193. The Full Color Spectrum: Nick Milne Ferments One Pathway for Every Color at Octarine Bio

Nick the unique thing about these pigments, is that they're probably the strongest pigments ever discovered in terms of the color strength.

Nick And in our benchmarks, they are between 20 to 40 times stronger than any other synthetic pigment.

Erum Hey, Carl. How's it going?

Karl Hi, Ram. It's going great. Welcome to August. The summer is flying by.

Erum Oh my gosh, yes, absolutely. Have you seen The Odyssey?

Karl No, I have not. Have you seen it? I,

Erum I can't. there's no availability here in New York City for the IMAX 70 millimeter showing of it.

Karl Oh, yeah. And you wanna see it that way. Yeah. I don't blame you. Yeah. Well, this is the Grow Everything podcast, where we talk about how biology is impacting all industries. Speaking of which, have you seen Apple's Neuromancer trailer?

Erum I saw a little bit of it 'cause I got texted to me, 'cause I get all the, the latest of Apple sent straight to my phone because I love Apple TV.

Erum Its content's so [00:01:00] good. But I haven't seen the full trailer. I know you've been talking about it to me offline a lot,

Karl the trailer takes a minute to watch, but you could also read the book, which I think you read.

Karl And,

Karl I think what's gonna happen or what's happening already is you see a lot of people looking at it going, "Oh, it looks like The Matrix," or, "It looks like Ghost in the Shell." And thoseas significant as those movies are, they were influenced by Neuromancer, which came out way before them back in the '80s.

Karl And, it was a very significant book in that it swept, like, the biggest science fiction awards, the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick Awards. But Neuromancer, even though it coined the term cyberspace and kind of gave people a preview of what, the internet would look like, there's a ton of biology and biotech in the book.

Karl The main character, Case, has, like a failing, nerve system. When he gets hired to do this job, one of the things they do is they repair his nerve system, but they put these sacks of toxins into his body, and if he doesn't complete the job in time, he's gonna die. There's, [00:02:00] Mitsubishi Genentech.

Karl You know, Genentech at that point was very y-young of a company. So there's a ton of biology, and there's a few previews of that in the trailer. So suggest you watch it, and then we'll com-compare notes. I've got a lot to say about this.

Erum Okay. Yeah. We'll definitely be keeping an eye on this, and when we watch it, we can talk about it some more.

Erum and then we'll put the link to the trailer in the show notes.

Karl Absolutely.

Erum And then another thing we'll put in the show notes is this, new,perspective from the Office of Science and Technology Policy here in the United States called Science, a New Golden Age. So I'm sure a lot of our listeners have already heard about it or have, read it.

Erum a guest of the Grow Everything podcast, Kristen Ellis, wrote a Substack to comment on this report or the policy recommendations. it's very interesting. some of the highlights that- I thought we should talk about is this importance on the individual scientist [00:03:00] versus larger institutions, which may take a while for science to translate into, products or, ha- a basis where you can start using it to make things or do something.

Erum I think that's very interesting. it talks a lot about how a lot of funding should come from the private sector, which is in line with this administration, if you see some of the actions that they've taken. Carl, what do you think about this? it's been something that, we've been talking about a little bit here and there.

Erum it's another statement coming from the administration about, advancements in science. but again, I think we're left to see what this actually means. How does this actually translate into action?

Karl Yeah. I'm kind of under the impression that the

Karl OSTP is a bipartisan, neutral,policy organization. But given the administration, nothing is really neutral these days. But I will say that there were a couple of really [00:04:00] interesting highlights because, for me, thinking about science funding is something I do think a lot about.

Karl science funding is something that has really helped build the US economy. It has made us very competitive in the world. All this technology that we rely on, our phones, the internet, all of these things were born in labs that were funded by the public. And,just recently, the Office of Management and Budget was trying to change how science gets funded, and they want to really turn it into something that's much more partisan and also something that, is really driven by industrial policy.

Karl So, this comes out at a really interesting time. I thought there was a couple of interesting highlights in it. One was the fact that AI is changing the way science is done. We know AI's changing everything, so of course it's gonna change the way science is conducted. And there's a lot of talk about China, which makes sense.

Karl I mean, China has been investing a ton of money in basic, research and development, and that's where everything kinda starts. And we're seeing [00:05:00] them over-invest in it while we pull back on it. the paper is an interesting paper also because it kinda comes

Karl at as being like a, an update of the Vannevar Bush paper that came out in the '50s. it was called,the Endless Frontier. I think we maybe have talked about it once or twice on this podcast, and that really was written in a way that made the country much more willing to fund science, even though it was apparently vetoed by the Truman administration, back in the '50s, the first time it went, to Congress.

Karl So I think, it's good to update these things. A lot of like, political policy should be updated. I always say everything needs to be remade. and we need to have a voice in that. But, I think that there's a lot in here to read, and I think we should keep talking about it because I think being able to cover it in just a few minutes or seconds doesn't really do justice to the paper.

Erum So it says that the private industry now outspends the government on R&D roughly [00:06:00] three to one, so that's $700 billion a year that private industry spends.

Erum Um, and it con- like I was mentioning earlier, it continuously talks about how to revitalize the R&D enterprise from the private sector. In China, it's not just the private sector that's paying for R&D, right? It is, the government has been very clear and proactive and putting money, where their mouth is.

Erum That's where I'm getting a little bit, you know, where is the money coming from? Where is it expected to come from? and, who's gonna do it? is this report from a government policy recommendation group saying, "Okay. Here's a great thing for private industry to do.

