Blue Biotech ????: Latest Trends

"In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans." By Kahlil Gibran

Blue Economy ?? and Bio

According to the World Bank, the blue economy is the

"sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem."

European Commission defines it as

"All economic activities related to oceans, seas and coasts.”

The 10 Key Blue Economy sectors are:

• Aquaculture: The cultivation and farming of aquatic organisms in a way that has minimal impact on air, water, quality and on fish welfare.
• Blue biotechnology: The application of science and technology to aquatic organisms in order to produce knowledge, goods, and services, in compliance with sustainability practices.
• Blue renewable energy: The offshore, inshore, and nearshore generation of clean and renewable power from natural sources, including wind, wave, tidal and solar.
• Blue tech and ocean observation: The activities, technologies and infrastructure involved in ocean data collection, modeling and prediction, including for maritime security and defense.
• Coastal and maritime tourism: The activities involved in providing services for tourism in and around coastal or marine environments that contribute to sustainable development in the local area.
• Environmental protection and regeneration: The protection and regeneration of marine ecosystems, including activities to prevent ocean pollution and restore and strengthen biodiversity in coastal areas.
• Fisheries: The sustainable harvesting of naturally occurring living resources in both marine and freshwater environments.
• Shipbuilding and refit: The products and services required for building, maintenance, repair and refitting of vessels for environmentally responsible water transport.
• Shipping and ports: The activities associated with ensuring a sustainable maritime transport ecosystem, including the transportation of freight and passengers by water and port services.
• Water management: The services and infrastructure required for sustainable water collection, purification, desalination, decontamination and distribution, as well as for sewage and waste treatment.

Blue biotechnology is the application of science and technology

• applications include everything from extracting chemical products from living organisms, all the way through to optimizing the production and processing of the chemical produced by these organisms into marine derived products, often for commercial purposes.

to aquatic organisms,

• organisms include microorganisms (bacteria, microalgae, and fungi), algae, vertebrates (fish) and invertebrates (e.g., sea cucumbers, sea urchins, sponges, shellfish, starfish, and jellyfish).

using biological and chemical methods to produce knowledge, goods, products and services.

• these products may be destined for use in a diverse range of subsectors: cosmetics, food, feed and nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, energy and biofuels, enzymes and biopolymers for packaging, clothing, etc.

Blue biotechnology is quite concentrated around four countries in the EU with particularly strong focus on scientific research and innovation: France, Italy, Spain and Germany. Over the past 20 years, the vast majority of European deals in the Blue Biotechnology sector occurred within the EU, with almost 78% of the total number of deals. 22% of the deals took place in the rest of Europe, mostly in the UK and to some extent Switzerland, both of which also have strong scientific traditions. Globally, the blue biotechnology market is expected to reach about €5 billion by 2029, at an annual growth rate of about 7% since 2021. The US held 87.29% share of North America for the blue biotechnology market in 2023. Regarding Blue Economy, Portugal and Mexico also show a strong focus on the blue economy with the Nordics (Iceland and Norway) being the countries with the most share of funding going into the Blue Economy.

According to dealroom, VC funding in Bluetech biotechnology peaked at almost $300M in 2022, then dropped 1/3 in 2023. Almost $900M have been invested since 2016.

• 95% of the funding into this segment went into seaweed and algae startups for a variety of applications. Applications range from pharma (Lumen Bioscience?uses a patented technology to use the well-known food algae spirulina to deliver therapeutic proteins), food (Brevel develops microalgae-based alternative proteins), feed supplements for cow methane emission reduction (CH4 global) and biomaterials & biofuels (Viridos produces sustainable, low-carbon, algae-based jet and diesel fuel; Sway seaweed-based bioplastic).
• Some startups are exploiting other marine resources for innovative applications, such as Jellagen, which uses jellyfish to produce Collagen Type 0 for complex tissue engineering and regenerative medical needs, and Hemarina which develops marine oxygen carriers for industrial and therapeutic applications based on the particularities of purified hemoglobin from lugworms, Arenicola marina.
• Across biodiversity tracking startups such as Spoor.AI (SaaS data platform that enables continuous monitoring of wildlife for offshore wind farms, pre and post construction), and biodiversity regeneration startups such as Urchinomics (which removes overgrazing sea urchins which helps turn a barren seafloor back into a vibrant kelp forest) and Coral Vita (using proprietary technology to grow resilient corals 50x faster to restore dying reefs).

Source:

• INVESTOR REPORT: UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF THE BLUE ECONOMY,
• Blue Economy.

Blue TechBio Companies

?? New Atlantis Labs, marine metagenomics

NewAtlantis (US)—dedicated to marine biodiversity and marine metagenomics for saving our oceans and preserving marine biodiversity—is about to quantify marine biodiversity ?? ?? with open meta omics to power sustainable and scalable ocean regeneration. At New Atlantis they believe that the phylogenetic diversity of the largely un-sequenced marine microbes and planktonic communities could provide a lot of novel potential secondary metabolites that might be of commercial interest. And with a partnership with Bacalhau—a platform for faster, cost efficient and more secure distributed computation, enabling users to run arbitrary Docker containers and WebAssembly images as tasks—they want to study the genome of the marine micro-organisms sampled directly from the ocean environment, using new high-throughput DNA sequencing technology and bioinformatics tools.

