190. Pour Some Sugar on Yeast: Lisa Roessler Scales Biology at Amyris

Lisa I just think when people hear natural, they think that it's safe and sustainable. Mm-hmm. And natural's not regulated, and I just encourage everybody to dig one layer deeper in the world natural

Karl Hey, Arun. What's going on?

Erum Hey, Carl. Yeah, just coming off of the 4th of July, 250th semi-quintanennial, which by the way, was a question in trivia that I went to last week. what do you call the 250th? And I nailed it.

Karl Oh, good for you.

Erum thank you. Thank you.

Karl I know our Grow Everything podcast listeners appreciate that you're able to say semi whatever, quintennial

Erum Yes, yes.

Erum graduating with a degree in chemistry, you learn how to say all sorts of interesting words, especially working in the pharmaceutical industry and all those drugs, so you get the linguistics down. But how are you doing, Carl? You were not in the US [00:01:00] for 4th of July. Shame,shame.

Karl I followed your footsteps up to Montreal for Jazz Fest. You caught the beginning of it, and I caught the tail end of it, but

Karl We saw a bunch of little jazz bands, some old time jazz, some Klezmer music, and then just really, got to hang out in Griffintown, which was lovely. I got to speak a bunch of French, which made me very happy. And then, you know, walked along the, the, not the river, but the canal, where there's some locks, and biked around, ate some great food, and, just had a good time.

Karl And the big thing that we avoided was the Brooklyn Bridge fire, which you told me about

Erum Yeah, that happened. It was a, it was a quick fire. of course, you see the headlines, they're like, "Brooklyn Bridge on fire," and you're like, "Oh, no. You know, this is it was completely fine. It got- it was, like, extinguished in a matter of minutes.

Erum But, it looked pretty scary. so that happened, and then just, like, a few days later, did you see the, Pfizer building, the collapsing?

Karl Yeah. So for our listeners who are not in New York City, the Pfizer building, which is in Midtown, [00:02:00] has been under construction because it's being converted into apartments.

Karl There's a lot of office to, What is it? Office to residential conversions happening across the city, and the Pfizer building is one of them. And so a lot of times when it's written about or talked about on the news, it's named as the Pfizer building even though Pfizer's not in there

Erum Yeah, yeah. I wonder what the comms team at Pfizer's doing because , they keep puttingthe company's name in the headlines.

Erum And it's like, what is Pfizer doing? They have poor, project management skills. Like, they can't even get a building up in Manhattan? But it's nothing to do with Pfizer the company. I feel kind of bad. I wonder what their, crisis communications team is doing. they are a great biotech company, so I feel a little bad about that.

Erum They've done a lot of innovation over the years.

Karl Yeah, they were in that building for probably 50 years. I mean, it's a imposing structure. And, what's been happening is kind of crazy. when they show the pictures, they show these [00:03:00] beams that are kind of buckling. And, apparently, like, building inspectors neglected to do their job, so there's a lot of things that are being looked into.

Karl it kind of makes me laugh because if one thing goes wrong, it kind of sets up this snowball effect, and the next thing you know, Pfizer is being named in all these stories even though they have nothing to do with this whole thing.

Erum All right. Well, we'll keep an eye on it. a building going down in Manhattan is very scary.

Erum nothing went down yet, so hopefully they can fix it without any huge implosion or anything, 'cause I, did see that word being thrown around and I'm just like, whoa. let's see what happens, and hopefully it can get fixed,

Karl I don't even know if they do implosions anymore.

Karl Like, I think, when I lived in Boston a long time ago, whenever they were gonna implode a building, they would announce it, and a huge crowd of people would show up to see it. I probably saw three buildings go down in Boston. I saw a few go down in Denver, which is very impressive. I don't think I've ever seen that here, and so I'm not sure they do that as much.

Karl there's a old church that's in my [00:04:00] neighborhood that's being dismantled. I think that what they do these days is dismantle buildings from the top down, or as we've seen in Dumbo where our office is, they will remove the outside of the building and just leave the infrastructure, like, the beams and the floors, and then build around it, which I think is a fascinating reuse of buildings.

Karl We could grow the, all that stuff. Like, that's what it should be.

Erum There we go. Nice transition there. Grow everything. Grow buildings. Yeah. And then, I mean, of course right now it's the World Cup fever. Everyone is just watching these games. There's a lot of watch parties all over the place rooting for their favorite countries.

Erum USA is out of the running unfortunately, but I've been watching the ads that happen between the, all the action, all this, I was gonna say soccer, but I'll say football for the world.

Karl During the hydration breaks, you mean?

Erum Yeah, during the hydration breaks.

Erum I love that. Everyone stay hydrated. but there was this one ad, and Matthew McConaughey was narrating it, and, like, [00:05:00] the way that he was starting, he's like, it's America in the heartland," and I think the ad was specifically for Fox Sports. And, I was, like, cooking at the time, and I just said out loud, I was like, "He's gonna talk about soil."

Erum And then he was like, "And then our soil," and, and then he said it right after I called it, and I was like, "Yes!" And I'm like, how did I, think that. And my husband's like, "Yeah, that's, that was like a really good call." And, it's because Matthew Kanehaye, is a part of this documentary called Common Ground, and actually Carl, like one of their agents had reached out to us to have the director on the podcast and I don't know, hopefully we can get them on, but it's about regenerative agriculture, and soil is a big part of that.

Erum it's something that we will be talking a lot more about because soil is so hot right now. Like everyone's talking about soil. it's just such a, so fascinating. It's underrated, I think, in terms of solutions and how to really, help, with everything.

Erum With carbon, sequestration, with obviously [00:06:00] like agriculture, plants, health, heat, all of it. And so, I think this is going to be very topical for us in the next few episodes. we have done some interviews already, so teasing, the idea that we will be talking about the hottest thing right now, soil.

