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What's next for synthetic biology with Fermbox Bio's Subramani Ramachandrappa
143 Plays3 months ago
Karthik, Mike, and Alina are joined by the founder of Fermbox Bio, Subramani Ramachandrappa, to discuss everything synthetic biology: the new business models that are unlocking scale-up, what products need to be successful, how consumers are responding, and even the future of food.
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Transcript
Introduction to Sustainable Innovation
00:00:12
Speaker
Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Lux Research's Innovation Matters podcast, the best place to get information on sustainable innovation and to stay on top of trends. I'm your host, Karthik Subramanian. I'm joined today by my co-hosts, Alina Strugut and Mike Holman, as well as ah we have a special guest today from India, Subramani Ramachandrapa, or Subhu.
What is Synthetic Biology?
00:00:34
Speaker
He's joining us from Bangalore and he's the founder of Fox Bio, a synthetic biology or sin bio company. ah Hello, everyone. How's how was it hanging, I guess? Doing well, thanks. Thank you, Karthik, for getting us started. All right. So I guess ah to kick things off, of course, and and with the very obvious question. So Subhu, could you please explain to some of our listeners who are not aware of Synbio as to what Synbio is, what you do at Firmboxbio,
00:01:03
Speaker
ah your innovation journey so far. And I believe you also worked at another company, Loros Bio, which also did something similar. So could you please take us through how you got to Firmbox Bio, what's in Bio is? All right, thank you. Let me start by introducing Sinbio and then talk about my journey in this industry and why Firmbox even happened as recently as ah last year.
00:01:28
Speaker
I think since COVID, we've all been introduced to these words like DNA, RNA, sequencing, polymerase, many terms which we many of us in day-to-day lives doing other stuff other than biotech haven't heard of before. But this science has been around for over 100 years, right? Way back in 1950s, Watson and Crick actually said that there's something called DNA. And then from there, a lot of work happened after that. Using fermentation to produce products happened way back in probably 1920s, late 1920s. So this science is not new to this world. It's just been evolving over time. So what is SynBio? SynBio is a science with which we can understand the DNA of any living organism.
00:02:28
Speaker
Now, what is this DNA? In IT t or technology, you have zeros and ones, which are binary code, which we call software in the form of binary code. And when we write a code to make an application like this computer or the apps we use on our phone, you develop a binary code and put it into a semiconductor. right That's where it sits in the chip. But in living systems, plants, animals, insects, humans, name them, any living system, also has a similar code, but it sits inside a cell. The difference between an IT code, which is binary, and the living code is the living code has four variables, A, T, C, and G. And it exists like a ladder in two bands. So just imagine for a moment.
00:03:21
Speaker
If we can do magic with zeros and ones, what is possible with four variables in two strands like a helix? Now, that's the magic of nature. And it's the same code across all living things. So that opens up a lot of possibilities. So if we can read and edit and modify a software code, make new patches, you can do that with living systems. So in 1950s, we understood all living systems have a DNA code, which is like a software.
Applications of Synbio
00:03:55
Speaker
And then with time, we figured out how to sequence that with lower costs. We figured out how to edit them. For a moment, just imagine Spider-Man.
00:04:04
Speaker
He gets bit by a spider and something happens to his DNA and now he can spew spider webs, right? Similarly, in synthetic bio, you can actually take a gene responsible to make, say, insulin in humans, copy that and put it into an yeast or a bacteria and produce human insulin. And that happened in the 80s. So if if if you ever look at anybody who's diabetic using insulin, you are using one of the first SinBio product as a medicine, as a better, safer, traceable, animal-free product. Having said that, today SinBio is breaking the barriers of just human health applications.
Future and Opportunities in Synbio
00:04:51
Speaker
Like, as you can imagine, if you build space tech, one day it becomes a toaster in the kitchen.
