BioP2P Staff
Enduro Genetics, a Copenhagen-based startup spun out of the Technical University of Denmark, is addressing the fundamental problem poor yields from declining production at scale in biomanufacturing, according to a report in AgFunderNews.
Company CEO Christian Munch told the publication that over time, only a certain percentage of cells in a bioreactor—15 percent to 20 percent— will produce what they’ve been engineered to express. The rest, he said, will consume feedstocks without making anything useful as they mutate and stop producing a target protein to enhance their own growth.
Enduro tricks cells into thinking that they have to produce the target substance in order to survive by linking the expression of essential genes, which are critical for the survival of an organism, and high production of the target substance in a cell.
“Our solution [‘Enduro Sense’] is a genetic biosensor that couples with essential genes in the cell and that means that only cells that are high producers of the target substance can grow or proliferate,” said Munch. “The essential genes are upregulated when the cell produces the target substance and downregulated when they don’t.”
The result is high productive cells dominate the bioreactor, enabling firms to sustain bioproduction over longer time scales, he said.
Read the full story here.