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BUSINESS BRIEFS

Amyris Biotechnologies Makes News Over its Brews in Emeryville

Bil Paul
Connection Staff
September 2007

Emeryville’s Pixar is much in the news lately with the success of its Ratatouille film, where a lovable rat named Remy takes Paris by storm with his culinary exploits. With his natural intuition about what to throw in the pot to make exemplary soups, Remy begins his career as a chef.

Just a short distance away in Emeryville, scientists at three-year-old Amyris Biotechnologies are also in the news for concocting soups of a different sort – fermentation soups that employ yeast and bacterial microbes to turn things like corn and sugar cane into substances that benefit people worldwide.

Just as the Chef Remy knew the proper ingredients to combine to create an unforgettable soup, Amyris scientists have the computer and chemical know-how to genetically alter or custom-design their microbes to produce valuable fermentation products. They’ve taken the fermentation processes used by wine, beer and liquor makers several steps further, producing a synthetic version of an anti-malaria drug and better biofuels for cars and trucks.

Amyris (borrowed from the name of a plant oil from Haiti) had its genesis in the lab of Professor Jay Keasling at UC Berkley, where Amyris co-founders Jack Newman, Neal Renninger, Kinkead Reiling and Vince Martin met frequently while post-doctorial fellows. They realized that the basic genetic research they had performed in an academic setting had important implications outside the lab.

“We got into science because we wanted to do something that was going to make a difference in the world,” says Jack Newman, an Amyris senior vice president. “Not just research, but something that was going to make it out as a product or service. We all love science, but there’s a certain buzz you get when there’s actually a practical application [for your work] that you’re really going to see in your lifetime … We looked for ideas that would be impactful.”

The five co-founders settled on a first project which was done in conjunction with UC Berkeley and the Institute for One World Health in San Francisco. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $43 million to these groups to develop a synthetic version of a highly effective anti-malaria drug. Unfortunately, the drug is presently too expensive for developing countries because it’s a natural extract from the wormwood plant. As a result, between one and two million people (mostly children) die from malaria each year.

The Amyris goal was to generate the wormwood extract, artemisinin, artificially. Working with UC Berkeley personnel, Amyris, using computer modeling, found a way to introduce genes from three different organisms into the DNA of a host microbe which enabled that microbe, feeding on sugar-based “food” in a fermentation process, to produce the anti-malaria drug.

The final step is to work with an industrial partner to translate Amyris’ fermentation process into a mass production mode where the output will be consistent, reliable, and – most of all – inexpensive.

By agreement with the Gates Foundation, Amyris will receive no profits from future sales of the drug. But the infrastructure Amyris built for the anti-malaria drug effort, and the knowledge and experience gained, was a basis for future for-profit efforts. “The technology we developed here was completely transferable [to new projects] so we really hit the ground running,” says co-founder Jack Newman.

Perhaps on the basis of its initial success, Amyris attracted $20 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (who helped fund Google as a startup) and Texas Pacific Group Ventures.

Presently, Amyris occupies a 20,000 square-foot space at 5980 Horton Street in Emeryville and has 80 employees. Approximately two-thirds of those are research scientists and the company is seeking more. Last October, John Melo, formerly president of U.S. fuels operations for BP (formerly British Petroleum), was brought on board as CEO.

Following the anti-malaria drug project (Amyris expects to complete the hand-over of that project within a year), the company has plunged headlong into a very active field – biofuel generation. Currently, ethanol produced by fermenting corn and other sugar-rich plant products can make up as much as 10 percent of gasoline sold for regular vehicles at gas stations, but higher concentrations require vehicle modifications.

Amyris wants to do better, and is working with its own genetically modified microbes to produce vehicle fuels by fermentation (using the same raw materials ethanol operations do) which can replace gasoline and diesel fuel completely. Progress on the project has reached the point where Amyris’ synthetic fuels are being road tested and the company hopes to bring them to market by 2010.

Amyris’ Newman says the company has “state-of-the-art strain engineering” capability. He compares creating new, custom-designed microbes (where new genetic information is introduced into host microbes) to writing computer software. In the old days, finding a beneficial microbe for a specific task meant looking for it in nature or using selective breeding – a process which might take 30 years. Now, it’s possible to write DNA code on a computer and have a company create the specified DNA segments on demand – a process that might take only three years. “DNA is just code and now we can write that code rather than just read it,” says Jack Newman.

Newman says Amyris’ neighbors in Emeryville have nothing to worry about from its genetically altered organisms. The company destroys all its microbes before disposal and sterilizes its equipment. “I went on a fact-finding mission … and I have yet to find one example of any modified organism that ever caused a problem,” he says. Organisms created in labs and used in highly controlled fermentation processes just can’t compete with natural organisms in the wild, he says.

As to the possibility of Amyris eventually going public, Newman says “It sort of depends on what happens in the marketplace.”

Bil Paul is a writer for The Emeryville Connection.

If you have a question or comment, please contact

him at ecocnews@gmail.com