Karl You guys go do it, and it's great because there's AI." what it's missing is this whole conversation about biosecurity, which, we've been talking about here on the podcast a lot. and it's been very interesting to see how [00:07:00] biosecurity's been coming up in the news. Yeah. I mean, since you mentioned biosecurity,what just happened this week is, executives from several of the big AI firms, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, plus a bunch of other leaders in AI, biotech, and national security, called for regulating synthetic biology.

Karl And what they're concerned about is that people are gonna start using AI and quickly build things that could be dangerous to the public. That's not the case. I mean, at least I have found, and we keep hearing from people, that AI models are gated, so if you try to get deep into something biological, it will be flagged or you can't do it.

Karl But I think it's interesting that, these companies all came together to push for regulating, synthetic biology instead of maybe regulating the AI. I don't know. What do you think, Uram?

Erum Yeah. That's really strange because we were just talking about this, policy recommendations, and they are encouraging the individual scientists.

Erum our friends that are [00:08:00] using AI to do their research whether they're looking for different microbes or, just for their everyday work, they get flagged and, their queries get flagged. So I think one of our friends was looking up a certain type of microbe, and it had like, it's like anthrasis, was a part of a nomenclature of this microbe, and it could be like obviously just bad anthrasis, like, main from, it makes anthrax I'm, I'm assuming.

Erum But then there's ones that we just don't know about that might not be bad at all, but we just can't look for it because, it's being flagged. And we also had a flag. we put our, podcast on YouTube, and one of our episodes was flagged for, like, suspicious content because, an episode mentioned Biology Without Borders,

Karl And so we had to appeal the flag, and explain to them that Biotech Without Borders is an organization that's based in Queens. It's

Karl I just think the approach is being too broad right now, and I think that they're over-indexing on [00:09:00] safety. And, I think what's gonna end up happening is these things are gonna be very much gated. So depending on how deep you wanna go into biology, you'll have to reveal more and more information about yourself.

Karl I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I just think that we need to see where that's gonna go.

Erum Yeah, I mean, like gated, but it's like how do you know what the gate should look like if you don't have a deep understanding of biology? So, it might slow things down

Erum I do appreciate the flagging and then, like, having to appeal because then, you're not appealing to an individual person. It's probably another AI behind that that's trying to learn why things are good versus bad, and having to make that reasoning and then saying, "Okay, you know what?

Erum So any time now Biotech Without Borders comes up, we don't need to flag it because we've gotten this explanation already of what it is." it'll be interesting to see. Of course, we have experts that look at biosecurity. we have our friend

Erum Kevin Flyingots of Aclid Bio, who's doing a lot in biosecurity, more on the DNA synthesis side. ... And also on the [00:10:00] laboratory side, so, that's very interesting. But in terms of how- he can collaborate with these other AI organizations that, serve up intelligence.

Erum that would be an interesting thing. Kevin, if you have any thoughts, if you're listening to this, it'd be great to- Yeah,

Karl let's- ... hear from you ... get Kevin back on to talk about it, yeah.

Erum Yeah. And then other people, like, maybe people from these AI companies that are taking more active measures to have scientific, models, right?

Erum So Claude Science is out there. I'm sure they all have their own, science models that they want to pursue. but, how's it going to be done in a way that's safe and effective?

Karl Yeah, we wanna get them on so they can talk about it. I think it'd be very interesting to have some of those voices here on Grow Everything.

Karl So you also flagged one piece of news before we get into today's, podcast, which I loved. So tell the world what you found, Iram.

Erum I found an article, which everyone that reads The New York Times probably has also discovered. And it's this article [00:11:00] about, discovering a new monkey in the Congo.

Erum it's called the Colobus congonis, and it is so cute. It has orange lips. it's a treetop dwelling monkey. so people that are, in the Congo and this wildlife reserve, like they observe the different wildlife that's in the area and, they'll take pictures.

Erum before, they probably didn't have super advanced cameras and they would have, take pictures of these monkeys and they couldn't tell that there was a difference because the pictures were blurry. but then they started getting clearer shots of it, this monkey, and they're like, "Oh wait, this is not an ordinary monkey.

Erum It's a new one." which I love, just the fact that not everything's discovered, folks.

Erum There's so much to be discovered. And like you talk about microbes a lot, but there's so many different animals on land, right? Last week, I think we talked about the deep sea. I've been talking about the deep sea a lot

Erum because I'm just so interested- To see these different organisms that have been evolving over millions of [00:12:00] years and, like, under different conditions, and they are some freaky looking organisms in the deep sea.

Erum but then here on land we still find these unique creatures and,

Erum We need to get a primatologist on here.

Erum What do you think about it, Carl?

Karl It's very cute. it just is a very cute monkey. It reminds me of the monkeys that you see in Costa Rica and Panama that are just treetop monkeys. They're very small. They're very loud. I'd like to know what kind of sound this monkey makes.

Karl But look at the pictures, folks. They're very cute. so let's get into today's podcast. Yerem,

Erum Yes. So today's episode, we are interviewing Nick Milne of Octarine Bio. we are continuing our bio dye series. It's been a very interesting series. This is going to be our sixth episode,

Erum So Nick is the founder of Octarine Bio. He was also a post-doctoral researcher at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for [00:13:00] Biosustainability, and formerly a research scientist at Evolva. they're based out of Copenhagen. And this is going to be a great episode learning about not only the science, but also the business and the thinking that goes behind scaling up dyes and replacing toxic ones.

