Biotech startup TurtleTree and biosolutions giant Novonesis have struck an exclusive agreement to scale the former’s precision fermentation platform, starting with its lactoferrin product.
The partnership includes a minority investment into TurtleTree on the part of Novonesis. Financial terms of the deal, which also included participation from 321Catalyst Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Mitsui Chemicals, are undisclosed at this time.
US- and Singapore-based TurtleTree has in the last few years shifted its business from developing cell-cultured milk in bioreactors to becoming a precision fermentation platform making dairy proteins that are difficult to produce at scale using animal-based methods.
The first of these proteins is lactoferrin, found naturally in milk. Sometimes nicknamed “pink gold,” it’s a multifunctional protein known to have benefits across iron regulation, gut health and immunity, says TurtleTree founder and CEO Fengru Lin.
Currently, the extraction costs of lactoferrin are too high to use the protein at any kind of meaningful scale in supplements and ingredients, hence the rise in companies attempting to produce it via precision fermentation.
Last year, TurtleTree received a No Questions letter from the US Food and Drug Administration for its lactoferrin LF+ product, marking the first time a regulatory body worldwide approved lactoferrin produced via precision fermentation.
While the company primarily focuses on formulations for B2B customers, it has also launched a small B2C brand called Intentional, where consumers can access TurtleTree’s product in capsule form.
Towards commercialization
Lin says the new partnership and investment will help TurtleTree move to its next stage on the road to manufacturing lactoferrin at food scale.
“With every startup, the biggest challenge is getting to unit economics that makes sense for the food industry, especially when we’re using techniques that are a lot of times brought over by the therapeutics or the pharma industry,” she adds.
TurtleTree is focused in particular on infant nutrition, a category Lin says sits somewhere between food and pharma.
“You need to be producing at a much higher quality than just regular food for infant nutrition, so to be able to bridge that gap,” she explains, adding that a company like Novonesis “is well established to achieve that with the current capabilities around female milk oligosaccharides, around other bioactives that are already in infiltration.”
Novonesis will help TurtleTree drive costs down, while Mitsui Chemicals is strong in Japan, one of the world’s largest producers of lactoferrin, according to Lin.
Ultimately, she adds, it’s about pairing TurtleTree’s precision fermentation capabilities with manufacturing and commercialization capabilities to provide a more consistent product, cost structure, and supply chain for health and wellness brands.
“This enables our customers to formulate with confidence and deliver meaningful benefits to the people who rely on these products every day.”