Karl Which is soil. and so you know, we've talked about the heat because it's been really hot. Last week we talked about the heat dome in Europe. I mentioned this New York City urban forest plan, and then as we were heading into the 4th of July, our friends at Fora Biosciences, who've been on the podcast, announced their plan to help bring back the American chestnut.

Karl Did you see this?

Erum I didn't, but I know that this has been an initiative for other people that we know, like Will Canine, who was the founder, co-founder, leader of, Open Trons.

Karl Yeah, he is super interested. A lot of people are very interested in the American chestnut because it was one of the most abundant and economically valuable trees in North America.

Karl And, the way I [00:07:00] understand it is at the beginning of the 20th century, so s- 120 years ago, there were 4 billion trees lost following the introduction of an infection, chestnut blight. And so it basically made this species functionally extinct, and it completely altered the forest ecosystem, wild habitats, and rural economies.

Karl And like if you look up pictures of American chestnuts, they're very impressive. They're not the size of the redwoods in California, but they're very large, and they were very important, to the Native American people because the chestnuts themselves are very nutritious, and the wood from the chestnut has all sorts of, properties.

Karl congratulations to Ashley and her team at Fora for doing this because I'm very excited. Now the question is how will the public react to the planting of these somewhat modified, you know,chestnut trees?

Erum Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely stay tuned for that. I think we need to, we're very pro-biotech solutions here on the podcast and, all of our [00:08:00] episodes, because we really see this as a innovation that could help, many aspects of different industries.

Erum But there are also, ethical concerns. There's biosecurity that needs to be taken into consideration. And, we always talk about, like, a life cycle analysis. All right? So if you bring something into this world, what happens w- it exists? How do other organisms interact with it? how does it affect our, human population, the planet?

Erum So I, I think this is something that we need to be a little bit more vigilant on how biotech is being, deployed, new biotech solutions are being deployed in nature.

Karl There's interest from the public, and in many cases the public doesn't really understand the technologies, and as a result people are afraid.

Karl And we've seen it in the biocolor space. We've talked about it. There's a whole organization that's out there saying that biocolors are genetically modified. They're not. Or if you produce them in yeast, they're genetic engineered. That is still not, [00:09:00] safe. That's not true. so I think this is one of those things where it's like we want to watch it and keep you, our listeners, informed on it because we're the ones who are on the front lines telling everybody this stuff is safe.

Karl It's got to be safe. The releases into, nature are limited, and there's a lot that we can do to educate the public on the benefits. Interestingly, I had a conversation with someone yesterday who was talking about modified insects, which is much more complicated, but there are, for example, sterile mosquitoes being released in places where ¡, There's malaria.

Karl And what they said to me is that people are much more open to these things now than they were, say, 20 or 30 years ago. And I think it's a combination of the companies educating the public better and people being more open, especially since they know that we need every kind of climate solution that is available to us.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So stay tuned. we're doing our part, but you have to do your part. And stay tuned to the episode and share this podcast with other people. There we go.

Karl [00:10:00] Yeah. Okay, so just a couple more things before we get into the interview. I know I've mentioned, we talk about biomanufacturing a lot.

Karl We recently had an episode with Senator Todd Young of Indiana talking about biomanufacturing in the United States. And so we pay a lot of attention to and have worked with companies in China, and Dirk VanderKley writes a Substack called "BioBrawl" that covers the emergence and the growth of biotech in China.

Karl And he just wrote a really interesting, Substack about the number of facilities that are being constructed across China. It's really like the full stack of biomanufacturing for target molecules. A lot of it is food-related, and in the article, he basically talks about half a billion dollars' worth of money being invested in these construction projects.

Karl what Clay points out is that industrial biotech can produce a lot more products than just batteries, EVs, and solar combined.

Karl And he also points out, which is something we talk a lot [00:11:00] about on the podcast, is this pipeline of industrial biotech is really setting up the infrastructure for manufacturing for the next few decades. So it's something we continue to pay a lot of attention to.

Erum for sure. we had this conversation about US versus China when it comes to bio manufacturing during DC Climate Week.

Erum it's a, a live episode. I recommend you guys listen to it because we had three investors,on a panel during this live recording. And, one of the investors had pointed out that there is a very coordinated effort, just like this, gentleman pointed out in the Substack, that, there's 25 pilot plants that are, commissioned to be open this year, next year.

Erum Which is really fast, China's known for fast manufacturing.

Karl China speed is a thing.

Erum Yeah. And it'll be interesting to find out what are the products that are the first to be manufactured. is it going to be industrial chemicals, so that, on that side?

Erum Or is it going to be, like, biotech beauty [00:12:00] ingredients? something we definitely want to pay attention to. And then it's like who is actually, manufacturing or commissioning those, plants and, working to get their products manufactured. Are they strictly China companies or are they actually United States companies that are working with Chinese companies and maybe the Chinese companies are making some early chemicals or precursors that they then sell to United States to make some more advanced molecules or biochemicals that we need for our products

Erum So it's, very interesting to see. I always like to think that, you know, everything's about collaboration but collaboration, competition is part of the game.

Karl For sure.

Erum It's part of the game.

Karl Yeah. I don't know, what do you want to say about this

Erum siphonophore? Carl, there's another thing I wanted to point out because, I love going onto Instagram, and I've been seeing a lot more biology content and, the algorithm's starting to know me very well.

Erum And I saw this reel about this, it looked like a very weird [00:13:00] long creature, and it was actually the longest animal that's been discovered so far. It's called a siphonophore. and it is the longest animal.

Erum it was found in the seas, in the deep seas. And this is something that- I think about a lot because, for all of the innovation and interest that's happening for space travel, we need a lot of that to go into the deep seas because, we know that There's a lot of space to cover in space, but there's less space to cover in the seas compared relative to space.

