Hi HN, Gaurab here, co-founder and CEO at Solugen (YC W17):
http://www.solugentech.com.
We convert plant sugars into hydrogen peroxide. Our overall goal is to replace petroleum-based chemicals with purer, plant-derived substitutes. We’re going after peroxides first because the process to make them is petroleum-dependent and quite atrocious.
Peroxides are everywhere: they’re used to disinfect and clean many of the surfaces you encounter everyday; they’re used to make the plastics in the chairs you’re sitting in; they’re used to etch the a7 chip on your iphones, they’re even used to clean the food and water that you consumed today. But the dirty secret is that it’s extremely expensive to make peroxide, costing up to $100M to make a small facility, with an end product that’s contaminated with a high level of dangerous impurities. Worse, because of the petroleum based chemistry used to make peroxide, one facility explodes per year!
So we made something better. I was finishing my MD/PhD and discovered an enzyme in pancreatic cancer that could efficiently produce hydrogen peroxide from sugars. At the same time my co-founder Sean was was at MIT finishing up his chemE PhD on the production of hydrogen peroxide on nanoparticles. We came together and used crispr/cas9 technology to scale up our process and figured out how to convert plant sugars into hydrogen peroxide for a safer and cheaper process that doesn’t explode. You may be asking “what happens to all the carbons in the carbohydrate backbone?!”, well we actually use the carbohydrate itself has a catalyst, regenerating through a hydrogenation process. So the only inputs in the system are H2 + O2 and the only output is H2O2.
We’ve made the world’s first peroxide made from plants, calling our product BIO-Peroxide, and released a Bioperoxide wipes line called Ode to Clean: http://www.odetoclean.com.
Our tech enables:
1.) CRISPR/Cas9 means enzymes can be readily optimized and mass-manufactured very inexpensively. We can continuously engineer and release new enzyme catalysts like software. This means biotech can now compete against traditional chemical processing.
2.) Direct consequence of 1. is that chemical synthesis via enzymes will be cheaper and more efficient than traditional fermentation processes
3.) Traditional petrochemical process design is not suited for enzymatic reactions, and neither is fermentation. We need new reactor systems that are bespoke for each enzyme. Enzyme-reactor fit.
4.) Because enzymes are so efficient and our new reactors maximize enzyme efficiency even further, the entire chemical industry can be made smaller through micromanufacturing. Economies of scale no longer need to be so excessive.
This leads into Solugen's MASTER PLAN!! (muahahha)
Phase 1, we developed our own enzyme and our own custom reactor for it. We can now make plant-based products such as hydrogen peroxide that can compete against petroleum processing, even on a small scale (see https://www.odetoclean.com). Phase 2, we will partner with other biotech companies to bring our reactor technologies onsite. Here we do paid pilots, design and sell a process package, offer technical support during installation, and we sell our engineered enzymes to the customers. Phase 3, we move into other chemical verticals, Phase 4, become a general chemical company that we want to model after 3M where there are both significant b2b and b2c revenue streams.
Really looking forward to a discussing with the community and getting feedback! This market is exploding! (bc peroxide plants blow up)
AFAIK the main problem with enzymes as catalysts beyond the bench scale is their limited lifetime. How is the half-life of your enzymes at operating conditions? I'm just curious how the process works in real life (so are probably your potential customers).