00:04:58
Speaker
So Synbio first made products to save lives, like human health, and now it's going towards the bottom of the pyramid with science becoming more affordable. Now we can make biomaterials. We can make colors, dyes, flavors, fragrances. For instance, most of the fragrances used to come from pine trees, like pine oil, and you would modify them to make fragrances and perfumes. Now there are no pine trees. you can actually take the same sequence that worked in a pine tree and make the same pine oil kind of an extract from which you can make fragrances. So, SynBio is not a good to have science. It is the science for us to go into the future. Yeah, Sussi, but I think you you've kind of hit on a key point about SynBio and that we we we we've talked to about ah talk about with a lot of our you our clients and companies that that are active and in the SynBio space is that
00:05:53
Speaker
it is this very powerful platform technology. There's a huge variety of different applications and materials and products and foods and and and so on that you can that you can produce with it. So and maybe a little bit to your journey at the sort of firmbox bio, like how did you, what's what's your ah kind of unique, what was the unique opportunity that you saw sort of in this in this broad space and and how did you um kind of how did you hone in on that on that unique opportunity? So I've been a biotech entrepreneur for more than two decades. I built a company around enzymes to conserve food, energy and water. That was way back in 2000. It was kind of a little early for sustainability businesses.
Scaling Challenges and Financial Strategies
00:06:36
Speaker
So that's what I did. And then we pivoted to make animal free proteins to make medicine safer. So we use recombinant or sin biotechnologies to make products which came from animals in
00:06:50
Speaker
yeast or bacteria and now give a clean product to the insulin guys, vaccine guys, et cetera. That business grew leaps and bounds until 2016. The world changed. In 2016, there was an explosion of sin bio opportunities. If you look at US, Europe, Israel, every lab, every institute wanted to make a new product. In fact, if you and I sat across the table and said, Hey, which is that one product which comes currently from plants, animals, or chemistry that you would like like to make in a biological system? We'll come up with five ideas. And when this happened, a lot of this work was getting done in labs, and we had this manufacturing plant where we used to make animal-free proteins.
00:07:33
Speaker
So we were like in the eye of the storm and we were a perfect partner to help many of these startups scale. So my last company Richcore started scaling for products all over the world. It went it was eggs, it was milk, it was dyes, it was gelatin, it was almost anything that the world was making. They started making their beeline to Bangalore where we built this plant for our products and we became a CMO. One of the things I learned there prompted me to think of how the world would move from there on. If you're making Sinbio products, you're going to make huge large volume. Just think if someone succeeds in making egg white or if somebody succeeds in making casein like milk protein.
00:08:17
Speaker
You need to compete with a cow in every street in India. So you will have to produce this in large facilities all over the world in every county and district in the world. And it's not possible by going to a toll manufacturer. Right. So and then the cost is so low that you need to build large enough scale and change the raw material to make it viable. I had raised funds in Ridge Corps and then Loris Labs, which is a chemistry company who had interests in green chemistry, wanted to acquire my investors and they came and created an exit. And then I was pushing for a more collaborative approach to build a global symbiocompany, which would not happen if you are one company model. Because if you want to build plants, you're stuck with equity and debt and you can't really build multiple plants. So I exited my,
00:09:07
Speaker
stock in Laureus Bio and formed up my initial team to build Firmbox Bio which is built on the platform of not just in bio but a global collaboration for product development, for scale-up and for manufacturing. My theory is if you want to be successful in manufacturing you may need to bring new types of capital, new types of partnerships and that's what Firmbox Bio is doing. Yeah, i mean it's such a I mean, as you articulated, right, in that sort of Cambrian explosion of sin-bio startups and in in the last decade, right, there was a lot of great science done, people figured out how to make all kinds of cool things, but um not a lot of those companies figured out how to successfully scale up the the the manufacturing, and that's, I think, been been the big
00:09:55
Speaker
challenge for sin bio to, to, to be able to manufacture cost effectively and to target, uh, applications that can, um, you know, that, that value the attributes that, that, that sin bio can, can bring, because it's, it often isn't practical cost-wise to compete on a you know, for for sort of really base commodity type of type of products. So can you go go a little bit more into this? I mean, you you hit on a couple of points in there, right? There's the manufacturing approach, but then there's there's also the funding approach to try to to to get around this, because I think we've also found that
00:10:33
Speaker
you know, venture capital and even public markets is maybe not the best mechanism or the the for for for for funding this this type of scale up. So can you go a little bit more into into that, what you see that manufacturing model and that business model being to kind of get over that hump? In order to explain the financial model, I need to start with what happens in scaling up or building plants for symbiote. The biology is always pushing the boundaries. Like people all over the world are doing research and able to make new products, maybe increase yields, purified to be exactly identical to what we have. So I have no questions there. But when I built plants previously in Richcore,
00:11:19
Speaker
I was literally building this as my own project. I bought fermenters from different companies. I bought wastewater systems from somebody else. I got the plumbing guy to fit them. I bought boilers for somebody else. So I was in essence, essentially I was building my own mobile phone. So I was buying bits and pieces and putting it together. There was no single contractor or partner who could build a plan for you because Synbio and biotech is so broad that each product requires a very different approach in manufacturing. People have perfected the art of making monoclonal antibodies or insulins because they are existent. But when you make new products with new host cells and new downstream processes, everything's different.
