"NewPro" Completes Multi-Million Dollar Seed Round Financing to Accelerate the Commercialization of Lactoferrin Produced by Fermentation Method | 36Kr Exclusive

36Kr has learned that the synthetic biology enterprise "NewPro" has recently completed a several-million-dollar seed round of financing. This round of financing was exclusively invested by Linear Capital, with Mingde Capital serving as the exclusive financial advisor. The raised funds will be mainly used for team building and the iterative upgrade of R & D technology, as well as the pilot-scale amplification production of core products such as lactoferrin, and the registration and declaration of new food raw materials.

Since the beginning of this year, although the chill in the capital market has not yet subsided, the national team funds represented by state-owned enterprises, as well as the synthetic biology-specific guidance funds of local governments in various regions, are accelerating the layout in the field of biomanufacturing. In particular, "biomanufacturing" has become an important industrial module of new-quality productive forces, and the speed of regulatory declaration and approval for new food raw materials and new varieties of food additives is also gradually accelerating.

"This is a new opportunity worth going all in for." Dr. Zeng Zhe, the founder and CEO of NewPro, mentioned to us. Dr. Zeng Zhe graduated from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and participated in the establishment of the Wageningen Institute for Future Food. He used to be a senior scientist at Danone Global Research Center, focusing on the research and development of functional raw materials and the formulation and clinical research of infant milk powder, and has a continuous entrepreneurial experience. In addition, the core founding team of NewPro has more than ten years of industrialization experience, including the research and development of functional food raw materials and the development of industrial microorganisms.

Deeply Cultivating the Dairy Product Field, Developing a Plug-and-Play Toolkit for Protein Expression

Based on the deep accumulation of the founding team in the dairy field, precision fermentation, and industrial microorganisms, the first raw material item that NewPro is betting on is lactoferrin, which has been highly sought after by the market in recent years.

This is a high-nutritional-value protein present in the milk of mammals (especially human breast milk), with functions such as 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 milk powder.

However, the traditional production method can only extract and obtain lactoferrin from natural milk (such as cow's milk). This method has problems such as high cost, limited output, and overseas technical barriers, often resulting in a situation of short supply in the global market. For this reason, major dairy enterprises are also competing to explore the use of synthetic biology technology to directly synthesize lactoferrin through precision fermentation of microorganisms. This new production method can significantly reduce costs and increase production capacity while ensuring the safety, cleanliness, and stability of the product.

Currently, NewPro adopts the protein expression methods of Pichia pastoris and various filamentous fungal chassis, and combines its self-developed protein separation and purification process to improve the yield of lactoferrin and ultimately reduce production costs.

The "animal-free" dairy is coming (Source: NewPro)

It is introduced that in this process, the main difficulty in the development of product strains is first that there are multiple proteases in most microbial chassis that can degrade bovine lactoferrin, ultimately resulting in the inability to completely express this protein product; in addition, most functional proteins have complex protein modifications, such as glycosylation modifications of bovine lactoferrin. Therefore, it is difficult to simulate the glycosylation modification type that is completely consistent with the natural source in the microbial chassis, thereby affecting the product efficacy.

To solve this problem, the NewPro team has developed a plug-and-play toolkit for "customizing different proteases and glycosylases for specific proteins", and combines the rich genome editing tools and components accumulated by the team over the past 15 years, and cooperates with AI algorithms in the optimization of personalized components and the high-throughput screening of target proteins, forming a unique chassis and editing advantage, thereby establishing the technical barrier of NewPro in this field.

Dr. Jiang Yu, the co-founder of NewPro, mentioned that the company hopes to utilize the technical accumulation in the field of industrial microorganisms in the past and continue to expand the development and production of new food raw materials to create new products for a wide range of consumers. Dr. Jiang Yu previously worked at the Key Laboratory of Synthetic Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Shanghai Industrial Biotechnology R & D Center for more than 15 years, and has been committed to the development of industrial microbial technology.

Currently, the amplification production and regulatory declaration of the lactoferrin raw material of NewPro are in progress, and efforts are being made to achieve the product's listing and sales as soon as possible.