Erum So you're in for a treat. Let's go.

Karl Nick Milne, Octarine Bio. We are so excited to have you on the Grow Everything podcast. Welcome.

Nick Well, thanks for having me.

Karl Let's get some background before we get into what Octarine does. You have a super interesting academic research background. you did some early proof of concepts that basically spanned from neuropharma, working on things like psilocybin to really complex yeast metabolic engineering.

Karl What was the catalyst for you for moving from that scientific background that made you realize that the same platform you were doing that work in could [00:14:00] be used to rewrite the future of color?

Nick So, um, I've been working in this field for going on 15 years now. I've worked in industry for a number of years working on a number of different projects.

Nick And I think to be honest, I'm a little bit of a, a cynic about the whole thing. in my time, especially over the last 15 years, so many of our wonderful companies have unfortunately not made it. And it's been a shame because I think everybody comes into this industry wanting to make a positive impact on the world, right?

Nick I think synbio and metabolic engineering and biosolutions has this incredible potential, but it kind of hits the harsh reality of, uh, you know, of, of commercialization. And so over my career, I've been really trying to find this sweet spot about where biology can actually compete against, synthetic chemistry.

Nick And I think the founding principle of Octarine has always been to focus on maybe some of these rare situations where biology is actually better than [00:15:00] chemistry. The, the unfortunate thing is that synthetic chemistry has had like a what, 150-year head start on us. It's very cheap, it's very efficient, and biology is more sustainable, but it's, it's just often nowhere near as efficient.

Nick But my co-founder, she's a, a plant biochemist, and so her career is really to look into these examples where biology does the most amazing chemical reactions. And there's hundreds of examples where biology does the most elegant things that chemists can never do. And so the connection to all of the research that we've done has really been to focus on these cases where biology clearly outperforms chemistry.

Nick and my academic research and also a lot of the stuff we've done at Octarine, that's always been the through line. so we've done projects around psychedelics. We've been looking at, cannabinoids, particularly novel cannabinoids, all really to kind of validate that value proposition that under the right circumstances, biology can do things that a, a chemist can only dream of.

Nick [00:16:00] And it's the, the color program, which is what we've been working on since 2023, I think is one of the, the strongest examples of where we can really, really capitalize on that value proposition.

Erum Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much for setting that up and, like, the, the history between,

Erum synthetic chemicals having that head start and then just being honest about, the challenge of biology in terms of the economic truth you can say, and the fact that, synthetic chemicals had this head start, but here we are, biology's more elegant and, you landed on replacing petrochemical-based dyes with biology-derived alternatives.

Erum So from your perspective, do you see this as a gradual shift towards industry, or is there a total transformation happening?

Nick I think it's industry specific, we focus mostly on the textile industry, though not exclusively. And in textiles, this is unfortunately a really gradual shift. The current [00:17:00] share of the textile industry that uses bio-based colors is less than 1%, right? Yeah. There are solutions that are there, but they just have very, very limited market penetration.

Nick And the main problem is they're not cheap enough. I think, a- again, I'm gonna sound super cynical, super pessimistic, but in my time in this industry, the one thing I've learned is that nobody's willing to pay for sustainability. they like it, they want to have it, they won't pay a single cent more for it.

Nick And then connected also to textiles is that they won't accept a worse product. I think this is where the, the trouble comes, especially with textiles, is that the, for the dyes and the pigments that are used to color our textiles, the performance bar is exceptionally high, right? We need these, these colors to last years in direct sunlight.

Nick They need to survive the washing machine. They need to survive rubbing. They need to survive the sea in some cases. And again, synthetic chemicals have had 150 years head start. They've gotten very good at [00:18:00] making these dyes not only cheap, but also really high performance. And to date, unfortunately, bio-based incumbents just haven't been able to solve that, that problem of being cheap enough and good enough.

Nick I think this is changing and, this is the whole value proposition of Auctane. But I think it's more to point out that the reason why we haven't seen more of this in the textiles is the performance and the price barrier.

Karl I'm super glad you pointed that out. I mean, we talk a lot about the importance of performance over sustainability.

Karl As much as we know sustainability is super important, but at the end of the day, that performance is really what consumers and brands are looking for, and it can be very challenging. But before we get deeper into that, can you help our listeners visualize the Auctane product? If someone encountered a fabric dyed with Pure Palette, what would they see or feel?

Karl How is it different from anything that exists today?

Nick So actually, if we do our job right, you shouldn't notice [00:19:00] the difference at all, right? One of the things that we're working really hard to do is to make a solution that is identical to what's already out there. So a direct one-to-one drop-in replacement for synthetic dyes, and that's all the way through the value chain.

Nick So at the customer level, you'll see a colored garment that looks indistinguishable from a synthetic one. Hopefully, on the tag there'll be this nice blurb there because that's obviously a really important value proposition. But aside from that, hopefully you won't know.

Nick And it actually extends all the way back to the value chain. at every step of the value chain, we're making a product that looks exactly the same. So for example, our manufacturing process makes a, a pigment powder. It looks identical to what a synthetic version looks like. It's identical to what the dye house sees.

Nick And then once we've formulated it, we turn it into a liquid. This is identical. This is a dispersed dye for polyester, and it's exactly the same as a, [00:20:00] a synthetic version. So really we're trying to make it as easy as possible to make the switch to a sustainable bio-based version.

Erum Yeah. Yeah.

Erum What colors are you working with?