00:12:08
Speaker
and it is bound to be inefficient or bound to fail because the biologist is not tuned to be an engineer to build a plant. But then we've got to learn what's not our skill and build this plant. So it requires someone to solve the manufacturing or industrialization juggernaut for investors to be having confidence in investing in these projects. Any sin bio project which is worth its size like a million liters or more requires or a hundred million dollars to build a million liter facility. Companies in the past who wanted to make food protein they raised 200-300 million dollars with a promise to build their own plant but none of them have been able to do it because there's this big chasm to cross one in cost economics and two how do you put the steel on ground and operate it? It's a very different beast.
00:12:57
Speaker
Investors who want to build plants have a low risk appetite. They like growth. They like a fixed income. They like a fixed IRR. So anybody doing sin bio should do financial engineering of how to fund rather than just clone engineering. So what Firmbox does is one, we co-locate the manufacturing facility. So we co-locate where there are sugars, waters. This is not new. It's happened before, but never happened in bio manufacturing. And then like we go to sugar mills or distilleries and then we give them an IRR model where number one, they invest like $1,800 million dollars under their nose. So there's more comfort to build that plan. If I tell you that 45% of my capex is utilities and 65% of my time is managing utilities in a biomanufacturing facility.
00:13:48
Speaker
Isn't it just better to work with a partner who's the best at it, like a sugar mill or a distillery or a paper mill, who always ran utilities. And all you need to do as a bio company is build a couple of fermenters in their facility or right next to it. That makes life a lot easier for us. But that someone has to take that first step. And so providing these partners who are risk averse an IRR model to go ahead and do a capex within their compound compound just changed the game for us. So we're building a one million liter facility in Thailand with BBGI, which is a large green initiative company funded by the biggest oil marketing company because they want to move towards sustainability.
00:14:31
Speaker
It was a no-brainer that our IRR was better than IRR that they could focus on from a typical ethanol business. So the future of Sinbio will be about co-locating, collaborating, and reducing the risk to investors. And they should operate separate from a tech, risk-heavy company. So they should get into joint ventures. And what I'm seeing now is as we're building the plant, you have many other family offices and large funds who like CapEx. saying, hey, we want a small piece of this asset. So then it delists further. So you can have four or five different owners to the same plant, very much like power manufacturing or internet cables under the sea. So it's a new real estate asset class, which gives a fixed income to the investors. Forget about them understanding biotech. They understand capex, IRR, margins, and cost. So if we can make that shift,
00:15:27
Speaker
I think same buyer will be successful and we'll build plans all over the world. Yeah, but I think it's I mean, the there is still a level of of of risk there, right, that I'm sure it's it's challenging to get to get some of these, you know, more traditional, you know, sugar processing or other companies to ah to buy into, um is there a role? i'm I'm curious, I mean, you mentioned you're you're building this first facility in Thailand. I know there's a very strong kind of bioeconomy push from the government and the public sector there. Do you see that sort of support as being playing a role and in getting some of these you know initial deployments over the line? no So let me explain. One is, of course, a country willing to do this is very good, right? A country giving you policies which is supportive.
