types of different sequences. So, all their DNA sequences are out there. So, what that means is you have these collections of genes which encode a protein that you can use to select from. You can look at the literature or you can use kind of intuition and design tools to now link those enzyme steps because a lot of times it comes with, the function generally of what they're doing. And so, as those tools and that ability become better and as the amount of information out there increases, that's just more you can choose from.
Once you have all that, all the development of recombinant DNA technologies that was the bedrock of synthetic biology, this ability to now take foreign DNA, clone it and then put it into like a microbe, to get that microbe to do something interesting. Using all those techniques and tools, we can now use those microbes to make our enzyme of interest. So that means you have your E. coli bacteria that normally doesn't produce your enzyme to make a cannabinoid for instance. You put the gene sequence in it and now it does, and it makes a lot of that enzyme, and you can now separate that enzyme and use that as your catalyst cell-free.
And so that's effectively our process. We have the discovery, how the pathways work. We then isolate the enzyme by expressing them in some type of microbe. And then we put it together in the bioreactor. And we've been really good at being able to develop these systems that are stable, that are robust, that work for long periods of time, and it's basically like doing a chemical reaction, which scales linearly, because you don't have to worry about oxygen and the growth of a living organism. But still using a biological catalyst, so still using biology. And so that's kind of the benefit of that whole platform.
James | Slack Capital:
Yeah, so in that first design phase, I understand that the company uses protein or enzyme databases such as Alpha Fold as well as Computational and AI models that the company has developed.
So how do all these different platforms integrate with each other in order to have an optimized engineering design system?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Once you have an enzyme that works and you can figure out what its benefits are and what its limitations are, then you can go one step deeper and figure out how am I going to engineer this to be even better? And there's a lot of different tools that people have used in the past.
There's the rational approach where you just try and, put your finger on specific residues or locations within the enzyme that you can change. There's an approach called Directed Evolution where you just do it randomly, where you can make these large libraries of mutations and then screen for things that are better. And as we're building out technologies with AI, you can now be predictive and so you can make specific libraries of known mutations, screen them and then learn from that very quickly.
And so, we still leverage all three. Things are going toward that that third, I think generally out there in the industry, this ability to leverage AI and machine learning to make things faster. We're trying to make ourselves available to that.
James | Slack Capital:
So, in terms of the AI model which the company has internally developed, is that specifically towards the optimize enzymes or is that related to the whole platform such as the bioactive condition, the co-factors, or other reagents?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
The AI now is applied to the enzyme design primarily. There's no reason why it couldn't be applied to. The more reactions and things that you set up, the more you can learn from it. But that technology is still being developed, I think, by others as well. So, it's not as mature as applying it to the enzyme problem.
James | Slack Capital:
So then obviously with the integration of these tools, it has quite significant cost and time savings related to R&D efforts, but how do you ensure that the selected enzymes, which will be engineered in into the company's Exozymes, how do you ensure that they are the most appropriate for the biocatalysis process?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
So, I think that comes down to having a good understanding of what the underlying economics will be. And so that's what you do upfront. I think it's not just us, a lot of other companies do is figure out what are your costs of your inputs? How long does it need to run for? And how much can you make in terms of yield, and then it gives you a general kind of, how much can I make this for? More or less. And so that defines, how well your catalysts have to work and then that gives you starting points, or ideas of how much engineering or what not you have to do for those enzymes.
James | Slack Capital:
I really like how the economic factor is considered quite early on in the design phase because ultimately if the cost to synthesize the compound is too high, then there's not going to be a market for it as we've seen time and time again in the SynBio space.
So then in terms of the specific characteristic optimizations that the company can achieve towards its Exozymes, can you detail the engineering traits which the company can achieve?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
So, we've demonstrated, and there's a number of papers that describe the ability to improve characteristics such as stability, and this will govern, how you can isolate these enzymes and the biological catalyst better. It also can reflect how long they will last in a reaction.
We've also used these approaches to change things like substrate specificity, so allowing an enzyme to substrate specificity, so allowing an enzyme to work on a different substrate to make a different product.
In addition to cofactor specificity. So, there's biological molecules that are not enzymes that are in your body like an ATP. This is the energy molecule that powers a lot of the chemistry that happens in your in your body. And so, that's just one example. There are a couple others. And so, we've developed we've engineered enzymes to accept different co-factors that an enzyme wouldn't naturally a given enzyme doesn't naturally take for instance. We have applied it in a variety of different ways.
James | Slack Capital:
And I recommend listeners head over to my eXoZymes report on Substack and you can find more details about these scientific papers which the company's released.