Nick so we are working on, on a very specific, part of the biosynthetic universe. So in contrast to other companies, we don't pick and choose molecules from all over the natural kingdom. We have one biosynthetic pathway. there's a lot of reasons why we like this class of molecule.

Nick one of the big ones is that from one sort of biochemical precursor, you get access to the entire color palette. So you don't need to go to all these places in the plant and natural kingdom to get all your colors. You can get the full color palette from this, this one pathway. And that's really important because, we want to cover the entire color spectrum.

Nick We're aiming to commercialize six different colors. And if we had to have kind of a new strain, a completely different metabolic pathway, I mean, that just multiplies the work. So all of our pigments [00:21:00] share the same biosynthetic pathway. They have the same fermentation, the same DSB, and that makes it a lot more efficient for us to scale up.

Nick That being said, we are prioritizing some colors over the other. We're working our way down in terms of the complexity. Some colors are easier for us to produce than others. So what's heading to the market this year is a purple and a black color. We have a green that's

Nick starting its scale-up journey. And then we're at the lab scale with the blue, red, and yellow, which is gonna be the, the primary colors, which is really needed to, to cover the entire spectrum.

Karl Amazing.

Erum Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Green's my favorite color. So love that. And speaking of green, let's talk a little bit about your successful raise.

Erum You've raised a Series A to scale up your platform and, you talked a little bit about the challenge, actually a lot, about the challenges of, bio-derived or fermentation-derived, molecules and the cost. But I want to understand what part of [00:22:00] your story do you think resonates most with investors and also what draws major textile brands to actually partner with you?

Nick So at the end of the day, sustainability, right? If I had to sum it up in one word, it's sustainability. Most of our investors are impact investors. Sustainability gets us in the door. It doesn't seal the deal, but you need to tick that box first before you can have other conversations I think over the years we've built kind of a pretty compelling business case around the molecules that we're developing.

Nick So as I said before, our molecules come from a very specific part of the biosynthetic, universe. They cover the entire color spectrum, which is essential for brands. I think the way to think of it is that we don't go to brands and say, "Hey, do you want this purple?" A brand comes to us and say, "We want this exact shade of turquoise or begine."

Nick Yeah, yeah, we, we want a very specific mix of colors. And in order to meet that demand from the brand, we need to have enough of a palette to be able to mix things together. And so having the entire color palette [00:23:00] really helps. It also helps from our customer's point of view. So if you think of the dye houses, it's a hassle for any company to work with a startup, right?

Nick And if they have to do that and, only get one color out of it, not worth their time. So we're working on this class of molecules. It's completely unexploited. It's never been put on the market before. We have a strong moat around the, the biosynthetic pathway, things like that.

Nick the big one for brands and for the investors though is we have a credible path to price parity. And I, I think again, that's gonna be really important. Synthetic dyes are just shockingly cheap. It's embarrassingly so. On the order of like single digit dollars per kilo. And for a biotechnologist, that's terrifying to hear that, y- you have to be down at that range.

Nick And how we've approached this is actually w- we're nowhere near that range. So on, on a kilogram per kilogram basis, our pigments are substantially more expensive. but the unique thing about these pigments, and again, why we're so fascinated in this specific class of molecule, [00:24:00] is that they're probably the strongest pigments ever discovered in terms of the color strength.

Nick And in our benchmarks, they are between 20 to 40 times stronger than any other synthetic pigment. And so to get a certain color on a fabric, you need 20 to 40 times less, and therefore our customers are willing to pay 20 to 40 times more because, especially in the dye house world, everything is about cost and use, right?

Nick They make their margins trying to shave cents off the cost of things, so they're very comfortable doing these calculations. And so we have a very credible path to achieving price parity that's been validated, at the dye house. I think the last thing for investors is that, what's super cool about these molecules is that they have incredibly broad functionality.

Nick So we've been able to demonstrate that we can apply these in all sorts of markets. And I think this is important because a lot of the industries that we're targeting, they're very old industries. They move very slow. They're often not very consolidated. And in order [00:25:00] for us to make a good return on investment, we need to have a fairly decent market share.

Nick So instead of trying to you know, dominate the textile world with our bio-based solutions. We're actually choosing instead to spread ourselves a little bit thinner and target multiple markets. And this is really, possible because of the broad functionality. So textile dyeing is, a big one for us. we also do printing, so we can print on textiles, we can print on paper, on cardboard.

Nick we do coating, so you can see, you can use it for like, handbags and wallets and things like that. And then we're also doing plastics. And for me, plastics is super exciting because, in order to use our pigments in plastics, they have to survive extraordinarily high temperatures. So this plastic, for example, is 300 degrees, and for a bio-based pigment, that's, that's ridiculous.

Nick So, for investors and for brands, it's, I think, the functionality that's really important with the, these products that we're developing.

Karl Yeah, that's amazing. I'm gonna focus on textiles for a minute because that,color and fashion, [00:26:00] part of the reason why no one really has any idea how cheap or what the environmental impact is of these dyes is because most of this stuff happens in the developing world where people just don't see it unless you're living it.

Karl and in the fashion industry, color's often an afterthought, and yet it's still one of the industry's heaviest polluters. How do you think that rethinking color, particularly through biology, can change the way consumers value the life cycle of their clothes?

Nick I think the industry can do a lot more with storytelling, right?

Nick I think fashion is this really great example where the narrative matters, and people are willing to pay huge markups for clothing that is from a certain designer or a certain brand. And so I think sustainability could be a stronger part of that, storytelling. We always try and compare ourselves to the, the colors used for food.