Erum But we have a lot of evolution and biology that's been happening for millions of years in the deep seas. So what is down there? Hopefully good things, but if there's bad things like the Kraken down there, we need to know now so we can prepare. But it's just like, oh, I mean, just 2020 we found out that there's this very, very long animal, and you have to look at it.

Erum put a link in the show notes, but it's like one long [00:14:00] connected organism that has a lot of little organisms that are, attached to it. Um, so it's like almost like a decentralized type of situation happening where there's, individual organisms and that are connected to one large organism, like a, I don't know, like a slime mold or something.

Erum But definitely worth looking into. I love when we find new creatures. They're very inspiring. How do they work? How do they function? what can we learn from them to make our worlds better, more delightful, more safe, more exciting?

Karl Yeah. That's super interesting, Eram. I love anything that has to do with the deep ocean.

Karl Again, it's unexplored territory that is right in our backyard, and there's so much that we can learn from it. Speaking of the deep sea, the company that we are interviewing actually created a product based on sharks. in the past, shark squalene, was extracted from the livers of sharks, and that was used in many cosmetic products.

Karl And Amyris, which is an early bioindustrial [00:15:00] company, was the first to really create a synthetic version of squalane, which is molecularly identical to squalene, but produced, in yeast using sugarcane. And I'm thrilled that we're gonna have Lisa Rosler, the chief commercial officer of Amyris, on pod- podcast to talk to us about what she's doing.

Karl She's been on the global commercial leadership side of biotech and chemical companies for more than 35 years. She was previously at Evonik. She was at DuPont. She's led sales, marketing, and growth, teams across major businesses, and we're re- super excited to have Lisa come on and talk about what's going on at Amyris.

Karl Lisa Ressler of Amyris, we are so excited to have you on the Grow Everything podcast.

Lisa Oh, thanks so much, Carl. I'm really, really excited and honored to be here.

Karl All right. So let's start off getting to know you a little bit for our guests who don't. You spent nearly 30 years at [00:16:00] DuPont and Evonik managing these legacy multi-billion dollar chemical portfolios.

Karl What was the catalyst for you that made you leap from that established world of traditional industrial chemicals into leading commercial growth for a synthetic biology pioneer, Amyris?

Lisa Yeah. So I have to say the shift to biotechnology is really pretty straightforward. engineers are always trained to look for better ways to do things, and I think as, just as human citizens, we should all be thinking about doing things in a better way that preserves our planet, preserves lives, and just is better for all of us in addition to, um, manufacturing better products.

Lisa I think about bio fermentation as the hosts are actually perfect little chemical plants. And so the jump from chemical manufacturing in terms of manufacturing plants to bio fermentation is not a huge leap. It's just how it's done, and, I [00:17:00] just love to think about it that way. coming to Amyris specifically, I have to say I was dazzled having spent nearly 35 years in science and science companies to see what Amyris was doing.

Lisa So,blown away by the science and the innovation that's happening when I got a chance to see it. But the thing that really sold me was, meeting the people and the culture here. this team so wants to transform the world and do the right things and do good and want to see the impact of their really smart work coming to life.

Lisa And so getting that sense when I got to meet the team was very helpful And last I will say, because it's not really last, it was first for me, it was belief in Kathy Portmann as the new CEO and leader. I've known Kathy for 35 years, and, our professional lives have intertwined. She is, a very strong leader with a lot of [00:18:00] good business sense, but she's very transparent, very true, very value-centered, and getting to work for a leader like that was just the icing on the cake of getting to come to Amyris.

Erum Wow. Yeah. r- that resonates with me because I work with Carl, and he's also a very amazing person to work with. Thank you. So it's so important to work with great people. yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you because, we can talk about the tech side, we can talk about business and commercialization.

Erum But before we get into, sales strategies and what you're working on the day-to-day, could you help our listeners visualize what Amyris actually produces? So if a consumer uses a personal care product formulated with your, for example, your precision fermented squalene, what would they physically experience that makes it perform better than traditional alternatives?

Lisa Oh, fantastic question. so let, let me start a little bit about who Amyris is, because it's not so easy to understand given that we've had such a shift in, business models. but Amyris has fully [00:19:00] scaled 16 commercial molecules or ingredients. And so as an ingredient supplier, that's one thing that's easy to sense and touch and to know what we mean by that.

Lisa but we also offer bioservices in the industry in the form of R&D collaborations. So if somebody has a chemical they would like to access, and we are willing to undertake and collaborate together with partners, from an R&D perspective to access those through biofermentation We also, because we've gone through and spent over 20 years doing this process development and scale-up, we are also willing to work with partners to scale up their products.

Lisa we are experts in process development, and we are experts in scale-up. So we have a lot of, piloting facilities, we have a lot of, analytical equipment, we have a lot of people who have walked through this. And we're absolutely willing to [00:20:00] work with corporations who have that interest to scale something because we really believe we're able to do it faster and cheaper than they could do on their own.

Lisa And so we think about somebody wants to, move forward with a product that's, biofermented, but they don't yet know if the market's going to accept it. We're a great place to come test that out, get product scaled, maybe even avoid CapEx for the first couple years because we can see the market and see if the market's really there, and help them get the products to, market.

Lisa And then finally, again, and we'll talk some more about it, we, we are a manufacturer. We've got 1.5 million liters of fermentation capacity sitting in Barra Bonita, and so of course we love it when we get the chance to also make those ingredients too.

Karl Amazing. And just so our listeners know, and correct me if I'm wrong, Barra Bonita is in Brazil, right?

Lisa That's correct. It's in São Paulo State, [00:21:00] yes.

Karl this is like a really interesting time to be talking to you, Lisa, because we've been seeing this major shift when consumer brands are trying to strip so many petrochemicals out of their ingredients. From your perspective, is that a gradual cosmetic trend, or are we witnessing something that's really a permanent commercial transformation across all of chemistry?

