Amyris, DARPA  sign $35M pact, aimed at accelerating, reducing cost of bringing new molecules to market

September 27, 2015 |

In California,  Amyris and  the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office have signed a multi-year, Technology Investment Agreementworth up to $35 million with  to create new research and development tools and technologies that will significantly reduce the time and cost of bringing new molecules to market. Amyris has chosen five specialized subcontractors to assist in achieving these innovations.

According to DARPA, its focus in working with industrial biotechnology companies is to competitively solicit “innovative proposals to develop new tools, technologies and methodologies” to create new capabilities in biotech. The tools and infrastructure developed through DARPA-funded efforts are expected to enable the rapid and scalable development of transformative defense-relevant products and systems that are currently too complex to access.

Among these efforts is a focus on development of next-generation tools and technologies with the goal of compressing the time to market for any new molecule by at least 10-fold in both time and cost. Amyris will leverage its current and planned infrastructure to generate commercial-scale amounts of hundreds of new molecules of relevance to DARPA’s Living Foundries program. These molecules are anticipated to include chemical building blocks for accessing radical new materials that are impossible to create with traditional petroleum-based feedstocks.

Beyond the anticipated industry-wide advancements to be made, this effort is expected to expand Amyris’s research activities across multiple new organisms, add hundreds of new molecules from multiple pathways to Amyris’s production portfolio, and integrate several advanced technologies into Amyris’s strain improvement pipeline.

The agreement is expected to diversify Amyris’ portfolio of host organisms and molecule classes, and enable simultaneous scale-up of hundreds of molecules with a wide array of end-market applications

More on the story.

Category: Fuels

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