Nick here is one of these examples where storytelling has been incredibly important [00:27:00] in the replacement of synthetic colors with bio-based alternatives. And here in Europe, bio-based colors in food is the default. it's, one of these rare examples where bio solutions has taken over from the synthetic incumbents, and I think the success of colorants in food has been the storytelling, right?

Nick People perceive synthetic colors as bad. They perceive natural colors as good. They're willing to pay a premium for that. they care deeply about what they ingest in their bodies, and I think a similar case can be made about the clothing we wear. I think one of the reasons why we are so excited about the textiles industry is people really do care about what they're wearing.

Nick They use it to express themselves. They, wear different clothing every day. So I think there's a strong story to tell about it, and sustainability is starting to become part of that story in other areas of the value chain. you hear a lot about, recycled fibers, bio-based fibers, [00:28:00] textile recycling.

Nick That's becoming a big part of the narrative that brands are putting out to their customers. Color isn't yet. I think that's something that, brands can do a lot more to. I think one of the main reasons why we're not hearing about colors as part of the brand narrative is there's no viable alternative, right?

Nick when we talk to brands, they tell us that customers are screaming for sustainable solutions, especially with the coloring, but they just don't exist yet. And I, I think that's really what's been holding it back.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. They don't exist at scale and performance, but you guys are working on it.

Erum and you're based in Copenhagen, is that correct?

Nick Yes. Copenhagen, Denmark.

Erum I love Copenhagen. and then you're very involved in the European biosolutions ecosystem and, you mentioned a bit about regulatory in EU, but can you tell us a little bit more about the regulatory environment and the openness to synthetic biology and how it differs, between the EU and other global [00:29:00] markets?

Nick Well, I think you can't combine Europe into one homogeneous story, but that being said, I Denmark is famous as being a, a biotech hub. You know, we've got Novo just up the road. We have Novozymes, we have all of these companies. So I think the ecosystem in Copenhagen and Denmark specifically is, very strong for these kind of solutions.

Nick There's a lot of funding available. There's a lot of consumer acceptance of these technologies. I think going a little step further out into the EU level, I think, Europe is famous for regulation, right? That's the one thing that we do better thananybody else in the world.

Nick And in my perspective, it's, often viewed as a negative, right? Europe over-regulates and that creates problems and makes it harder for, solutions to reach the market. But I think in our case, this has been one of our strongest selling points because for, better or worse, European regulation is making it really difficult to be un-unsustainable.

Nick if we think about dye houses for a [00:30:00] second, at the EU level, synthetic dyes are being phased out. The worst ones are being phased out. the EU is placing increased regulation on wastewater emissions, and this is all in the name of sustainability and public health. But at the end of the day, this has a monetary cost and this hits the dye houses squarely.

Nick they have to pay more now to deal with these unsustainable solutions. And so, in 2026, where sustainability is maybe not as strong a selling point as it used to be, that can be replaced by regulatory compliance, right? So we're not a company that is developing sustainable solutions.

Nick We're developing, solutions that make it easier for you to comply with these increasing European regulations. And here is where we're ahead of the world. we're much further ahead in promoting sustainable solutions through regulation.

Karl I think it's super interesting because those kinds of constraints also spark, creativity and, make new [00:31:00] solutions way more palatable to companies and brands.

Karl earlier you talked about scaling. You talked about how you guys are scaling your green color, and you guys are basically taking precision fermentation and turning it into production of natural pigments. What do you see as being the biggest challenge for you guys in terms of moving from that controlled bench scale shake flask to massive industrial scale?

Nick So I'm fortunate enough to have been involved in scale-up projects across my career, so I've learnt often the hard way about scale-up problems. And so the,typical answer to this question is, things not scaling linearly. Things that work at one-liter scale suddenly don't work at 1,000-liter scale.

Nick But I think part of that problem is not understanding the differences between the environment at large scale as in lab scale. And so a mentor of mine has this adage that you start with the end in mind, and it's applied specifically to fermentation. So what we do at lab scale here is designed to [00:32:00] mimic pretty closely the environment at large scale.

Nick And so I, I think we've generally been quite successful in our scale-up journey, mostly because we're not trying to push something that's not going to work as well at large scale. I think for us as a startup, the biggest issue is cost. so we're working with a traditional CDMO model. we develop the manufacturing in-house, we send it to a third party to scale it up and to put it on the market.

Nick And at each step in that scale-up journey, it's a huge cost. going up by an order of magnitude, roughly doubles the price of your manufacturing run. And as a startup, we don't have room for failures here. We-- There, there's no budget if a 10,000-liter fermentation fails, and that really changes the dynamic about how you approach scale-up.

Nick we're trying to commercialize six pigments. Each one of those needs to go through scale-up. We're spending a nightmarishly high amount of money on this, and so it changes the dynamic a little bit. We're far more risk-averse. We're not prepared to take any risks in our [00:33:00] fermentation. We're not prepared to change anything.

Nick once it's running at pilot or even industrial scale, we're gonna be very reluctant to change it because we just can't afford failures. And in general, I think that's a huge problem with this industry, is that the cost to go from lab scale to commercial scale is still astronomically high

Erum Yeah, I mean, I, I love the, the piece of advice of, thinking of the end in mind.

Erum What does, fermentation look like on a, on a scaled-up version and trying to mimic that in the lab is, incredibly smart and I would just love to just see how that looks. maybe one day in the future when I visit Copenhagen again, I can take a look or whatever your CDMO is located, because it's just so fascinating.

