Two years ago, Prolific Machines unveiled a proprietary manufacturing technique for growing cells for industries like cultured meat. Today, the Emeryville, California-based company announced it is ready to bring to market the bioreactors that make that possible.
Deniz Kent, Max Huisman and Declan Jones founded the company in 2020 to focus on making food and medicines more efficiently and sustainably, which involves growing and controlling cells without the need for expensive recombinant proteins for cell production.
Today, cell biology processes are used to produce everything from antibodies for immunotherapy to nutritional proteins in infant formula.
But molecular methods are expensive (more expensive than a gram of gold) and difficult to control. Kent gave the example of adding cream to coffee, which moves around randomly as it dissolves. That means cells go where and when they want to go. Kent said current methods are also imprecise, meaning the cell growth you get today may be different to the growth you get tomorrow or a year from now. Plus, cell growth is not in a format that machines can understand, making it difficult to optimize.
“For the last few decades, we've been using molecules to control cells,” Kent says, “and sometimes those molecules are chemicals, sometimes they're proteins. We put those molecules into a bioreactor and hope for the best.”
Prolific Machines' protein production bioreactor (Image courtesy of Prolific Machines) Image courtesy of Prolific Machines/
Prolific Machines believes there's a way to move from these molecules to something better: light, which is used today for a variety of applications, from producing food from microalgae, as Brevel does, to detecting pollution, as Spore.bio does.
Kent said light solves most of the problems with growing cells. It's a cheap commodity, you can shine it where you want it to go, you can turn it on and off as needed, and light is the same now and will be the same years from now. And you can split light waves and use them for different things. Plus, machines understand light because light is just electrons running through a circuit board flowing into an LED, Kent said.
Prolific Machines' bioreactors are ready for customers to use, enabling them to more efficiently biomanufacture high-value biological products such as nutritional proteins, antibodies for disease treatments and whole cuts of cultured meat.
The company offers genetic tools, which are essentially strands of DNA that can be used with light to remove growth factors or turn one type of cell into another. It also offers cell lines, one cattle cell chassis for food applications, and one Cho cell chassis for pharmaceutical applications. It also has hardware to put light into the bioreactor and measure how that light interacts with the cells. Finally, it has a software component with algorithms that take the spectral data and determine the best light patterns to apply.
All of this was made possible by $55 million in new funding in Series B led by Ki Tua Fund, the corporate venture arm of Fonterra Co-operative Group, with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mayfield, SOSV, Shorewind Capital, Darco Capital, Conti Ventures and In-Q-Tel (IQT), which includes convertible notes and brings Prolific Machines' total funding to date to $86.5 million.
Kent plans to use the new funding for commercialization and customer acquisition.
“We're now moving from proving this works to offering it to people,” he said. “We've started working with some commercial partners, but we're not going to announce them yet.”