Lisa So w- we really believe that this type of technology will transform across industries, and it is happening across industries, but it's gradual. So different markets have different acceptance and needs. So if you think about things like personal care and nutraceuticals and food and beverage, consumers demand better for what they put on their bodies, on their skin, what they take into their bodies.

Lisa And so there's a lot of push all the way to the consumer in those markets that demands to understand where those chemicals come from. [00:22:00] It's good for the person, but it's also good for the planet, and we see a lot of that being the first places, that this is being accepted. You're very well aware that's also happening in pharma Where it, it is a better process, to be able to, to scale through, biofermentation and other biotechnologies I do have a belief that there are other specific industries where supply chain stability will drive the conversion.

Lisa It won't necessarily be the consumer demanding it, but there's a lot of things happening in our world today with climate change as an example. And so we get a lot of natural products from plants that will become less and less abundant or have supply chain risks, where we can ferment those from sugar and have stable supply, consistent supply.

Lisa you, you don't see, pricing going up and down based on whether it was a good year for a crop or not, right? So that stable supply will be another value driver that [00:23:00] pushes us into markets beyond where it's being used today. But ultimately, for petrochem-based products, there has to be a performance driver.

Lisa And so I believe that conversion is coming, it's coming with time, but it has to be a performance driver. And so what we're also seeing that there are new molecules that you're able to design through bio fermentation with, an extra alcohol group or an extra double bond, right? It doesn't necessarily exist in, um, nature today or deriving from, traditional petrochemicals, where we can actually design performance benefits, and that's what I think will actually drive into the other, industries and drive that transformation.

Erum Yeah. I'm glad you said that. It's a, song that we sing here on Grow Everything that, performance, needs to trump sustainability and, I hate to say it that, that way, but it is, for the, the commercial benefits because there's a need and there's novelty there and it could sell.

Erum unfortunately, sustainability hasn't been [00:24:00] doing that well in terms of, a selling point. but things could change and, I'm glad you're talking about that. so you mentioned earlier that, there's been, a reboot at, Amyris in a way that, you know, have a new CEO, and it famously restructured to step away from more of this direct-to-consumer beauty brand and return to its original roots as a pure B2B industrial biotech company.

Erum So my question is: What part of this business model reboot do you find resonates most with global corporate partners who need massive, reliable supply chains?

Lisa Yeah. So, first, I, I do want to acknowledge what you brought up because people are very curious, when we talk about Amyris, and there is a history there.

Lisa And Amyris was, both a science company as well as a B2C consumer brand company. Those are both really difficult companies to run with very different competence behind them. And y- you both know there are many companies that try to do [00:25:00] either one of those things and do them well, and they still don't survive.

Lisa Trying to do both of them at the same time, really difficult. So when we s- sat back coming out of Chapter 11 and thought about w- what are we good at? What are we unique? it, it's about delivering the science. it is really owning that access through biology to get to the chemistries that are needed.

Lisa And so, we think about being a B2B science company. We then think about what are those business models. Are we going to be R&D collaborators? Are we trying to help people scale? Are we trying to supply ingredients? And so you ask resonates, and I, really believe it's the uniqueness that Amyris can bring in that end-to-end, all the way from concept and strain engineering

Lisa to tons and kilotons of products going out the door, and being able to do that end-to-end [00:26:00] in one company, because as you can imagine, when you go from strain development to process development, there's an iteration there, right? Because things like, uh, being able to get rid of impurities in your process development, you can go back to the strain and redesign it so the purity's not there, right?

Lisa So there's an absolute iteration that has to happen, and then there's an iteration between process development and manufacturing that also has to happen. And so having it within one company is quite a unique value proposition right now in biotechnology in general, and we believe that uniqueness and what we bring from the core strain engineering all the way to the ability to scale is the uniqueness that resonates with our customers

Karl Yeah.

Karl that's amazing. I'm glad you kind of spoke about the difference between a company that's doing science versus one that's developing a product, or the one that is trying to do everything at once, which is extremely challenging. And we know that a lot of biotech [00:27:00] startups fail because they can't commercialize, their molecules at a competitive point.

Karl They're competing against petrochemistry in many, cases, and many of the products are ultra-commoditized, especially in the world of chemicals. So what's the secret to moving a biomanufactured ingredient past the green premium into true high-volume market adoption?

Lisa Yeah. So, I would say it's not a secret.

Lisa I, I talk about this quite a bit with, our teams, and I say, "You can Google this stuff. it's not a secret." But fun-fundamentally, what needs to be true is there has to be a market need. Fundamentally, there's a market need You need to match it with what we uniquely can do as a company, right?

Lisa And what are we good at and that we're not stretching so far outside of our boundaries. That has to be true. I, I call this the Venn diagram. there's three things have to be true. The market need, what do we uniquely bring to meet that market need? But there has to be value to be able to pay [00:28:00] for it.

Lisa And it's that third one that I think people, struggle to find those applications, because you talked about scaling to commodity. I really believe the way to do this is to go after those ones where you have very high value. And where you do have those high-value applications, we can maybe talk about a few of those,it's not just substitution with a green premium, it's that you really are bringing value, whether, a-again, it's, it's stable supply chain, it can be lower cost, but you're bringing performance, and you have to bring that value or this won't work.

Lisa And fundamentally, my belief is if you go after the high-value applications, and we've seen this time and time again with science, you've got some scale, you've got others who are attracted to come build improvements, and you have an ecosystem that then drives your economics to then go [00:29:00] after things that are commodity.

Lisa and in my lifetime, I thought about examples. I was gonna go all the way from the mainframe to our iPhone and things like that. But in my lifetime, I think about, GPS, and I really remember the very first time I got my $300 Garmin that sat on the dashboard, and I was so excited about it.

Lisa But the transformation from very high-value naval applications for which it was created to all of a sudden it's available to a consumer who's willing to pay $300 or $400 to have it in their vehicle, and it was quite a novelty, and not everybody afforded to go get the Garmin, to all of a sudden it's in our phones and it's in our cars, and it...