But there is more. Gordon Gould—the co-founder and co-CEO of New Atlantis—and his team don’t just want to protect the Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), the national parks of the oceans around the globe. They want also to empower the communities around the MPAs—that most of the times lack the resources to adequately protect life in their waters due to reliance on precarious government funding and traditional philanthropy—by providing MPAs with a viable business model that generates revenues based on MPA conservation efforts and outcomes achieved in their waters, by creating an open marine metagenomics biodiversity analytics platform from which ecosystem health can be evaluated in order to issue blue carbon and biodiversity credits as a revenue source for MPAs. Courtney Nichols Gould, Gordon’s wife, is the co-founder and co-CEO of New Atlantis Labs.

But what do you get when you blend the blue economy with biology and data science? You actually get a time travel back to our origins that gives you the possibility to study biological pathways, proteins and genes (of known and unknown metabolites) in different time points throughout evolution, enabling in the end the pharma sector and the tech sector to build more efficient models for drug discovery.

?? Holloid GmbH, digital holographic microscopy Holloid

Holloid (2020, Austria) provides high-speed 3D imaging and optical characterization monitoring using AI, digital holographic microscopy and patented software solutions to detect, identify and sort colloids, such as dispersed particles, cells and microorganisms. They provide easily customizable solutions for various industries:

• Food
• Pharma (Vaccines, Protein production and Precursor molecule production)
• Cosmetics
• Renewable Energy (Biofuel and Hydropower)
• Chemical Industry
• Environmental Monitoring.

?? Sirenas LLC, computational metabolomics Sirenas

Sirenas (2012, US) has sustainably and ethically built one of the largest and most unique collections of marine organisms and plants from diverse ecosystems and geographies (from the deep sea to coral reefs and estuaries).?These samples go through cutting edge and proprietary chemical extraction and analytics, and tested each one in over 70 in-vitro biological assays relevant to human health. The result is the largest repository of information connecting the uncharted chemistry of marine organisms to applications in human health.? Our insights reveal both extracts and single compounds that modulate inflammation, pathways in cancer, infectious disease and microbiome dynamics. Founder and CEO is Eduardo Esquenazi (Is a Cancer Breakthrough Living at the Bottom of the Sea?).

Their approach, dubbed ATLANTIS?, unleashes cutting-edge computational algorithms on large, proprietary metabolomic and bioassay datasets to rapidly uncover key chemical and biological insights for the small molecules present in complex samples from extremely biodiverse environments. The end result: the ability to mine a vastly untapped chemical language for new chemical scaffolds effective across a broad array of high value targets and disease models (Sirenas Receives Research Grant Totaling $1.68 M To Accelerate Its Drug Discovery Technology, ATLANTIS?).

On February 12, 2018, Sirenas announced that it has entered into a multi-target research collaboration agreement with Bristol-Myers Squibb to deploy Sirenas' drug discovery platform against certain undisclosed challenging therapeutic targets to identify potential drug candidates.? The research collaboration leverages Sirenas' expertise in applying ATLANTIS?, its data mining technology, to identify such potential drug candidates derived from Sirenas' proprietary chemical library isolated from global microbiome collections (Sirenas Enters Into Multi-Target Collaboration With Bristol-Myers Squibb).?

On Dec. 13, 2022, Sirenas and Hume Supernatural, Inc. (“Hume”), a leading personal care product company, announced that the companies have entered into a collaboration to bring new natural ingredients from diverse marine and terrestrial sources into the personal care space (Sirenas and Hume Supernatural Enter Into Strategic Collaboration to Create Science-Backed Personal Care Products).

Right now they have 5 programs in development (alongside their biotech partner, Galileo Biosystems): GB 499,408 (inflammation, IND enabling), SMD-5053 (malaria, preclinical), SMD-3218 (lupus, preclinical) and SMD-5004 and SMD-3265 (oncology, discovery).

?? Basecamp Research, AI-based biological design for genomes and proteins Basecamp Research

Basecamp Research (2019, UK) is a biotechnology company that partners with R&D?teams to develop proteins that meet their most challenging requirements in applications as broad as food, pharma and bioremediation. Having sampled from most extreme and extraordinary biomes on the planet, their knowledge graph of natural biodiversity is the most comprehensive and diverse in existence. This data advantage allows us to rapidly develop AI that outperforms state-of-the art. The company was founded by Oliver Vince and Glen Gowers. On March 12, 2024, Basecamp Research announced the launch of BaseFold, its new deep learning model?that predicts 3D structures of large, complex proteins?more accurately than?other AI-powered tools, including the industry gold standard, AlphaFold2 (IMPROVING ALPHAFOLD2 PERFORMANCE WITH A GLOBAL METAGENOMIC & BIOLOGICAL DATA SUPPLY CHAIN).