"Lactoferrin is just the beginning. Our long-term goal is to make a cup of customized artificial breast milk. Currently, we are gradually expressing the functional proteins in breast milk one by one." Dr. Zeng Zhe said with a smile. However, he also mentioned that the product efficacy is not the only influencing factor for commercial success. There have been many products in the market with good nutritional value, but consumers are not buying them. Therefore, the development of new foods should not only focus on nutrition, but "also be delicious".

This is also the original intention of NewPro to initiate the development of sweetener products. Currently, most artificial synthetic sweetener products have unavoidable side effects, such as weight gain, intestinal flora disorders, and the induction of health problems such as fatty liver and diabetes. Therefore, "digging out healthy sweet proteins from nature and achieving efficient and low-cost production" has become another major direction explored by the industry.

It is introduced that NewPro is developing and expressing sweet proteins derived from natural plants (including thaumatin derived from Thaumatococcus daniellii and truffle sweet derived from Tuber melanosporum) through Pichia pastoris and filamentous fungi. In terms of sweetness effect, "Adding 1 gram of thaumatin is approximately equivalent to adding 2000 grams of sucrose", so only a very low dose is required when this raw material is applied, with almost zero calorie intake. This not only reduces the raw material cost of application, but also achieves a balance between sweetness and low calories.

In the future, sweet proteins will have the opportunity to become natural sweeteners for healthy sugar control, satisfying consumers' love for sweetness without almost any calorie burden. Currently, this product has carried out small-scale fermentation tests and volunteer taste evaluations, confirming that there is no taste difference between the microbial fermentation method of NewPro and the natural extraction method.

Sweet proteins widely tested and applied in beverages (Source: NewPro)

Betting on Potential Big Items, Commercialization on the Agenda

Thanks to Dr. Zeng Zhe's compound experience in R & D, marketing, and entrepreneurship, NewPro is very focused on the rigid demand for the entry of each category and the full life cycle value in product selection.

Whether it is lactoferrin or sweet protein, neither can be considered a very large market at this stage, but their commonality is that they can eventually have the opportunity to become big products by continuously expanding product application solutions. In addition, under the overall strategic layout framework of the company, these two products are expected to achieve product linkage in the future.

In terms of commercialization progress, Dr. Zeng Zhe frankly stated that although NewPro is in contact and cooperation with many global dairy leading enterprises, the regulatory declaration of new food raw materials for human use requires a certain amount of time. Before that, the company will first expand the application scenarios in the field of animal nutrition and health for the two core products, and relevant samples have been tested in some intended customers.

In addition, NewPro is expected to start planning capacity building from 2025.

"There is no shortage of creative talents in the food raw material industry. In the past, it was just that everyone was afraid of the challenges of the new food raw material regulations, some hesitated and waited and watched, and even remained stagnant. But now, it is a new opportunity for the development of biomanufacturing. We hope to work with more industry colleagues to create more new foods for consumers." Dr. Zeng Zhe said.

Hu Mingyi, a partner of Mingde Capital, said that Dr. Zeng and the NewPro team have very rich experience and accumulation in the dairy and biomanufacturing industries, with rich experience from the development of underlying strains, mass production amplification, clinical research to commercialization, as well as a global perspective and resources, and a strong execution ability. We look forward to NewPro continuously overcoming the research and development and production problems of key components of breast milk, leading the development of the industry.

Zeng Yingzhe, a partner of Linear Capital, said that precision fermentation has always been one of the directions that Linear Capital focuses on, and each link of product selection, mass production, and promotion is indispensable. The expression level of active proteins in organisms is very low, and a large amount of separation and purification is required to extract them, with a high cost. Among them, with the large-scale promotion of lactoferrin in the fields of milk powder, health care products, etc., the demand is growing rapidly. The NewPro team uses its rich industrialization experience to rapidly iterate, which significantly reduces the synthesis cost. We have accompanied the entire process of NewPro from 0 to 1, recognize its productization idea, and are honored to exclusively complete its seed round of financing. We look forward to NewPro being able to promote more health-effective formulas to the global market.