Lisa That transformation I really believe is coming for biotechnology in general and biofermentation. So what needs to happen is all three things that I talked in the Venn diagram need to be true, which means going after high value, then the [00:30:00] ecosystem develops to drive cost out and drive volumes, and then you can scale to more commodity and transform industries

Erum that's great, and thanks for that transformation story. I mean, I-- the GPS story is a great one. let's talk about some action that's happening at Amyris. You guys recently announced a partnership with Wacker to develop bio-based functional ingredients, for personal care, which we love talking about.

Erum how do you navigate that unique commercial challenge of blending Amyris's cutting-edge biology with Wacker's century-old expertise in traditional chemical formulation? So biology and chemistry, they butt heads. I was, like, actually a chemistry major, and the biology students were in another, building, and we would play against each other in powder puff and, like, it's always this, like-

Erum it's always this, like, button heads. But now here you are, you guys are collaborating. Tell us more about that, partnership.

Lisa first of all, I, I'll just, I'll mention Wacker because I really think that they are a great example of a company that's 125 years old. They are a manufacturing company.

Lisa They make [00:31:00] silicones and silanes all the way from sand. they are a true manufacturing company. But they've caught on to the idea that biotechnology is a wave of the future, and they've been investing for well over 20 years, and they are deeply rooted in their own transformation if I take the question a little more broadly about how do you get through, this challenge,I don't see it as a commercial challenge.

Lisa What I see it as is two puzzle pieces that are really coming together, and that each half of the partnership have to bring something unique. And this is the way we've approached all of our partnerships in the last few years, and we have, quite a few of them, that we're really proud of in addition to Wacker that we're also super excited about.

Lisa But what they really bring is a deep understanding of the needed attributes in the application. So Wacker in, personal care as an example, they are an amazing silicone company, right? They understand the applications for haircare [00:32:00] and skincare, et cetera, based on their experience in silicones. And so what they bring is the deep understanding and the knowledge of those applications and what's needed from a chemistry perspective, and they bring that access to the industry.

Lisa What Amyris brings on the other side is whether we can access that chemistry through biology. And to me, when, you can get in that room and they can talk application and, attributes translated to chemistry, and then we can match that conversation by talking about access to that chemistry through biology, we're each bringing unique pieces together and it's like magic when-- It, it's a translation in languages when you've got the biologists and the, chemists that are talking about what's needed to really transform there.

Lisa And, we like to call it bench-to-bench collaborations, because it is a chemistry bench to a biology bench. Um,but [00:33:00] the,the, the tension that you described,I think if you can put that aside in terms of how you're, approaching the problem and you think about what is the better approach, really some very encouraging conversations that happen with our technology teams.

Karl Yeah, that's amazing. another, piece of Amyris news, earlier you mentioned this production, facility that you have in Brazil at Barra Bonita, and you recently added a fourth production line there. I'd love to give our listeners a sense of what that looks like.

Karl and then as chief commercial officer, how does having that kind of physical capacity, expansion change the conversations you're having with, risk-averse enterprise clients?

Lisa I'm so happy that I get to represent my, manufacturing colleagues and what they're doing at the plant because it really is a-- I'm feeling trite using the word [00:34:00] partnership, but we are one team, one fight, and they are just amazing colleagues to work with.

Lisa but the facility's absolutely world-class. a manufacturing marvel. And as you said, I've spent 35 years around chemical manufacturing plants, and to get to see what was built and that I get the opportunity to talk about is just fantastic. as I mentioned, talk about there's four lines.

Lisa We now have about, one and a half million liters of manufacturing capacity there. And what's so fascinating to me is as they're running that facility, they're generating a billion pieces of data a day.

Karl Oh, wow.

Lisa So just a, science marvel. it's a professional organization, and they really focus on using things like Six Sigma and lean methodology to drive discipline and excellence.

Lisa And it becomes a major part of our dependability as a supplier, as part of this iterative scale that I described before, and it differentiates us both in [00:35:00] credibility, but also I'll talk about the new line, but also in flexibility. so the new capacity helps us in scale, of course, but, it is an 80 cubic meter line, where the other three lines that we have are 200 cubic meters each, which is quite a scale.

Lisa So with the 80 cubic meter, it allows us to take on projects that maybe don't economically already scale to the 200. So it does give us additional capacity, but what it brings to our partners is the ability to go more in a stepwise way to be able to economically produce at a smaller scale. So it gives us flexibility, and that's the piece that we get to sell that's fantastic.

Karl And, correct me if I'm wrong, I seem to remember that the facility is either in a giant sugar field or near a giant sugar field. Where is it in Brazil? Like, Give us the picture.

Lisa So it's in São Paulo state, but if you knowSão Paulo City, it's southwest between three and, [00:36:00] three and four hours, depending on whether it's raining or not.

Lisa it is sitting absolutely in the middle of a sugar field. We are across the street from a sugar mill. That, helps us because they actually do things like generate steam. And so we're co-located in a very remote area, but all of the resources that we need are actually right there from a low-cost perspective.

Lisa That's really helpful for us.

Karl That's amazing.

Erum Yeah. We have to go down there.

Karl Yeah, it's part of our, path to Netflix.

Lisa We'd love to invite you, and I actually am going there, next week with our commercial team, which is... I've gotten a chance to host customers there. It's... W- when somebody does get the chance to see it and the scale of it, five stories high with the,it's marvelous.

Erum Wow. Yeah. Okay. All right. We'll plan it. We'll plan it. Amyris is shifting to develop proprietary molecules entirely in-house alongside its [00:37:00] historical joint development partnerships.

Erum So how do you commercially evaluate which biological molecules you should keep exclusive to Amyris versus which ones you should license out to the broader market? How do you make that determination? I think that would really help a lot of the entrepreneurs who listen to the podcast.

