Dyadic and TurtleTree Scientific enter strategic partnership

Dyadic International, Inc., a global biotechnology company focused on further improving and applying its proprietary C1 gene expression platform to accelerate development, lower production costs, and improve the performance of vaccines, drugs and other biological products at flexible commercial scales, announced a fully funded collaboration with TurtleTree Scientific to develop a number of recombinant proteins growth factors which can be manufactured at high yields and low cost in bioreactors.

"Growth factors are cell signalling molecules that play an important role in increasing the quality and quantities of a growing number of potential biological products which are produced from cell cultures," said Ronen Tchelet, PhD, Dyadic's Vice President of Research and Business Development. "We will engineer our hyper-productive C1 cell lines to develop a number of growth factors with high bioactivity and yields which can be manufactured at flexible commercial scales and at costs that we anticipate will help TurtleTree accelerate their business."

The robust and versatile C1 platform technology, a hyper-productive Thermothelomyces heterothallica fungal expression system, has been used to produce large quantities of desired recombinant proteins at an industrial scale with significantly lower capital and operating expenditures. The technology has been validated at a scale of 500,000L and is used by the world's largest and most renowned industrial biotechnology companies including the likes of Abengoa, BASF, and DuPont.

TurtleTree Scientific, an arm of TurtleTree, is rapidly positioning itself as the leader in growth factors and cell culture media for application in cellular agriculture. The new and advanced C1 strains are GRAS certified making it suitable for food grade applications. These human pattern glycosylation strains, alongside improved molecular genetics tools, will allow TurtleTree Scientific to use the C1 platform to express growth factors that exhibit high bioactivity, achieving superior yields and price levels.

"This catapults TurtleTree Scientific to a global market leader in food grade growth factors at a price point that will make cellular agriculture a reality for all," says Max Rye, TurtleTree's Co-Founder and Chief Strategist. "It has been a challenge to manufacture human growth factors at a large scale at an affordable cost, in order to enable several exciting commercial processes we are targeting. It was important for us to partner with Dyadic and C1 to help us overcome this hurdle, without compromising on the safety or efficacy of these growth factors while lowering our capital and operating expenditures. The C1 strain has been glyco-engineered to achieve human-like glycan levels and we expect that these scientific achievements will open new doors to apply C1 to a broader array of glycosylated growth factors."

Dr. Tchelet continued, "We are very excited to have the opportunity to work with TurtleTree as they position themselves as innovators of novel human growth factors by applying synthetic biology to engineer C1 cells to speed up the development and help lower the cost of a growing number of biological processes and products."

TurtleTree has already seen significant interest from cell-based meat companies since it recently announced TurtleTree Scientific. By leveraging industry-proven technology, this partnership brings all of us one step closer to the future of cell-based meat and dairy products that are cruelty-free, accessible, and sustainable.