00:16:14
Speaker
Number two, companies you're working with thinking of sustainable products is the other ad, right? Like you need a partner who wants to do this. The third most important thing to be successful is you build a million litre in stages so that you keep reducing the risk with every success that you can bring at different scales. So the plant we're building is, we're first building a 40% capacity, which is 400,000 liters. We're filling the capacity. And then we are engaging with other companies who want to use bigger capacities in the same plant and inviting them to co-share the capacity. So in a way, you don't build the capex until you actually sustain its revenue and its breakeven. Most importantly,
00:17:03
Speaker
You need a success story. That's been the problem of senbio. You need a success story of a product. You need a success story of a plant. So what we do at Firmbox is we pick products which are currently sold at more than $100 per kilogram of protein basis. So anything about $100, trust me, will be viable in precision fermentation. And it will give an IRR which will solve for the capex. Number two, I am building capex in phases and inviting others to use that capacity, which means it's reduced the risk of my investors even further. So this manufacturing plant is a standalone toll manufacturing JV. And Firmbox is its first customer.
00:17:45
Speaker
and Firmbox can invite others to come and partake in that same. It's like building a hotel and you using two floors and remaining five floors, you find others who can use that capacity. By doing that, by narrowing and pooling resources, I think we'll have the first success story. And when I'm talking about this plant, I'm having companies from Africa who are saying, hey, why don't we do a feasibility in Africa? We're having companies from Eastern Europe saying, can we do a feasibility? So they want to come and visit because they are traditional investors. They want to see it on the ground. And I'm lucky that we found a partner who trusts us and who's taking that first step. See, someone's got to take the first step. And then when this plant is done by February 25,
00:18:30
Speaker
you're going to see many more companies replicate this model. And I think that's what Firmbox wants to do. We want to disrupt how sin bio manufacturing can be successful. So you um you mentioned targeting these high value products over $100 per kilogram. Just for our sort of listeners, what are some of the examples of the the markets where you're you're seeing that kind of potential? So we we see that, of course, in colors, dyes, flavors, starting materials. um cosmosuttics So we're staying away from human health and we are enabling food companies to work with us to build scale.
00:19:10
Speaker
But we are focusing in the middle sector, colors, flavors, cosmetics, dyes, fats, lipids. This has been our focus here. One of the things that ah stood out to me, and and maybe I'm thinking the wrong way can and you can correct me, ah I wanted to ask you about the collaboration aspect right now. When you're a company in Sinbai or maybe in in in a lot of sectors, for example, I cover nuclear fusion. And I see that you have the fusion industry association where you have a lot of startups, even though they have different technologies that they're developing, they want to collaborate, they want to get together because they know that fusion is quite far away. And only if we are together, then we can, you know, commercialize this technology and get the attention of regulators and everyone involved and stakeholders and private investors.
Importance of Collaboration and IP in Synbio
00:19:52
Speaker
But when you start collaborating, you also have concerns over information leakage, IP leakage. People are concerned of what if someone's going to rip off my technology and use it and get first instead of me.
00:20:03
Speaker
So ah maybe this is not relevant to this in Biospace, but I just wanted to ask you, are there any concerns from other startups or even when you're collaborating with other players, even larger players on information leakage? How do we ensure that we get there first? But you know my key differentiator remains a key differentiator. First, let's understand the IP part in Symbio. The products are not novel. We all agree. We're making a color, or a dye, or a fat, or a lipid, which is in nature. So the product by itself, there is no IP. But the IP revolves around your expression system you use, the kind of gene editing and molecular biology work that you did on your clone to produce a certain product. It also revolves around your process, how you've been able to be efficient, how you purified it.
00:20:50
Speaker
and how exactly you were able to make a product which is viable. A part of it would still remain a trade secret because it will be part of the manufacturing plant. it will And ah the fingerprint of the product is quite unique because you used a living system and it would leave its fingerprint on the final product. So it's not difficult for you to identify if somebody sold what we call stole your clone and went and made it in another factor. So to that extent, you're protected. Number two, I think the beauty of this business is who can scale wildly? So the entry barriers to be able to build scale and produce this product itself is not going to be easy for someone to just copy paste.