• BaseFold was created by augmenting the AlphaFold2 model, which predicts the 3D structure of a protein based on its amino acid sequence, with BaseGraph. BaseGraph is Basecamp Research's purpose-built foundational dataset for biological AI, collected via access and benefit-sharing partnerships?with over 25 biodiversity-rich countries. Furthermore, Basecamp Research will be working with NVIDIA to optimize and productionize BaseFold for NVIDIA BioNeMo.

On June 18, 2024, Basecamp Research partnered with the Ferruz Laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Biology of Barcelona to unveil ZymCTRL ("enzyme control"). Modeled after large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, ZymCTRL allows users to generate new enzyme sequences simply by inputting an enzyme identification code, specifying the desired activity (Basecamp Research and Ferruz Laboratory Announce ZymCTRL: A Revolutionary AI Tool for Enzyme Design).

• ZymCTRL represents a significant leap forward, offering an end-to-end solution that bypasses the need for a seed sequence, thus providing users with unparalleled control over the design process. This next-generation tool is not only rapid and cost-effective but also capable of creating enzyme sequences with only 30% resemblance to those in its training set, broadening the horizons for novel enzyme development.

How Basecamp Research Helps Catalog Earth’s Biodiversity

Basecamp Research has now raised a total of $30M.

Blue Economy Funds ?? for Blue TechBio

Funds

• Katapult Ocean: Investing in ocean impact companies that solve climate and biodiversity challenges, and provide food and water globally (Target fund size €75M). Top Innovative Fund and the world’s most active ocean impact venture fund manager, with 64 impact investments since 2019. (€150,000 - €4.5M, first ticket €150,000-€500,000 with the remainder reserved for follow on)
• SARSIA: Investing in Electrification, Green shipping, Aquaculture and fishing, Biotech, Monitoring the ocean.
• Morningside Hill Blue Horizons: Investing in sustainable aquaculture, water management, industrial IoT and automation and agricultural efficiency. VC fund launched in 2019 focusing on Bulgarian startups. It comprises public funds of €33.3M under the operational programme “Innovation and Competitiveness”. (€1 – €3M seed and series A)
• Ocean 14 Capital, fund 1: Investing in aquaculture, sustainable fisheries, alternative protein, marine flora and circular plastics. A leading Blue PE fund backed by the EIF and global institutional investors. (€5 - €15M for growth, €1 - €5M for venture)
• Faber Blue Pioneers I Fund: Investing in early-stage deep-tech impact driven start-ups for ocean sustainability and decarbonisation. EIF as anchor LP. (€100,000 - €1.5M from preseed to series A)
• Indico Blue Fund: Investing in Blue Clean Tech, Blue BioTech, Digital Ocean, Green Shipping, Water and Waste Management, Sustainable Aquaculture, Renewable Energy. Fully privately funded with a focus on R&D deployment in Portugal, and SDG impact measurement. (€100,000 - €5M average deal size €1.4M)
• Astanor Ventures: Investing in food system, water and biodiversity. Focusing on Blue Economy and bioeconomy. Received funds from the EIF. (€100,000- €5M average deal size €1.4M)
• Planet Ocean Fund: Investing in alternative aquatic nutritional sources and plants, precision mariculture and robotics, sustainable fishing, energy and carbon Capture, plastic alternatives and reusables, ocean and earth data generation. Europe’s first venture capital fund of funds solely investing into ocean-related climate tech.
• Special Opportunity Fund: Investing in ocean health, climate resilience and food security. Institutional Investor: Walmart heir Lucas Wallen.
• For more:

Mutual funds

Moreover, this is a list of examples of mutual funds with a focus on the Blue Economy are:

• Global Impact Fund by BlackRock. Launched in 2020, it targets ESG projects but also invests in resources to address critical issues affecting the oceans.
• KBI Aqua ISR Fund by Amundi. Dedicated to investing in companies that align with environmentally responsible practices, particularly those related to water conservation and management.
• Aqua Classic Fund by BNP Paribas. Focuses on the Blue Economy’s conservation goals.
• Rockefeller Credit Suisse Ocean Engagement Fund. Launched in September 2020 with $780 million in assets under management, it is a substantial commitment to financing ocean centric solutions.
• Rockefeller Climate Solutions Fund. Launched in 2012, it has evolved into a mutual fund in the USA and a UCITS in Europe with a focus on ocean-related climate solutions.
• Other mutual funds include DWS Concept ESG Blue Economy LC, CPR Invest and Covea Aqua.

Exchange-traded funds (ETF)

In addition, exchange-traded funds (ETF) with a Blue Economy focus have also emerged. Three ETFs have been identified:

• IQ Clean Oceans ETF, which was launched nearly 2 years ago, now has $4.6M in assets and is the largest ETF according to Morningstar.
• Rockefeller Asset Management has launched an ETF on Ocean Engagement Strategy through Krane shares. This ETF provides access to the U.S. market audience to invest in the Ocean Engagement Strategy.
• Newday Ocean Health ETF (AHOY.P) made its debut in June 2022, and has some $2M in assets.

Until next time ??