Lisa Yeah. So, of course, we still love our partnerships.

Lisa but what, we try to do is look at, molecules that we can access with high productivity, either because we're working on something that's in that same pathway, we've made a discovery, and all of a sudden we've unlocked, now we have a new molecule that we can access and we wanna go shop, as an example.

Lisa and so if it becomes economically viable and there might not be a natural partner, for instance, there might not be somebody who has, a large market share or because it hasn't been accessible or abundant, there's not a natural leader, may [00:38:00] make the choice to take that on. right now we're in the midst of launching a product called Miraplex 50 that's a fully scaled emollient that we produced already at scale, and we're out talking in the value chain to various partners.

Lisa And they're, assessing the product and we're mapping the value chain to say what really is the right way for this to come to market, a fully Amyris-owned, product that we're launching. What I really like, and I talked about, one team, one fight with our manufacturing, partners, is with the technology organization.

Lisa And they have approach my colleague, Sunil Chandran likes to call the 80/50/0. And what that means is that when a partner's able to knock on our door and they identify a chemistry or molecule that they're interested in, that our vision would be to have 80% of the work done for 50% of those cases on day zero.

Lisa So the day they knock on our door, we've already done a lot of the pathway work [00:39:00] so that we're not reinventing the wheel every time that we start taking on a new project. And I love that concept because as you can imagine, over the 23-year history, we have created a lot of those pathways and we worked, even with the US government to identify what is accessible through our chemistry.

Lisa and I will tell you, our technology organization, just a few months ago hit strain 100,000. So we've got a lot of history and data and understanding of the pathways, but this sort of mindset of having it Almost ready when the partner knocks on the door in a lot of the cases It's invaluable to the commercial team.

Lisa It's invaluable to our partners, so I love that. the one caveat I want to make sure I mention is that, again, we love to have partners who come in and work with us on those targets. They help us co-develop. There's a lot of benefits to them. They can be first movers in the market. they get input to the design.

Lisa They get [00:40:00] preferential pricing. But when we do the work ourselves, we retain a lot of the power in terms of who are we gonna work with, and what is the business model, and what does pricing look like, because we've done that on our own. So, there's a lot of advantage to partners working with us instead of just waiting for us to create it and bring it to them.

Lisa but it will be a balance of both of those.

Erum You mentioned this emollient that's a, newer ingredient. Can you give our listeners an idea of the, the breadth of different molecules you guys are producing, and maybe some that, we're probably using today?

Lisa thanks for asking that.

Lisa Um,so in personal care, we do have, a number of emollients. squalane's the most famous, I think, that you had mentioned earlier, where we produce that from sugarcane rather than, coming from sharks' livers. Yeah, so it's about saving lives, even if it's the life of a shark, it's still an important life.

Lisa Yeah, that's important. Shark lives

Erum matter.

Karl Yeah.

Lisa And so, um,we make, squalane and a, product called hemisqualane that's [00:41:00] used more, in haircare than skincare. and we have other active, beauty ingredients. I think you might be familiar with, bisabolol.

Karl I don't know. What is that?

Karl I don't know that one.

Lisa It's actually not,a, a huge volume blockbuster, but it, goes after all of the things that you would expect an active to do in terms of firmness, younger looking skin, hydration, et cetera. So we have a portfolio that we're continuing to develop from a personal care perspective in both emollients, which are functionals, and a- on the active side, and we are working on scaling up, some additional actives currently.

Lisa we have, a number of flavors and fragrances, and so we make, patchouli, which, it's a wonderful smelling, um,molecule. Uh, sandalwood- three or four other derivatives that go into things like, lily of the valley and other types of flavors and fragrances. [00:42:00] We are, making precursors for pharma.

Lisa So we make squalene, which is different than squalane, as a precursor in a partnership with, Croda. So Croda takes our starting material, further processes it using cGMP, and makes just a fantastic incipient for, vaccines. Because vaccines today are using squalene, again, that comes from sharks, and we are bringing in a plant-derived equivalent that helps with scale and stability.

Lisa And you imagine when you have, um, a crisis, let's cross our fingers and hope that doesn't happen again, but you need to scale vaccine manufacturing quickly, here's something you can do at a scale in any of the regions very quickly, right? So, love that product, and it gives us a foray into, pharma.

Lisa And we have, Our history is also in pharma. The way, Amyris was started was, with [00:43:00] artemisinin. So, that's a, a,vaccine for malaria And, Bill and Melinda Gates, funded that original work, and then once we were able to make the artemisinin actually, release the IP so that those products can be manufactured to be able to really go after, malaria at the time.

Lisa that's our history. we are also, in some collaborations with, partners in specialty materials. more than one company is interested in, unique molecules that can help in adhesives, and as you imagine, electronics specifically is a big deal for, novel performance materials. I didn't mention agriculture.

Lisa we've got, one product that's an interesting, It's an insecticide, but it doesn't kill bugs. What it does is attracts bugs that are natural predators, and those bugs kill the bad bugs. [00:44:00] So it's really interesting, again, when you think about, approaches and what our mission is and what we try to do.

Lisa making something that's poisonous and kills things is not necessarily in our mission, but I love that it attracts the right kind of, insects to make that happen. very cool work.

Karl I love that. Yeah, we have, like squalene on our shelves here, and like every time I use it, I think about Amyris.

Karl So it's, for those of us who know where it comes from, at least I always think about Amyris and that really, that pioneering work and in terms of, m- I guess liberating our dependence on sharks, saving sharks' lives. I wanna go back to your background a little bit again.

Karl you start off really trained as a classical chemical engineer, and you were at Carnegie Mellon and Pitt. But what was the biggest cultural shocks for you when you moved from that kind of traditional engineering mindset to working in a company that is focused and works with living, evolving microorganisms instead of like [00:45:00] mixing chemicals in beakers?

