Two years ago, Prolific machines presented its technology for a unique manufacturing approach to growing cells for industries, including cultured meat. Today, the Emeryville, California-based company said it is ready to bring to market a bioreactor that will make that growth possible.
Deniz Kent, Max Huisman and Declan Jones founded the company in 2020 to focus on more efficient and sustainable ways of manufacturing food and medicine. This would involve culturing and controlling cells without the need for expensive recombinant proteins for cell production.
Today's cell biology processes are used to produce everything from antibodies for immunotherapies to nutritional proteins found in infant formulas.
But molecular methods are expensive (more expensive than a gold gram). And they are difficult to control. Kent gave an example of putting cream in coffee and it moves randomly as it dissolves, meaning the cells go where they want to go and when. And current methods are imprecise and the cell growth you get today may not be what you get tomorrow or a year from now, Kent said. Additionally, cell growth is difficult to optimize because it is not in a format that machines can understand.
“For the last few decades, the way we've been controlling cells is with molecules,” Kent said. “Those molecules could be chemicals or proteins. “We add these molecules to the bioreactors and hope for the best.”
Prolific Machines believes it has a way to move from these molecules to something better: light. Light is used in many different applications today, from making food with microalgae, like what Brevel does, to detecting contamination, like what Spore.bio does.
Light solves most of those cell growth problems, Kent said. It's a cheap commodity, you can place the light wherever you want, you can turn it on and off as needed and the light is the same today as it will be in a few years. You can also split light waves to use them in different use cases. Additionally, the machines understand light because it's just electrons circulating across a circuit board and turning into an LED, Kent said.
Prolific Machines' bioreactors are ready for customers and will allow them to more efficiently biomanufacture high-value bioproducts, including nutritional proteins, antibodies to treat diseases, and whole cuts of cultured meat.
The company offers genetic tools, essentially strands of DNA that, with light, do things like eliminate growth factors or convert one type of cell into another type of cell. It also offers cell lines, a bovine cell chassis for food applications and a Cho cell chassis for pharmaceutical applications. Then there is the hardware that introduces light into the bioreactors and measures how that light interacts with the cell. Finally there is a software component with an algorithm that takes the spectral data and determines the best light pattern to apply.
All of this was made possible thanks to $55 million in new Series B financing. The Series B is led by The Ki Tua Fund, the corporate venture arm of Fonterra Co-operative Group, with participation from a group including Breakthrough Energy Ventures , Mayfield, SOSV, Shorewind Capital, Darco Capital, Conti Ventures and In-Q-Tel. (IQT). Includes convertible notes and brings Prolific Machines' total financing to date to $86.5 million.
Kent intends to use the new funds on marketing and customer acquisition.
“Now we're moving from having proven that this works to giving it to people,” he said. “We have started collaborating with some business partners, but we are not going to announce it yet.”