Imagine if we could grow rare plant ingredients in a lab instead of digging them up from the wild. This project uses a giant digital library of nature's DNA and an AI 'automated scientist' to figure out the recipe for these molecules. It then teaches microbes to brew these ingredients in tanks, making the process much faster and kinder to the planet.
High-value natural ingredients currently rely on unsustainable wild harvesting, which threatens biodiversity and creates fragile, slow supply chains that take up to a decade to develop new products.
An end-to-end bioproduction platform featuring an LLM-based 'automated scientist' (ORIGIN Co-pilot) and a metagenomic database of 10 billion sequences.
If you are a premium skincare brand dealing with unstable supplies of rare botanical extracts — this project developed an AI-powered bioproduction platform that reduces time-to-market from 5–10 years to 2–3 years. This ensures a steady, sustainable supply of high-purity ingredients without harming biodiversity.
If you are a health supplement manufacturer dealing with the high cost and environmental impact of wild-harvesting species like Panax ginseng — this project developed a precision fermentation system that cuts land use by >90%. It allows for the industrial generation of ingredients with >95% purity.
If you are a drug discovery firm dealing with slow and fragmented pipelines for natural product synthesis — this project developed an AI-driven retrosynthesis and host-aware pathway design tool. This accelerates the delivery of validated microbial strains and optimized pathway blueprints for 50 molecules.
Based on available project data, specific price points are not listed, but the project aims to reduce development time from 5–10 years down to 2–3 years, significantly lowering R&D overhead.
The project will demonstrate 3 molecules at a pilot scale ranging from 30L to 100L, achieving titers greater than 10 g/L.
The project leverages a proprietary, Nagoya-compliant metagenomic database containing over 10 billion sequences to ensure legal and ethical sourcing of genetic information.
The platform aims to reduce the current time-to-market for bio-based ingredients from 5–10 years to just 2–3 years.
It uses a multi-host rapid prototyping approach across common industrial microbes like E. coli and S. cerevisiae, making it compatible with standard fermentation infrastructure.
The consortium is well-balanced for commercialization, featuring a 43% industry ratio with 3 industrial partners and 2 SMEs. With 7 partners across 6 countries (including the UK, NL, and PT), the project combines academic research from 3 universities with the operational capacity of SILICOLIFE SA to move from digital design to pilot-scale production.
Contact SILICOLIFE SA in Portugal for partnership opportunities regarding the ORIGIN Co-pilot AI.
Contact us to identify which of the 50 target molecules align with your product pipeline.