Lisa for me, the culture shock didn't come from the manufacturing or the operations because at the heart, it's still controlled unit operations that behave in a predictable, repeatable way. So that part of it wasn't the culture shock for me personally. It just... I come from a place of deep processes, structures, clear value propositions, roles and responsibilities about what everybody does.

Lisa When you've got 35,000 or 50,000 people in a company, you need to have that. what I think about in terms of what we're all trying to do around, biotechnology, it... there's more of a startup mentality, and so, there's a lot of variables here, and we're talking about some of them today in the markets and the business models and what company's doing what, and a lot of them transform and change.

Lisa And so there's a lot of companies that... I,I'll use the word scrappy, right? [00:46:00] You just, you piece it together to make it happen, and I feel that so much in this company. we are not a startup anymore, but there's a startup heart here. And so a, lot of these companies are very scrappy in how they're approaching this transformation.

Lisa and what I like about, Amyris is right now we're beyond startup, and that with the new leadership that we brought in, I had mentioned Kathy, our, our manufacturing leader, Adam Blasiak, I can't believe I didn't mention him already, came from Givaudan. learned my background. But we're, bringing in that rigor into the business in all of the aspects from the financials perspective, technically making choices about what do we work on, manufacturing and bringing in that, process orientation, and even our commercial practices.

Lisa We're trying to bring in best practices that you've learned from some of these big companies. So we have great novel science, and we have scale, and I like to think about Amyris [00:47:00] being the grown-up in the room, but we're improving every day to be able to flange up what we have to the expectations of those industries, right?

Lisa Because they do think differently. And so, I, I really think that's part of, a view of where we are. But that was a bit of a culture shock for me to step out of those large corporations into, every decision matters in what we're doing. I love it.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. It's great that, that you've been working at these legacy companies that are, th- very large, and Amyris has this rich history, and yet you guys have adopted this startup mentality where you have to be innovating and flexible and, trying to get ahead.

Erum But I love the scrappiness. I mean, that's, that really helps. The hunger, the drive, and really the vision, right? you always equate startups with, like, having the big vision of the future. So my next question is about that. what role do you think precision fermentation will play in global consumer goods, and what do you think needs to [00:48:00] happen commercially to make bio-based chemistry invisible for manufacturing rather than a premium marketing claim?

Lisa I really believe that this move from targeting just high-value applications to being broadly preferred is really where we're going. And when we talk about, what it is at Amyris we're trying to do, and it is about transforming industries, you have to keep your eye on that.

Lisa but with any technology, there needs to be a change in the entire ecosystem, right? One company is not going to be able to drive it end to end. So I see two really big things that will help enable this. One is that we're gonna continue to see advances in technology Like downstream processing, continuous processing versus batch, using AI.

Lisa There's so much that we're doing right now using AI that even in the last six months has transformed how we're working, and those things will all help [00:49:00] make what we're doing better for manufacturing, driving out costs, helping with scaling. Once you do scale, you drive out more costs. All of that will come together, and it will not be a single company that does that, right?

Lisa There's a lot of enabling technologies. but in addition to that, there's market dynamics that are being created by climate change, geopolitical pressures that are happening, and the next best alternatives that are out there today will ultimately change, and their economics are going to change, and their availability is gonna change.

Lisa And so then you start looking at an alternate technology like biofermentation that is easily in the grand scheme of things, right? Um, it's an easily scalable technology, and that makes this become the right answer. And so it's dynamics that change in the market and dynamics that change in technology that will come together and absolutely drive this [00:50:00] to a broadly preferred technology.

Lisa Believe that completely.

Karl Yeah. I love that. I think one of the things that people who are outside of this industry don't realize that once you engineer an organism, you've basically created a factory that replicates itself, and, you can ship that factory basically anywhere.we know it's all, relative, but you can ship that factory anywhere and scale it up if what the process is.

Karl So we've hit the part of the interview where we're gonna ask you a bunch of quick-fire questions. I'll kick it off and ask one, and then you can answer. You know,we try to keep them very quick and fun. your answer could be as short or as long as you'd like. But what's one marketing myth about natural beauty ingredients that you wish would disappear forever?

Lisa I just think when people hear natural, they think that it's safe and sustainable. Mm-hmm. And natural's not regulated, and I just encourage everybody to dig one layer deeper in the world natural and understand really where [00:51:00] your products are coming from to find out if natural means better for you.

Karl Yeah.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. Poison ivy's natural.

Karl Yeah. Yeah. Rattlesnake venom is, too.

Lisa And some people will inject it in their faces if you tell them it'll make them prettier. Yeah.

Erum Oh my gosh. Don't even... I just watched The Substance. I'm still trying to wrap my head around- Oh, gosh. ... um, what people will do, what people do for beauty.

Erum Okay, here's the next question. All right. What is one legacy ingredient that is a total eco criminal and needs to go?

Lisa So it's not one ingredient, but it's a class of chemistries. any defluorinated chemistries, right? Your PFAS and, they're challenging for, the ozone layer. They're challenging in that they're in our blood causing really, documented changes to our health.

Lisa but what I really like is biotechnology I think will be part of the answer for some of those applications and part of the answer for the cleanup. Yeah. And so, it's challenging [00:52:00] stuff that's made our lives easier. We just didn't realize all the environmental and human impact for it.

Karl Yeah. finish this sentence: The future of global chemical manufacturing will be built by...

Lisa Microbes. Let's grow everything. Yay.

Erum Oh my God. Okay, that has to be a clip, for sure.

Lisa I hope so.

Erum Yes. Yeah. I'm glad you didn't say built by Amyris, but you could have. Well... We would have accepted that answer, too. Okay, final question.

Erum So if Amyris yeast strains had a corporate theme song, what would it be?