So, I want to zoom in on the stability element of the Exozymes, is that with the intention to ensure that the bio catalysis process is effective and efficient over multiple batches or in multiple days?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
I think it's all of the above. So, there's certain scenarios where you would want it to be stable over multiple reactions. There are other scenarios where just having it last longer over multiple days. We have a have a paper that we published as I was leaving UCLA that we stabilized enzymes to the presence of solvent. So Isobutanol, which is a biofuel, one of the limitations is that because it's a solvent, it denatures proteins. So, we stabilized those enzymes to that solvent. Now the reaction lasts much longer.
And so, if you can make enzymes last or the reaction last twice as long, that's effectively the same as recycling the enzymes once, because you have the same amount of enzymes now lasts twice as long. it's the same as if you just isolated up and restarted again. And so, if you can have them last not just twice as long but 3, 4, 5 times longer than it solves two birds with one stone. So, it's a combination, it depends on the application and what the approach is.
James | Slack Capital:
And in terms of the co-factor regeneration innovations that the company has developed, how does this further optimize the chemical synthesis process?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
So that was one of the things that when we were developing this at UCLA, that was the first problem that we had attacked because a lot of times when people are doing multi-step reactions enzymatic reactions cell-free, they do one of two things. They add in exogenous substrate to just power the recycling of the co-factor. That's the traditional way of doing it. Or they basically design a perpetual motion machine, which by definition will eventually… like it doesn't exist, so it'll eventually wind down.
And so those initial core developments were to address that second problem. How can you actually build up excess energy but maintain the flow of your carbon from your substrate to your product? And so that was some of the core developments that we allowed and when you now break… so what that did is it breaks the rules of, or expands kind of what you can do stoichiometrically, because you can build up excess energy or recover from lost energy. And so, it widens the design space. So now there's a lot more types of molecules that you can actually go after because you don't have to have this perfect balance of energy production and energy usage.
James | Slack Capital:
And so, all these factors, the co-factor regeneration, the specificity, the stability and other characteristic elements, they all work to reduce the cost per production batch of eXoZymes platform, which makes it very attractive for partners and out in the market.
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Right.
James | Slack Capital:
Okay. And I'll also be speaking with Damien Perriman the Chief Commercial Officer of eXoZymes about what potential partnerships could look like in the future.
So then now zooming into the second phase, how efficient is eXoZymes at expressing and purifying its optimized Exozymes via microbial hosts?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
It’s primarily based on the existing technology. That's a relatively mature technology, this ability to over express and isolate enzymes. There's a number of companies that have pioneered this going back decades and that's the whole point is that that works. Cells want to make enzymes, they don't want to make your chemical X to be able to sell, as some type of pharmaceutical. they want to make an enzyme to live and to grow.
So, we can leverage the ability of cells that want to just generally make enzymes. They do that really well to make our catalysts. And so, a lot of that technology has been established. Standing on the shoulders of others I think is the saying. We still do try and push things forward as much as we can but yeah, a lot of it is based on mature technologies.
James | Slack Capital:
So then moving into the third and final phase of the company's platform, where you synthesize the targeted chemical compound in a bioreactor environment. Does this occur in relatively standard industrial bioactive equipment or has eXoZymes developed unique infrastructure specific to its platform?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
As much as we can, you want to leverage kind of low-cost infrastructure that's already established. That's not going to fit for every example though. But by and large, getting away from bespoke fermentation for every specific things that you're trying to make, which is kind of the SynBio way of doing things to the more chemicals. You know, Glass or glass lined or stainless, depending on how big it is, Reactor that uses, standard off the shelf parts. That's the ideal.
James | Slack Capital:
So, if I could summarize everything that's been said so far. eXoZymes platform simply operates more like a chemical reaction process whereby all these ingredients are added into the bioreactor, which allows the chemical synthesis process to occur.
And it's these specific ingredients which the company has innovated and developed, which provides the advantages of eXoZymes platform over all the existing chemical production methods. And in the previous interview, Michael stated that obviously cell-based technologies have significant issues towards scaling as well as the unit economic costs.
Tyler | eXoZymes:
You got it.
James | Slack Capital:
Okay, so then having a greater understanding of eXoZymes platform and its three distinct phases, I would like to discuss its advantages, and I've provided it a long list of these in my eXoZymes report over on Substack but I'd love to specifically zoom in on the near theoretical yields and titres in which the platform can achieve.
Tyler | eXoZymes:
So, because enzymes are specific, you tend not to get side products usually, it goes down to a single product at the end. That's a benefit. And if you design the systems appropriately, because one thing that you can never change is the thermodynamics, of a system. And so, if you can make sure that it's over overall thermodynamically favoured, then you can get to really high yields as well.
