Small Business ERC Collaborative Opportunity to Develop a Biomass Conversion to Fatty Acids Platform

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Research and development work at the NSF Engineering Research Center for biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC) has identified a bio-process for conversion of sugars to fatty acids as a platform technology. The fatty acid synthesis pathway can serve as an extremely versatile platform for the production of a very diverse class of chemicals. Due to rising demand and constrained supply, fatty acids are currently produced from palm or coconut oils. Due to rising demand and constrained supply, fatty acid prices have quadrupled in the last decade and are projected to rise further. The proposed effort will enable a broad platform for commercialization of various biomass-derived fatty acids and their derived products. Such a platform will cater to many industry sectors including consumer products, nutrition, personal care and polymers based upon carbon chain length of the fatty acids. The proposed effort will focus upon commercialization of C14 and C16 fatty acids. Technology Holding LLC (small business) and Rice University (CBiRC) have collaborated to develop and commercialize the patent-protected biomass conversion to fatty acids and fatty acid derivatives platform. The proposed process utilizes patent-pending metabolically engineered E. Coli culture to convert C6 sugars from biomass to fatty acids. The metabolically engineered strains have shown to exhibit extremely promising performance - these strains can produce fatty acids at a fatty acids/glucose yield close to the maximum theoretical value and at good production rate. The goal of the proposed collaboration is to translate the existing ERC platform research into the marketplace by developing a hierarchy of fatty acid and derivative products synthesis based upon yield and market price. The commercialization effort will focus upon: (1) Demonstrating the intellectual property protected fatty acid based platform technology via scale-up; (2) Rapidly transitioning the fatty acid based platform technology to the marketplace aligned with the translational goal of CBiRC and (3) Creating an economically viable product portfolio from the platform.