🎥 Enduro Genetics aims to deliver its first two projects this year to turbocharge bioproduction: ‘We’re taking some of the ‘bio’ out of biomanufacturing’

Spun out of the Technical University of Denmark, Enduro Genetics addresses a fundamental problem in biomanufacturing—declining production at scale and poor yields—says CEO Christian Munch.

In a nutshell, Enduro effectively tricks cells into thinking that they have to produce a target substance in order to survive, by linking the expression of essential genes, which are critical for the survival of an organism, and high-production of the target substance in a cell.

“Our solution [‘Enduro Sense’] is a genetic biosensor that couples with essential genes in the cell and that means that only cells that are high-producers of the target substance can grow or proliferate,” explains Munch. “The essential genes are upregulated when the cell produces the target substance and downregulated when they don’t.”

The net result is that high productive cells dominate the bioreactor, enabling firms to sustain bioproduction over longer time scales, he claims.

“You could say that we’re taking a little bit of the ‘bio’ out of biomanufacturing. I think our technology is one of the solutions that can help unlock the biomanufacturing industry from just being focused on specialty niche products to more everyday products.”

AgFunderNews caught up with Munch at the SynBioBeta conference in San Jose last week to get the lowdown.

Making existing biomanufacturing capacity more productive

By making existing biomanufacturing capacity more productive, clients can potentially avoid capex they had planned to spend on additional or larger bioreactors, he claims.

Implementing Enduro Sense into a production strain is done one time at the master cell bank level and requires no changes to the media (no antibiotics, no additives) or production process, he says. “We don’t introduce any foreign DNA and we don’t tamper with the production pathway.”

Some clients are happy to send Enduro their strain, “and we do everything in-house,” says Munch. For others concerned about IP, he says, “We can send the constructs, the sequences that they need to implement this as a data file, so they can synthesize the DNA and do the transformation themselves with our guidance, and we can help them interpret the results. We’ve done implementations with clients where their strain never left their premises.”

Enduro raised a €12 million ($12.4 million) Series A round earlier this year taking its cumulative funding to €18 million ($18.7 million) and now has a handful of commercial clients, says Munch. “We will deliver the first two projects this year.”