Company: Pathfinder Bio
Location: Nottingham
Founded: 2022
Founders: Gareth Little (Co-founder), Prof. John Heap (Co-founder)
Written by: Aonghus Topham
Edited by: Caroline Babisz and Natasha Barrow
The reliance of all industries on sustainable chemical manufacturing is becoming increasingly critical as environmental pressures mount with decreasing supply of already limited resources. Pathfinder Bio’s proprietary enzyme discovery platform offers a scalable and high-throughput method for delivering on the promise of biomanufacturing, driving industries closer to a circular bioeconomy: whereby renewable biological resources are used in a closed loop process for large-scale production of goods. Biomanufacturing offers a pathway to a more sustainable and efficient future, benefiting industries that are reliant on the production of physical goods. At the heart of this shift is enzyme discovery: harnessing biological catalysts to precisely create sustainable manufacturing processes.
Enzymes are proteins which catalyse biochemical reactions made up of amino acid sequences, they have the potential to be tweaked to be more efficient catalysts by altering this sequence at specific regions of the protein. Mutating a few specific sites within an enzyme generates enormous diversity in terms of performance, yielding trillions of possible combinations all of which must be tested to find the optimal variant. Measuring the performance of these mutants is typically done in a low-throughput way, by measuring the activity of individual enzymes one at a time, for example by independently culturing bacterial cells expressing each enzyme variant.
Even when using advanced liquid handling robotics and microfluidics, these labour-intensive techniques are severely limited in throughput and lack a continuous, self-sustaining selection system for enzyme discovery. Growth-coupled selection measures the enzyme’s efficiency through measuring the survival of the bacterial cells in which they are expressed, having the potential for massive scalability offered by running large numbers of bacterial cell-variant combinations in parallel. The bottleneck of this process previously lay in the labour-intensive nature of engineering bacterial cells able to support multiple variants.
This is where Pathfinder Bio’s unique widely-applicable selection technology stands out, with the ability to sift through billions of enzyme variants in a one pot reaction. Combining cell free biomanufacturing techniques with massively improved research and development efficiency gives Pathfinder a unique capability within sustainable chemical production.
Founded in 2022 Pathfinder Bio’s team consists of Dr Gareth Little (CEO, co-founder), an expert in biomanufacturing with 14 years of experience in engineering biology for chemical production, and Professor John Heap (Inventor, co-founder): a research leader within bioengineering and 3x founder. They are joined by Dr Hasan Tanvir Imam (Senior Scientist), an expert in biocatalysis and enzyme development. Pathfinder Bio are currently looking for a co-founder/C-suite level executive with experience within Biomanufacturing to join full-time and help shape the company’s commercial activities and drive impact of their proprietary technology within target markets.
After initially securing a £300K initial funding from Innovate UK, Pathfinder Bio are currently raising for a £2.3m seed investment round to launch their beachhead products, drive business development and further refine their go-to-market strategy [1].
Currently in discussions with a large global aroma company, Pathfinder Bio is positioning itself to be a key player in the fragrances and ingredients industries (known to offer high profit margins). This partnership will allow distribution of Pathfinder’s beachhead products whilst they also focus on the personal care, pharmaceuticals, and agri-chem markets, replacing fossil carbon inputs in these industries.
With an estimated $11.5bn market value [2], the global enzymes market is one of the most potentially lucrative areas of biotechnology and will continue to grow with the increasing demand for clean-label consumer products across a variety of industries. The unbounded potential future applications and market reach of Pathfinder Bio’s technology will allow them to become an integral piece of a circular bioeconomy across the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, chemical, agri-tech, food-tech and biofuel industries.
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