Erum so I'm kind of curious, like, you, you have this scale-up process,so you scaled up some color, working with, other brands on a high level. Just curious to know, what that commercial rollout looks like and, have any of your clients used [00:34:00] your colors and in what capacity?

Nick So the, so we have a purple and a black that's available at commercial scale now, so kilograms to hundreds of kilograms in that kind of range. we've focused over the last few years predominantly on the manufacturing. I think for us that's been kind of the bigger challenge, that getting the strains developed, developing the fermentation, the DSP and starting scale-up.

Nick We now have a pretty healthy pipeline of new colors coming through the pipeline, and so our attention is shifting a lot more to the, the second part, which is what do you do with this colored powder that you now have in your hands? And so what we're working a lot on now is the formulation work, so how to turn this into a consumer-ready product.

Nick we work with both brands, so people, companies at the end of the value chain as well as companies further up. So this is dye houses, print houses, plastic extruders, everybody that's involved in making the products that use our pigments. So we are working [00:35:00] with, I don't know, maybe 20, it's quite, quite a big number, both brands and, and people further up in the value chain to implement our products at pilot scale.

Nick So we're doing some pilot testing now. first products on the market will be within textiles. So we like textiles, because of the value proposition. So again, I think people care about what's on their clothes. I think people will want to buy sustainable alternatives. We're seeing quite a draw within fashion in general.

Nick We also like fashion because of the regulatory barrier. It's extremely low, both good for us, bad for the industry in general. so textiles is our, is our beachhead or anything related to fashion is our beachhead. and we expect first products to be available at the consumer level by the end of this year.

Karl one of the things that we've talked about and we know is true with consumers is they expect really consistent color, across products. How do you navigate what biology gives us, which is this inherent variability and there's also this variability of working with living organisms.

Karl [00:36:00] How do you ensure that you're delivering a predictable shade every time

Nick Yeah, that's 90% of the problem. That's- ... traditional metabolic engineering, you focus on the one molecule and you, you scale it up. I think our problem is stopping everything else from being formed.

Nick when you've got a color, all of the byproducts and all of the degradation products and all of the biosynthetic intermediates, they're all different colors, And so having these different colors in your production is a, is a nightmare. So making the pigment of interest is the easy part.

Nick What sp- what we spend 90% of our time doing is stopping the production of- ... of everything else. And the reason is, as you said, it would be a nightmare if a brand loved our purple and then we delivered them a slightly different

Nick yeah, maybe we have a byproduct and it creeps up a little bit in our fermentation, and you can see that.

Nick So how we do this, so we have a very strict tolerance for how much of other pigments we tolerate in our fermentation broth. And the number that we've come up with is, [00:37:00] what is the difference that a human eye can detect? So basically, if you look at a, a piece of fabric and you say one has a tiny amount of a, a different colored pigment in it, how much can that be there before you actually see it as a difference?

Nick And the answer comes out to about 0.5%. that's about the number. So internally, we have this tolerance that the pigment that we're producing has to account for 99.5% of the, the total color, which is quite a high bar, I would say. Again, that's why it's the biggest challenge for us. we achieve this through, classic metabolic engineering.

Nick We deal with byproducts. We balance flux. it's also how we design our fermentation that, there's tricks you can do to stop certain byproducts forming and things like that. But again, it is, the challenge. we test this at the dye house level as well. So again, our dye house customers, this is their biggest worry as well, that we deliver them a slightly different version and everything falls apart.

Nick thankfully this has been tested across multiple of our batches and, at the fabric level you [00:38:00] see less than 0.001% change in the, the color coordinates.

Karl Amazing.

Erum Yeah. That sounds like there's so many levers to pull and it just- ... just imagine that like there's just, there's-- you have to think about so many different variables when it comes to scaling up.

Nick Yeah. It's not the challenge we thought we'd be solving. That's-- to be honest,

Erum Yeah. Wow. that's so fascinating. we're at the part where we like to visioneer a little bit and think about the future. what role do you think bio-based pigments will play in consumer goods, and what needs to happen to make it at the industry default rather than the premium alternative?

Nick Hmm. So I think I-- this may be the 10th time I've said this, but price and performance. That's, uh-People value sustainability, right? If you offer them something at the same price, the same performance, but one is sustainable, people will choose that every day of the week. So that is the path to bio dominance.

Nick But if you don't [00:39:00] have those two things, it's just not gonna happen. I think a lot of that's solved at the, the manufacturing side, right? Price parity comes on how cheaply you can manufacture it, and that's, that's our problem. That's the industry's problem to figure out how to make manufacturing cheaper.

Nick On performance, that's, molecule selection. there's a lot you can do on the product development side to fix that. But beyond that, I think the biggest lever that can be pulled is around regulation. what's keeping a lot of these dyes on the market at the moment? Yes, they're cheap, but it's because there's no viable alternative.

Nick we've known for, I think, 50 years now that a large majority of the pigments used in our clothing are toxic. And not just slightly toxic, like highly toxic. we're not talking, "Oh, it would be nice if we could get rid of this 'cause it's slightly harmful." It's, they're really, really bad for the environment and for humans.

Nick But they've persisted in our supply chain for so long because there's no viable alternative. And you're seeing this change a little bit when it comes to regulation. The EU is phasing out a lot of [00:40:00] this, so-called azo dyes that are used, for textile dyeing. Europe has already largely phased out synthetic colorants in food.

Nick America is doing the same. I think regulation is the, the push that actually sees a lot of these bioproducts start to replace synthetic versions.

