Deinove dumps biofuels for nutrition and antibiotics; shares plunge

This past week, Deinove’s shares have been plunging and you might wonder why. Bottom line, the company’s directors decided on a strategic refocus of its activities on high value-added markets of carotenoids (nutrition and cosmetics) and antibiotics (human health), with notably the conversion of Deinobiotics’ activities (created in 2012, specialized in research & development of novel antibiotics, and currently a minority subsidiary of Deinove) into a wholly owned subsidiary through Deinobiotics’ shareholders’ contributions in kind to Deinove.

Industrial development of biofuels has been suspended until a potential change of the biofuels market context.

“Our 2nd generation biofuel program has made several advances, including the proof of concept that Deinococcus can be a true innovative chassis for biological production,” said CEO Emmanuel Petiot. “ Incidentally, this will give our new strategy a solid technological footing. We have also built a cutting-edge integrated genetic, metabolic and fermentation engineering platform. We will capitalize on these developments by focusing on applications for which there already is a market; carotenoids, in particular, have many potential health, cosmetic and nutrition applications with high added value”.

In addition to consolidating and expanding Deinobiotics’ activities, the teams will concentrate their efforts on the Deinochem/carotenoids program, make headway on nutrition projects with Avril and Flint Hills Resourcs S and foster other partnerships on target markets of health and cosmetics for which Deinove has developed a program to identify other compounds of interest within its strain library.

http://www.deinove.com