Novo Holdings, a leading international life sciences investor, announced a significant investment in 21st.BIO A/S – a new Danish bioindustrial scale-up company.
Established in 2020, 21st.BIO has been founded with a mission to support bioindustrial companies globally in upscaling from molecule innovation to large-scale production to be able to meet market demands and thereby advance the green transition globally. The focus areas of 21st.BIO include producing proteins and peptides that can be utilised for the food, materials and agricultural industries. It is estimated that as much as 60% of the physical inputs to the global economy could be produced biologically.[i]
Today, much of the transformational bioindustrial innovation is never commercialised because of the challenges that occur when production has to be scaled from the lab processes to full-scale manufacturing. The production environment in which the molecule was originally developed is often unable to deliver the right quality and at acceptable cost levels.
A common issue facing innovators in industrial biotech is also a lack of access to competencies and facilities to develop a molecule production process that can deliver the desired quality at the cost levels required to compete effectively.
Thomas Schmidt, co-founder, and CEO of 21st.BIO, said:
“Many brilliant industrial biotech ideas never succeed, because production challenges result in too high price points for the final product. Hence, a vast number of otherwise great innovations do not make it to a scale at which they are truly relevant for the world. At 21st.BIO, we can help establish the right technology for producing novel molecules and peptides and hence help innovators successfully make the difficult step from innovation to big business and impact for the planet. We have gained access to a selection of Novozymes‘ unique technology platform on commercial terms, which means that a success for 21st.BIO is also a success for Novozymes.”
The technology platform of 21st.BIO originates from selected parts of Novozymes platform, which has been developed and perfected over the past 40+ years.