Karl Yeah. Amazing. so now we're gonna enter the part of the podcast where we ask some quick-fire questions.

Karl I'll do the first one, and then I'll let Erum take over. But what's the single hardest color in the spectrum to coax a microbe to produce?

Nick I wouldn't call it a specific color, but white is difficult, right? White is not really a color. There's no real pigment That's the annoying answer I'll give.

Nick The other answer I'll give is,it helps to look out the window. What can you see out the window? And, the most sort of rare color in the natural world is green. That may surprise you because if you look out the window, you, all you can see is green, and that's, that's chlorophyll. That's a garbage pigment.

Nick It can't be used for anything. If you exclude chlorophyll, the greens of leaves, of grasses, of things like [00:41:00] that, how often do you see a green? Very, very rarely. Green is I'm not sure of the reason, but it's a color that just doesn't occur very often in the natural world.

Erum Oh, wow.

Nick That's interesting.

Nick Very few examples. We're, we're lucky enough to have one of them. So our, our second pigment is a more of a turquoise green actually, but,it's one of the few that we know of natural organic pigments that's green.

Erum Wow. Wow. Did not know that. Thank you so, so much for that. Always learning. Okay. So if you could steal any color mechanism from a wild organism and engineer it tomorrow, what would it be?

Nick I'd have to say structural color. So you think butterfly wings. you see butter and they change iridescence, the color change. I, I think that's so fascinating. it's not a pigment. it's the chosen nanostructures and they reflect light at different wavelengths. And I think why it's cool is because it's permanent.

Nick this whole issue around performance, it's a structure, right? As long as the structure exists, the color exists. I think that's super cool. Difficult, very difficult, [00:42:00] but a cool variable.

Karl It's super cool, and I say we are rank amateurs in engineering biology until we can do that. Yeah. So what's the number one red flag you see in biotech pitches that has nothing to do with actual science?

Nick I think especially in biotech and in, companies making sustainable solutions, it's this assumption that if it's sustainable, people will buy it.

Nick build it and they will come. I think that is absolutely not true. I think, there's far more hoops you have to jump through aside from being sustainable. And I think that's often missing. not just in a, in a pitch deck, but just in a business plan in general, is this understanding of what does it actually take for your customer to switch from their existing solution to your solution.

Nick And in most cases, in most successful cases, it's got nothing to do with sustainability. It's because you solve a specific pain point with your solution that just happens to be sustainable. And I think assuming that sustainability will get you market share is, I think, a big mistake that [00:43:00] companies have made in the past, and I think that's part of the reason why biotech hasn't been as successful as it could be.

Nick But to this day, I think there's this naivety around everybody wants sustainability and they'll do anything to get it.

Erum that's really great advice to other startups. we'll have to make that into a clip and put that on TikTok because- Yeah. ... that was a good one. more people need to hear that.

Erum okay, so next question. A product that desperately needs a bio-based makeover because its current dye is an absolute eco criminal.

Nick I would be remiss if I didn't use an example that we're actually trying to replace. I'm g- I'm gonna use this opportunity to plug what we're doing. So our, our top priority is, a dispersed dye for polyester, so the colors that are used to make polyester, and there's kind of two reasons for this.

Nick The first is that polyester is about 75% of the market. 75% of all clothing made is polyester. That's a crazy statistic. [00:44:00] And within polyester, 80% of the dyes that are used are what's called azo dyes. so azo dyes. And so by dye class, azo dye is by an order of magnitude the most commonly used class of dye.

Nick And the problem with it is that they are well known to be carcinogenic. it's crazy. A- again, go back to my first point, not just a little bit, not just, oh, these are maybe problematic. These are really bad, and they persist in our supply chain because they're cheap, they're effective. the synthetic industry has had 150 years to kind of perfect the chemistry here.

Nick They just work way too well, and there isn't a good amount of, sustainable s- alternatives. So the big problem with them is that, yes, they're carcinogenic, especially when they reach the wastewater, when they reach the human gut, and when they're on your skin, they release these carcinogenic compounds called primary aromatic amines.

Nick The other problem with azo dyes is they have a very low fixation rate, [00:45:00] so they-- at the dye house, you're losing about 30% of that to wastewater. So every kilogram of dye used, 30% of that is just gonna go straight to wastewater, where it's gonna release these carcinogenic, amines. So the manufacturing is terrible, carbon, energy, blah, blah, blah.

Nick but nitrous oxide generates extremely high levels of nitrous oxide. so it's, it's a real eco killer, and it's persisted for so long because it's just so good at what it does.

Nick Well, a few people know, I think, it's-- I'm wearing polyester at the moment.

Nick Maybe you guys are too. There's a decent chance there's a highly carcinogenic compound sitting on your skin right now.

Erum Oh

Karl my

Erum God. Yeah. I'm so scared. It's

Karl like- Yeah, there is, there is a book that has been mentioned a couple times. I can't remember what it's called, but it talks about the stewards and stewardesses in the airline industry getting very sick from the uniforms that they were wearing, and it was because of the dyes and the materials they were being made of, and I think they [00:46:00] ended up suing the airlines.

Nick Yeah, I

Karl know the story. But anyway. Yeah. So last, quick-fire question. What's the ultimate survival guide book or resource that you'd give to academics who want to actually build real world biotech?

Nick So a book that helped me was called The, The Lean Startup. It's like, it's a classic. But why I recommend this, maybe not for the reason you think.