And so, because you don't have limitations of a cell membrane, you don't have to worry about your cells dying. Things like that. So, a cell has all of metabolism, it’s not just going to take that sugar and turn it into the product that you want. It's going to turn it into the DNA, the fats, the everything else that it needs to live.
So, when you go cell free, you get rid of all of that background, and so now all of your carbon just goes to your product of interest. And so, your theoretical yields can be high because of the specificity, and then the overall yields can also be high because that's basically the only place for the carbon to go.
James | Slack Capital:
So then ultimately with these high titres, the end compound doesn't have that many impurities compared to cell-based technologies. So, then the downstream processing is relatively straightforward and quite cheap.
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Yep.
James | Slack Capital:
So then in terms of eXoZymes ability to synthesize new to nature compounds or tweak the performance of existing compounds, how does the platform achieve this?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
So, we have a paper that was published where we made basically two different types of cannabinoids. A common one and a rare version simply by changing the input. And so, enzymes while they're specific, they can also be a little bit promiscuous. So we leveraged that to be able to make not just one, but two different products, just by using the same set of enzymes. That's also the beauty of the cell-free approach, you have complete control over all of your inputs. And so, because that you can more easily get to a more diverse set of final products.
James | Slack Capital:
So then as the platform operates more like a standard chemical reaction process now with this high level of degree of control, it greatly reduces the risk when scaling from a lab into commercial setting, unlike cell-based technologies?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
I think there's a lot of things that go into scaling living cells in SynBio based systems. Only one consideration is whether your product is toxic or not. Sometimes, something as simple as you need oxygen to aerate and then your ability to do that at very large scale becomes more difficult.
For a living cell with a cell-free system, you only use oxygen if you need it, and because you have complete control, you can do things in smaller reactions because you can concentrate these enzymes as well. So, it solves a lot of the difficulties. I think in just setting up and deploying these things, they should scale more like a chemical reaction than a bio-based solution.
And so, the system that we set up with Isobutanol for example, we were able to use like a biphasic system where you have like an overlay on top of it that would normally kill a cell. And so that ability, because you don't have to worry about something living now, expands just the types of things you can use to separate as well. And so, it basically gives you more options at the end of the day.
James | Slack Capital:
So now I think it is time to look at the scientific reports which eXoZymes has published in the past and I've detailed these in length on my Substack report, so I recommend listeners to go and look at that and click on those links. But can you detail what occurred and also the achievements and results that were accomplished?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
I’ll start with a cannabinoid story. All of this work started with central glycolysis, which is a fundamental metabolic pathway that's present in in all living organisms where you basically take some sugar, and you break it down into two or three carbon building blocks and energy. So that's where we started with that premise. And once we developed the regulatory systems, we could turn that sugar into these building blocks.
And then the first thing we made was a terpene. So, these are flavour and fragrance compounds. So, limonene is the thing from Lemons that gives it kind of its lemony scent, it’s a hydrocarbon at the end of the day. The Department of Energy supported this because it could be had potential as a biofuel as well. We were able to set up an ambitious 30 enzyme pathway relatively, that worked to make tens of grams per liter of product very quickly. Normally that compound itself, limonene is also toxic to cells. So, it gave you that advantage. But we took a step back and we said, hey, if you can make this much limonene directly from a sugar, that means we can make the compound that leads up to limonene. It's called Geranyl pyrophosphate. We could then use that compound to modify small molecules. By simply feeding in now what's normally a plant product, olivetolic acid, so that's what the plants make. And then you could specifically attach this GPP, the Geranyl Power Phosphate, to that that makes CBGA, which is the precursor to all of the cannabinoids. The key there though was that we knew we could make the GPP, but the enzyme from the plant was a membrane protein. So, we knew that was going to be difficult to work with cell-free membrane proteins. And so, we found a bacterial protein that did a similar reaction, re-engineered it to actually do the reaction that we want, and showed that we could use this approach to make, just by feeding in the one substrate and making the other one, we could then use that designed enzyme to put the two together to make CBGA. So that's how the whole glycolysis to terpenes and then marries cannabinoid production because it's reusing all the elements that we had already developed.
So, we had done a lot of that work upfront. So, the terpene work was some of the earlier stuff that we had done. We had a lot of experience with glycolysis, and at the time we were talking to the DOE, and they said, well, can you do something else? Can you make something that's more DOE related and has a better carbon yield? Can you make isobutanol and that's actually just five enzymes off of the end of glycolysis. And so, we demonstrated you could do that really quickly… that you can make isobutanol. Interestingly, our first attempts made enough isobutanol to denature the proteins, which is also the limit that you get to in cells, if you don't do any kind of Crazy engineering. And so, we recognized if we just stabilize the enzyme, that's one of the limitations. There are others, but that's one of the limitations is that the isobutanol you make kills those enzymes. If we could just stabilize them, then we could produce potentially much more isobutanol as a biofuel.