00:21:39
Speaker
You will see that most of these clones are built in with tools such that after three or four generations, they don't produce the product. So you can build in that kind. If someone took your clone and IP, they can't just go and multiply that into many batches. So it would stop after a few batches. And you need a lot more of the ecosystem, including your distribution channel, your products, your customers. to be able to build that kind of traction. Lastly, you could challenge countries. Some countries may have more lax approach, and somebody may just pick up a clone and do this. But I think the more it gets done, the volumes are so huge. Your customer awareness like Microsoft did in the past, where if there was more piracy, and more people just used it and you convert them, this is going to happen.
00:22:24
Speaker
And competition from big companies could be challenged with the IP you've generated because you can't start one fine day. You should have done that clone development process engineering stuff for companies to just copy paste. And my experience in my last company where we scaled more than 150 processes, nobody were worried about that IP. Not one company. They would send us the clones for scale up. One, there's a trust between companies. Two, India as a country itself gave a lot of protection for such licensed clone because when you import a clone, you disclose to the government that you're importing a particular clone with a certain construct from such and such customer to do a toll manufacturing.
00:23:06
Speaker
So you already disclosed that I brought this clone from somebody. You cannot bring a stolen clone and do recombinant products anyway because every country has an app approval process for synthetically engineered organisms. I was wondering from the consumer perspective, we're seeing in our research that ah consumers are fascinated by the idea of using technology to solve big health problems and the potential to revolutionize medicine. However, um there is also a little bit of an unease because it blurs the lines between what's natural and what's artificial.
00:23:44
Speaker
And it's this mix of hope and discomfort that creates a kind of um of a boundary anxiety where the thrill of innovation clashes with concerns about ethical limit and preserving the natural order. So I was wondering how important is Is it to to educate consumers about symbiote and biomaterials and tame their fears? what What steps are you taking to to make this information accessible?
00:24:16
Speaker
so um My experience looking at this industry very closely is that you need to split the market into food products, into industrial and cosmetics for example. You need to split these markets into different categories because Sinbio products have been acceptable say in flavors and amino acids for instance even in food historically like there's no amino acid which comes from meat anymore they're mostly making it in fermentation. Then you have products like in cosmetics they've always used products like hyaluronic acid or others so I don't see there is a resistance there from a even from a B to C
00:24:59
Speaker
for my consumer perspective. I think the challenge is coming more when we would buy it and use it at home. Stuff like cultivated meat or an egg made through fermentation. My experience is most of the companies have spent more time doing customer awareness than solving for price parity right now. And I think with time, Customers will understand that the milk we buy is written with steroids, with hormones, with antibiotics, and its impact we are seeing in antimicrobial resistance, in antibacterial resistance because of, you know, use of antibiotics in animals. That awareness is picking up. I think phase one, companies should first make it viable. Phase two,
00:25:49
Speaker
There will be innovators, followers, and laggards very much like technology adoption in Sinbio. And then we are not worried about a billion people consuming it because you'll need billions millions of plants. I think Sinbio should first focus on the innovators who would set this trend, which is what is happening, and bring a viable product, which is not 100 times your current cost, but more viable to make a case. And I think awareness will come with time and we should we cannot rush this to the consumer perspective. On cultivated meat, here you're growing living cells. One of the ah thought processes is, hey, is this more processed meat? Actually, it's the other way around because you're taking ah the same cell from the animal, not modifying its genetic makeup.
Consumer Education and Cultural Shifts
00:26:40
Speaker
You're feeding it ultra pure growth factors and cell culture medium and producing the cells and putting them on plant scaffolds. No meat is lesser processed than cultivated meat. And I think when people start visualizing or are visiting manufacturing plants, like all of us have visited farms, we've visited juice factories, we've seen milk factories, and we have a certain growing up with it. I think the new millennials will have to start seeing this like, ah the food factory on BBC or CNN or whatever, we need to see that so that with time, as they solve for price, consumers will become more aware that this is cleaner, better and very traceable. Right now, the lobbies are so strong that we have to fight that war and it will take us some time.
