“NewPro” recently completed a multi-million dollar seed round of financing. This round of financing was exclusively invested by Linear Capital, and Mingde Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor. The funds raised will be mainly used for team building and iterative upgrades of R&D technology, as well as pilot-scale production of core products such as lactoferrin, and registration and declaration of new food raw materials.
Since the beginning of this year, although the chill of the capital market has not subsided, national team funds represented by state-owned enterprises and synthetic biology special guidance funds of local governments are accelerating the layout of the bio-manufacturing field. In particular, “bio-manufacturing” has become an important industrial module of new quality productivity, and the speed of regulatory declaration and approval of new food raw materials and new varieties of food additives is also gradually accelerating.
“This is a new opportunity worth all in.” Dr. Zeng Zhe, founder and CEO of NewPro, mentioned. Dr. Zeng Zhe graduated from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and participated in the establishment of Wageningen Future Food Institute. He was a senior scientist at Danone Global Research Center, focusing on functional raw material research and development, infant formula and clinical research, and has continuous entrepreneurial experience. In addition, the core founding team of NewPro has more than ten years of industrialization experience, including functional food raw material research and development, industrial microbial development, etc.
Based on the founding team’s deep accumulation in the dairy field, precision fermentation and industrial microorganisms, the first raw material product that NewPro bet on is lactoferrin, which has been highly sought after by the market in recent years. This is a high-nutritional protein found in mammalian milk (especially human breast milk), which has the functions of regulating the immune system, regulating iron absorption, promoting intestinal microecological balance, and enhancing the body’s resistance. It has been widely used in infant formula. However, traditional production methods can only extract lactoferrin from natural milk (such as milk). This method has problems such as high cost, limited output, and overseas technical barriers, and it is often in short supply in the global market. To this end, major dairy companies are also competing to explore the use of synthetic biology technology to directly synthesize lactoferrin by microbial precision fermentation.
This new production method can significantly reduce costs and increase production capacity while ensuring product safety, cleanliness and stability. At present, NewPro adopts the protein expression method of Pichia pastoris and various filamentous fungi chassis, and combines it with the self-developed protein separation and purification process to increase the lactoferrin yield and ultimately reduce production costs. (Source: 36kr.com)
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