And so that's what we did. We didn't just stabilize the enzyme but the five enzymes to make isobutanol. We stabilized all of glycolysis… so, the whole pathway. Now you had enzymes that were heat stable and solvent stable, simplified their isolation, and then it allows them to last much longer. And so, then we were able to make I think the published amount is 250 grams per liter affected titer of isobutanol within I think it was four days. So, it was about 2x times the rate that you could get in in cells So, its max rate was about four grams per liter per hour. It did slow down over time, but it got to a really high titer and all of the sugar that went in, all that glucose, went directly to Isobutanol and nowhere else.
So, when you measure it, you basically have your starting input glucose because we really tried to push it as far as possible and you had isobutanol and that was it. And so, it demonstrated that not only could these systems be really efficient and last for a long period of time. But in engineering these enzymes to be stable, you could increase the length of time that these systems worked.
James | Slack Capital:
And I'd like to add that these scientific reports were released quite a few years ago, so before the integration of the modern tools and all these exciting developments that have occurred more recently with the platform.
But something which was announced just recently, which is also very exciting, is that eXoZymes developed a chemical from the design to the actual synthesis in a matter of weeks, which is honestly something truly unheard of.
So eXoZymes also holds numerous patents towards its platform and the numerous scientific innovations which the company's developed. So, what are the elements which make it hard for a competitor to replicate?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
So, we have IP that covers a broad array of the technologies, and so you can bucket it into: process, composition of matter, and then the enzymes themselves and the knowhow to make them and to set up those reactions.
And so, within the process you have both how to set it up, in addition to some of the specific enzyme mutants that go into that pathway. And then on the composition of matter, we have definitely small molecules that we've made, that you have IP on as well. That that final product. And then kind of that third part within the trade secret about knowing how to set these things up really makes it hard to replicate these systems and the ability to do that at scale.
James | Slack Capital:
So existing chemical manufacturing methods and cell-based technologies have a lot of inherent issues, and eXoZymes platform looks like it can overcome a lot of these downfalls. So then with these advantages. competitors may enter into the space with competing technology platforms that are somewhat scientifically similar. However, eXoZymes has a lot of the patents, which you alluded to, and also, they have the first mover advantage. So then how significant is this?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Yeah, I think that's actually quite big. We have the knowledge and experience of working with these multi-step reactions which takes some doing. And I think that having that perspective in addition to IP that covers some of the aspects that make these things run for long periods of time, I think gives us an advantage as well. We've also been doing this for a long time.
James | Slack Capital:
Yeah, and I could imagine reverse engineering the platform would take a lot of time and also a lot of capital.
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Yeah.
James | Slack Capital:
There was also an announcement released recently where there's more development occurring on eXoZymes platform and this has been supported by federal funding, which is really exciting to see.
So, as we finish off here what vision of the future are you most excited to bring forth with eXoZymes platform?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Yeah. I'm really excited to see our technology solve problems in the market, to be able to produce chemicals that that people want that they've had a difficult time accessing for a variety of reasons. Cannabinoid fit that picture, isobutanol fits that picture as well, As a renewables solution for fuels and commodity chemicals.
And so really being able to execute on what we've built and the platform that we've designed, and you know. Seeing that be realized is where the vision goes and how this continues to grow. So yeah, I'm really excited. The future's going the futures bright. We have a lot of things that are exciting that that we're trying to do.
James | Slack Capital:
Definitely in the future's looking very exciting for eXoZymes and I'm very glad to be a shareholder as part of the company. But as we finish off the interview here, was there anything final that you wanted to add?
Tyler | eXoZymes:
I don't think so. There's been a lot of stuff that's been done using synthetic biology. A lot of things have been tried. Some things have worked, kind of, but there's not a lot of successes. I think at the end of the day, the markets need options to make chemicals that people want. As Michael says, to give us the life that we want to live, the good life. And so, I think at the least, we're providing options for people to be able to make those compounds that can be used in as fuels, flavours, pharma type applications.
James | Slack Capital:
Well, thank you so much Tyler for jumping on and having this extended conversation about the science behind the platform and a bit more about the intricacies.
I'd like to remind everyone to jump onto my Substack report on eXoZymes and read all the details and find out further information about what we've covered today. But yeah, thank you so much for taking the time and I'm very appreciative.
Tyler | eXoZymes:
Yeah. Thanks again. I really appreciate your time and asking me to chat. Yeah.