00:27:30
Speaker
Yeah, just sticking to the consumer side, I was maybe curious to hear your thought on this, not necessarily with firmbox bio, right? But I'm a vegetarian, so I don't typically look at cultivated meat or any other kind of meat, but of course I do have plant-based meat, which is not meat, but it's just, you know, supposed to be tasting like meat, apparently. um I don't know how meat tastes like so I can't even call for that but I'm just curious what people think about cultivated meat because it's really not meat some people say so even among these innovators who you know really need to push for example with the Apple Vision Pro right everyone knows that it's a product for the innovators right now it's really expensive and it's not for the for the general folk so
00:28:09
Speaker
I just wanted to get your take on how people are thinking about these products from that aspect. like Is it a meat replacement? like Is it going to give me the same taste, the same feeling? um So how are you seeing that side impacting technology development to get it into market? So Firmbox Bio is partnering with LF Farms to help scale up cultivated meat. So that's our play in cultivating meat. It's not our product, but we're using our know-how to help them scale up, right? And when I speak to the founder of this company, I want to share his view because it makes a lot of sense to me. He says the future of food will not be quantity. It will be quality over quantity, right? Protein dense, nutrition dense food will be the way how we will eventually start consuming proteins of the future. So if you put 100 grams of cultivated meat, right, which is not processed without antibiotics, without steroids, and it's dense for you to consume,
00:29:04
Speaker
without cholesterol, without the fat, it's far more nutritionally beneficial for you than a one pound beef steak, which has many other things which you really don't need to consume, which is like extreme fat and extreme cholesterol and stuff like that, including the amino acids and the lack of B12 nowadays in meat. So I don't think it's a concern for the meat eaters provided You get close to that taste and that feel where you have the oozing of the blood, the color, the taste, and it's gonna take some time to really mimic nature did this over millions of years. So it's gonna take a while. So they've started off with ground meat, right? People are doing ground meat. And now LFM is making cuts, thin slices. And now 3D printing is changing the game. So now they'll be able to build up, you know, print a 3D steak
00:30:00
Speaker
with a bone in it so that you can almost consume that. The other thing about food from a consumer perspective is it's about culture, right? Food is culture for all of us anywhere in the world. And shifts in culture happens when there are shocks in the world. It could be wars like famine, like World War II changed how we ate food. Like in India, we have coffee with chicory in it because when there was no coffee, they gave people chicory powder. And now in South of India, you don't have coffee without chicory, right? So there will be shocks from global warming, from wars, from lack of water or pollution. And people will make that shift. So we may have a sudden shift or a gradual shift, but this shift will come and the form of the food we eat will change.
00:30:49
Speaker
Will we just pop pills like people do in space? I don't know. But that's quite extreme. But on Earth, you will see that the form of food will change. When I was in the US recently, I saw everybody in the morning just sipping a shake in the morning. No one's eating breakfast. Right now, egg white can go right into that as a protein supplement. Who would know? Who would see the difference? You put some fruits and egg white and you have a protein shake versus putting two eggs in it. So my take is that there will be a cultural shift, but there may be external events which may make that happen faster. Global warming, wars, like if you made these products in Africa, for instance, and made a protein viable by using their cassava or tapioca starch, you're gonna democratize food for them.
00:31:37
Speaker
And they wouldn't care if the protein came in the form of a cow or it came in a glass of milk, because it makes them nutritious. And you can put it in midday meals. You can give it for kids. So all this is going to change. Five years ago, who talked about protein shakes? Like if you now go to a department store, everyone's buying protein supplements, right? It's not like we don't eat meat, but we're still doing that. So i I think cultural shift will trigger this industry a lot more than we can imagine. Yeah, it's an interesting point. you you mentioned We had a great conversation a a few episodes ago with our colleague Amy Harris about um how food companies are starting to bring out products designed specifically for people who are on Ozempic or some of these other related weight loss drugs right because you um they they
00:32:28
Speaker
reduce your appetite so to maintain your health you actually need to eat foods that are more Nutrient-dense as as you were just describing. So I hadn't really thought of that before but there is ah Perhaps a confluence there between that trend around um Around those osempic and other drugs and and the benefits that some of these sin bio based foods could potentially provide and I did have one other thing ah maybe before we wrap up that I was was interested to to circle back to is um kind of the the geography of of of manufacturing, right?
