UK-based startup is preparing for the commercial launch of its first products made via in 2026.
Rather than using sunlight, water, and soil to nurture fully-grown plants, Green Bioactives grows plant cells in bioreactors in conditions optimized for the rapid, consistent, and controlled production of high-value botanicals as traditional supply chains are increasingly threatened by unpredictable weather, political instability, disease, heavy metals, and pesticides.
To find out more, AgFunderNews (AFN) caught up with the firm’s chief business officer Chris Meaney (CM) at the conference in San Jose.
AFN: Why is plant cell culture beginning to gain traction as a means of sourcing botanicals?
CM: Over the last 10 years, a number of things have changed. First, there is the demand on the land; we can’t pillage natural ingredients in the same way we previously could, so we need alternative solutions, especially where we’re looking at very specific molecules from plants.
Second we have also seen improvements in equipment such as bioreactors. And third there’s just more demand from the industry for these ingredients across different applications today.
AFN: What ingredients are you focused on and why?
CM: We’re focused on high volume, low input molecules in personal care and cosmetics markets, where there are also lower regulatory barriers to market entry, which means you can commercialize some things sooner rather than later.
Some of our co-development projects are confidential, but one product I can talk about is about a molecule [traditionally sourced] from licorice root called , which is a tyrosinase inhibitor [it can reduce the production of melanin, which is responsible for skin pigmentation]. It’s in high demand for skin brightening and whitening, age spots, and sunspots.
It’s widely used in cosmetics but it’s currently naturally sourced from challenging areas, for example, countries such as Afghanistan and Iran which are politically unstable, or places threatened by climate change, which impacts production and yield. We’re able to produce it consistently throughout the year and we’ve already seen demand from Europe, North America, and Asia.
We’re also looking at saponins, which have applications in cosmetics and vaccine adjuvants, which are [traditionally sourced] from the bark of the Chilean soap bark tree, which grows at very high altitudes and takes decades to reach maturity.
AFN: When might your first products hit the market?
CM: It’s an exciting time as we’ll be able to supply small amounts of samples to companies for testing this year with a commercial launch planned in 2026.
AFN: How does plant cell culture work in practice?
CM: We start by identifying a molecule from a plant, often in conjunction with our partners or potential customers in the personal care and cosmetics space. We look at things that are challenging for a number of reasons. It could be about sustainability or reliability.
We then go to various sources of plants and take many samples into the lab where we’ll try to grow those cell lines in dishes using different media, and then the high performing ones will transfer into liquid suspension. Here they’ll be given nutrients to help [increase] the concentration [of certain bioactives] and [the] productivity of the cells. And once that’s complete, we move into bioreactors for commercial production.
AFN: What levers can you pull to customize the output?
CM: A lot of the molecules we’re working with are created by plants in stress situations. I always like to give the example of when humans are under pressure, they produce adrenaline, which [triggers a] fight or flight [response]. But plants can’t run away, so to protect themselves from insects or weather or climate change, they produce these molecules that are valuable in industry.
So we have to mimic those situations. How do we create stressors? That’s done with nutrients and things like shakers, so they will produce more of the required molecules and help give us a greater yield in the finished product.
AFN: What kinds of cells do you work with?
CM: We work with plant vascular stem cells whereas some other companies in this space work with de-differentiated cells [mature cells that firms reprogram or ‘de-differentiate’ to act more like stem cells].
When you work with de-differentiated cells, they can have vacuoles [tiny holes] that allow water or air to get in, whereas with plant vascular stem cells, they don’t exist, so it makes things like cryo-preservation easier, which is a key enabling technology we’re working on.
AFN: Are you genetically engineering your cells?
CM: Different customers have different preferences. So it can be from, ‘It has to be purely natural’ through to GMO-light, through to full transcription factor manipulation, and it really does depend on the industry you’re working in.
For example, for customers in cosmetics, keeping it natural is important. However, we hear a lot now from multinational companies that 10 years ago may not have been interested in anything that’s been genetically modified [but are now changing their views].
So for example they may be OK with it if there’s no GM material left in a remaining product right through to others that will accept a genetically modified product.
AFN: And what about downstream processing?
CM: It could be a basic extract that’s required. It could be a highly concentrated molecule. We can do both.
AFN: What are the biggest barriers facing plant cell culture startups?
CM: Finance is always a challenge. But the other thing I’ve seen is a lack of contract manufacturers [that specialize in plant cell culture].
With other areas of fermentation, there are ‘ready to go’ companies you can hand production over to and scale up quickly. But plant cells behave in a different way, which makes it more challenging. You can’t just put the process into somebody who has 10,000, 50,000, 75,000-liter bioreactors and say, ‘Go ahead!’ There’s a lot of work, a lot of development, to get there, and to get to commercial scale.
The post appeared first on .