Nick So the, the book outlines this idea of the MVP, the minimal viable product. And I think why it's really important, especially for scientists, most scientists have kind of a long academic career. We do master's degrees, we do PhDs, we have research projects. We're trained to be good scientists, and that makes us terrible at developing products.

Nick I think that what scientists often forget is this, these are two very different skills, and I kind of, I jokingly have to beat the scientist out of some of our employees because- ... it's a different mindset. science is all about truth and publishing academic papers where you need to have all your data in place, and that's not about building a [00:47:00] product.

Nick So I think the book is a really helpful reminder that you're actually trying to do two different things. You're not a scientist anymore. You're a product developer. Your goal is not to discover exciting things, although I know that's fun to do. your job is to place a product on the market as quickly as possible.

Nick And I think why it's relevant is that, again, because I'm such a cynic about this, the industry has unfortunately a lot of failures, a lot of examples where things haven't gone to market, and investors are pretty tired of continuing to funnel this. So the, the days of raising large rounds and spending 10 years getting a product to market are gone.

Nick I think investors want to see how quickly and how cheaply can you actually make money. That's kind of the new proof point. And the goal has shifted, I think from, developing cool science and cool technology to how quickly can you make money. that's the new reality we work with.

Nick And this book is really, really actually quite useful for that.

Erum Yeah. I think, think your investors are very proud of you saying [00:48:00] that.

Nick I mean, it's, it's a tough, it's a tough dichotomy, right? Because we, I, as, as I said before, our investors are impact investors. their LPs are people who want to see positive climate happen in, in our, in our lifetime as well.

Nick But the world we live in is that that also has to make money, and the new reality is that it has to make money pretty quickly now.

Erum Yeah. No, I love that. we're on board. We're on board, and we're really excited for you. I'm just so excited about, the future of Octarine, how your growth trajectory is very fascinating, the story of how you guys are commercializing your fermentation process, amazing.

Erum So I really, really wanna thank you, Nick, for coming on the "Grow Everything" podcast and sharing more about Octarine.

Nick It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Erum Carl, what'd you think about the episode?

Karl I've been really loving this color series. I love that there's so many companies trying to tackle this problem of synthetic dyes. And,Nick pointed out that what Octarin is focused on is these, he called it kind of cases where biology can outperform synthetic chemistry, not just compete against sustainability alone.

Karl And that really speaks to the thesis that we have here on Grow Everything, because performance is gonna beat sustainability, and then it just turns out that a lot of these biological products are a lot more sustainable. So I think that's very exciting, and it just continues to build the thesis that we've built [00:50:00] episode after episode.

Karl What did you think, Iram?

Erum Yeah. I love that approach where he's only looking at those rare cases where the biocolors outperform synthetic, and I think it's, a great practice because you want to prove that it works. And Octarin's pigments, according to Nick, are 20 to 40 times stronger, meaning more vibrant across different parameters, than synthetic alternatives, which is central to a path to price parity because if they're high-performing, why wouldn't you purchase them,

Erum especially if, you can get all the economics right. and The colors that he's really honing in on are purple and black. and it's really interesting because, purple and black are very hard pigments to make through biology, but he figured it out. he has a green coming up too, so that'll be interesting to see [00:51:00] what that looks like.

Erum but I'm curious to then learn, who he'll partner with that will be using these colors.

Karl we've also mentioned this before on the podcast that black is a very challenging dye for clothes.

Karl You need to use hot water. You need to put the textiles into that hot water for longer periods of times. So as much as we love wearing black, it does have an environmental cost associated with it. I don't know that purple is the same. Purple is one of those colors that you mentioned it was very challenging biologically.

Karl It was also a very rare color. the snails in Mexico that produce this beautiful shade of purple. I don't know what it looks like when you have to dye textiles purple, but I know it's, considered to be a rare color. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how that turns out for Octarine and who they're gonna be selling that purple to.

Karl It is my favorite color.

Erum And then one of the strongest takeaways I would say from this episode, was the, of course, the scale of problem. And [00:52:00] on our previous episode, Roya did a great job of talking about this, and Nick reiterated it. And he pointed to polyester and how that dominates the world of clothing, and specifically talking about the azo dyes and how toxic they can be.

Erum So they are very harmful and the need to replace them is urgent. I really wish here in the United States we would also have regulation around dyes in clothing because we wear them all day long. we sweat. skin for as wonderful that it is and how much it protects us,

Erum It's still a living thing that needs to be taken care of. So putting azo dyes on it all day long, not the best thing to do. I hope with Octarine and all the other companies that we've had on this podcast talking about bio dyes, hope they scale up, [00:53:00] help the companies work with them and partner with them to transition away from these toxic, harmful dyes to better, higher performing, and of course, sustainable dyes.

Karl Yeah.

Karl I look forward to seeing the progress that Octarin and all the other c- color companies make in the next few months.

Erum Yes, absolutely. wonderful interview. also very excited because we will be heading to World Biomarkets in September, and we've been talking to the people there.

Erum There's going to be great programming, some amazing companies that are really

Erum Moving the needle when it comes to industrializing and commercializing biosolutions. Join us if you're interested in this space. We have a

Erum promo code called GrowEverything to get a 25% discount to attend World Biomarkets, which is called BioInnovations.

Erum They did a rebrand, so we need to update our notes here, but BioInnovations in Omaha, Nebraska. Join us.

Karl Awesome. Well, thank you [00:54:00] for tuning into the Grow Everything podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us. All our contact information is in the show notes, and don't forget to subscribe to our Substack.

Erum Let's grow