Lisa So I'm again dating myself, but I'm an '80s music fan 'cause that was back when I was in my prime. Love '80s music, so I'm gonna go with Def Leppard, "Pour Some Sugar On Me." Oh my God. "Pour some sugar on me."

Erum Oh

Erum my God.

Karl That's a party song.

Erum Yeah, exactly. Oh, [00:53:00] so fun. This was so much fun. Lisa, thank you so much for coming on the Grow Everything Podcast. I just loved hearing about everything from the history to the innovation and what's happening now from both the science side and the commercial side.

Erum We really appreciate your voice here on the Grow Everything Podcast.

Lisa And I, again, I am so honored to be here, and I really think we can be transforming industries. Everybody's just got their piece to play. It comes together.

Karl Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Lisa. Really appreciate it. Smart Tea Ad

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Erum So Carl, what'd you think of that episode?

Karl Okay, so that was so much fun. I think there's some great clips that are gonna come out of that one. and the fact that [00:55:00] Amyris has gone through bankruptcy, has come back from the dead, is positioning itself as a scaled company, says a lot to where the industry is and where it's gonna go.

Karl She emphasized that, this Brazilian facility that they have, which I've known about for many years, produces one and a half million liters of capacity, and

Karl Now they're adding another smaller volume line that's gonna make partner scale-up more flexible. And I think this goes back to what we were talking about with all these developments in China. Having a company like Amyris available to produce much more makes it easier for other partners to come in and use their facilities.

Karl What do you think, Uram?

Erum I was waiting for this interview. I was so curious because Amyris has been around for a while, right? We need these wins. And you said come back from the dead. I don't know if they were dead. I think they were just kind of- Okay, yeah,

Karl I shouldn't

Erum have.

Karl I apologize

Erum No, it's okay.

Erum But just more like, maybe not as, on a growth trajectory, maybe repositioning themselves perhaps. And, we've seen this. Apple was kind of [00:56:00] quiet f- a bit in the '80s and '90s, and they came back

Karl No, they also, they almost died.

Karl I remember, like-

Erum They almost died, yeah ...

Karl the, you know,Business Week front cover saying, " will Apple die?"

Erum Yeah. Yeah, there we go. So that's, yeah, that's straight up reporting right there. and even, you know, IBM, they've been quiet. I think there's starting to be a resurgence there.

Erum so it's great to see these companies that kind of withstand, they work and they collaborate to continue to provide new innovation and products to our ecosystem, to the economy. I do think that this idea of the partnership models, and Lisa did a great job of really walking us through how they are co-developing with partners.

Erum They're having these pilot plans, which again, like you mentioned, that that's a China strategy to also have pilot plans so you can de-risk the scale up and so you understand how these, ferments operate on larger scales if, that's the tool that they're [00:57:00] using. I mean, there's also cell-free, there's other tools, but, that's the bread and butter for a lot of biotech is the fermentation process.

Erum they are also continuing to launch proprietary molecules in-house. So that really shows that they're diversifying, they're going to withstand, they're gonna have strong economics. And these economics is not just them, it's them with partners.

Karl Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I thought was key to what Lisa talked about is the fact that

Karl Many of the customers that come to Amyris are not really ready for full industrial scale, and Amyris is able to hold their hands and support them as they go from, say, lab to bigger production to very large production. And I think that's really important, particularly for companies that are looking at biotech as a solution but don't really understand how they can scale.

Karl So having a partner like Amyris that has scaled and is willing to do that kind of stepwise work, I think is really important

Erum Yeah, and they're also, of course, leveraging AI. So what-- their AI-enabled [00:58:00] manufacturing, what is that AI learning? How can they use that to support other companies? I think there's a, a lot going on there.

Erum we would love to see how it's, continuing to, power the manufacturing of new molecules. And again, they-- course, something that we say a lot in the podcast, they focus on molecules and their performance, so it's not just about sustainability, which again, we love sustainability here, but performance wins, and we wanna make sure that these molecules are functioning for the customers.

Erum And so I really wanna learn more about how they are using AI, and it'd be great to have someone from Amyris talk about that.

Karl Yeah. I think we have to have Lisa back on. She was a lot of fun. She talked about the strong value-based framing of biotech, whether that's, this idea of replacing shark-derived squalene, rethinking pest control, calling out, PFAS-style chemistry.

Karl She really [00:59:00] framed biotech as both a commercial platform and a cleaner industrial alternative. We know that's true. you who are listening to us know that as well. We want more people to understand that biomanufacturing is the future, it is clean, and we wanna see a lot more of it. So I'm looking forward to having Lisa back on.

Karl She was a lot of fun, and I just love that you and she were on the same page when it came to karaoke.

Erum Yes. Yeah. That was so much fun. okay. So thank you so much for listening. We want to mention two things. one of course is the World Biomarkets. It's happening in Omaha, Nebraska in September.

Erum We would love to see you there. World Biomarkets has offered a 25% discount for anyone that wants to come. If you hear this podcast, use the code GrowEverything to join and get that discount for attending.

Karl Next week, Carl and I will be at the workshop on computationally designed organisms.

Erum This is a workshop that I went to last year. the leaders of this are Mike Levin and Joshua Bongard, two amazing professors. You guys heard our [01:00:00] episode with Mike Levin, which was mind-blowing. If you did not hear that, I highly recommend listening to Mike Levin speak about biology. Big thing, big takeaway from this whole c- workshop is that, and computationally designed organisms, is that it's looking at organisms and how they function from the high phenotypic levels versus a lot of what, biotech is, is looking at the molecular gene level.

Erum So it's coming at biology from a different perspective, and I cannot wait to see what they discovered and what updates they have from this workshop next week, and we'll be sure to fill you in

Karl awesome. So thank you for tuning into the Grow Everything podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please do reach out to us.

Karl We appreciate and we answer every comment that we receive. Our contact information is in the show notes, and don't forget to subscribe to our Substack. Let's grow.

Erum Let's grow