Geographical Shifts in Synbio Manufacturing
00:33:07
Speaker
Because of course when you you talk about all these products, um at least a lot of these you know dyes and other additives and things are made from petrochemical processes, a lot of materials.
00:33:18
Speaker
of course are as well. And ah the production for those is sort of well one, like oil is pretty easy to transport relatively speaking, um but also a lot of the infrastructure we have for manufacturing that is built up around, you know, places where there is oil in the the the in the Middle East, in the US Gulf Coast and and and so on. um But if the sin bio and this type of manufacturing becomes much more predominant, then it should be oriented around places where there is biomass. You mentioned you're building this facility in Thailand. ah You mentioned a lot of interest from from perhaps industry in Africa, which I think is is really intriguing. So what's your thought on that, how you see potentially this this type of production changing the the geographic geography of where where manufacturing is done?
00:34:12
Speaker
So Sinbio needs building blocks. It needs carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, right? like it Because it builds a product. It puts them together into some form. To be honest, Sinbio right now has not even scratched the surface. We are using sugars like dextrose, glucose, sucrose to make these products because that's what's available. What you will see when you dig deeper is you need a carbon source. a microorganism will recognize a carbon source when it sees it. I mean, it's like dropping all nationalities and color of our skin. We are all humans, right? So a bug doesn't differentiate as long as it gets used to consuming a different carbon.
00:34:59
Speaker
The future, the present is using all these biomass dependent, corn plant dependent or rice or wheat crop dependent. But the next wave is using cellulosic sugars. it's like you It's about using carbon capture to methanol or another form of carbon. It's about using algae from the ocean, which has sugars itself. It's about using waste polluted water, which is fermenting with carbon source in it, which is like methane, for instance. So my take is, as we keep solving for a new carbon source, you can make different products. So now you name me a place and we can actually figure out this could be a future carbon source because the world has carbon.
00:35:47
Speaker
either in carbon dioxide or in methane or in the ocean or in algae or in plants or in the bark of a tree. So what will happen with time is we will do away with glucose and sucrose, which is, I would say, high-end carbon easy to eat sugars, and then we'll be able to use other carbons. And eventually, if we can capture carbon dioxide, one of the companies in India is doing that. If they're able to consume carbon dioxide and produce protein, We have so much of it. So we can do this anywhere in the world. Now let's take the Middle East. They're using date sugar right now. So they say we can build fermentation, but we'll give you a lot of dates and it has sugar. Go for it.
00:36:28
Speaker
so Every country, like you can use tapioca, you can use tubers in Africa to make protein. So, and it's still easier than carbon capture. So the future would keep changing the benefits of a certain country. And like right now we are dependent on oil resources. I think it will eventually come back to carbon dioxide, which is all over the world. So no one country would be really in a dominant food production capacity unless they're not able to invest infrastructure.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:37:00
Speaker
Well, it's been a pleasure having you on, Subhu. Thanks again for joining Alina Mike. It's been a pleasure having all of you on. And to all our listeners, if you like the content on this podcast, please feel free to like, share, subscribe, and add your comments. ah Your feedback is highly appreciated. And rate it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you find your podcasts. Thank you so much for joining, Subhu. Pleasure talking to you once again. And we'll catch you all guys in the next one. Thank you so much Lux Research Team. I enjoyed your questions. I hope I've been able to give some color to the questions you had. Innovation Matters is a production of Lux Research, the leading sustainable innovation research and advisory firm. You can follow this podcast on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want more, check out www.luxresearchinc dot.com slash blog for all the latest news, opinions, and articles. so