Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
This is the copy and pasted summary abstract from DOD website:
Nice find. Once again, silkworms, not protein fermentation, is highlighted for the production of spider silk fibers. Another U.S. government entity corroborating interests
U.S. Government Accountability Office article on Synthetic Biology (and Spider Silk from Silkworms)
First Paragraph of the report:
Synthetic biology can change the genetic material in viruses, bacteria, yeasts, plants, or animals to give them useful new characteristics. For example, integrating spider DNA makes a silkworm produce super strong, ultra-lightweight silk.
Also:
Once equipped with information about the DNA's function, synthetic biologists can edit or create the desired genetic material within an organism using genome-editing tools such as CRISPR. Scientists can make these genetic changes far more rapidly using synthetic biology than with earlier methods, such as selective breeding over multiple generations. Moreover, synthetic biologists are able to retool organisms to have uses they do not currently exhibit in nature. For example, scientists are engineering silkworms to produce spider silk rather than traditional silk (see fig. 1).
Wow. This article confirms basically everything I've ever said about the perceived competition.
So this is supposed to be a big breakthrough in protein fermentation, right? So now, they are celebrating an 8-fold improvement from the best methods of the past. This breakthrough is an improvement of up to 8 grams per liter. LOL, great!
But wait, there's more.
The best performing fibers they made from these yields have a tensile strength of 481 +/- 31 MPa.
What this means:
Point 1
Their 481 MPa tensile strength fibers are about 1/4 the strength of Kraig Lab's Dragon Silk. The extensibility is roughly the same as KBLB between 30%-40%. This gives their fiber a toughness of about 179 MJ/m3, which is about 1/2 of the toughness of Kraig Labs Dragon Silks. Please don't be misinformed by those on here who don't know the very basic difference between tensile strength and toughness. These people may try to convince you that fiber glass is twice as tough as spider silk. That is completely untrue and it exposes the lack of basic understandings of material properties. If I was simple enough to believe those things, I too, might not believe spider silk could have vast applications.
Point 2
This "breakthrough" has increases protein yields from roughly 1g/L to about 8g/L. So that means a typical large scale 2000L bioreactor can produce about 16 kilograms of this new spider silk/mussel fusion protein. So what exactly is in this bioreactor? I know these fermentation companies like to make people think it's just sugar feedstock and bacteria. Well, simply put, it's not. If you click on the full Nature article regarding this breakthrough, you can check out their methods. I will paste them below so people can see the real complexity of simply just growing and expanding the bacteria (we won't even get into extraction/filtration/fiber making, etc).
As you will see, even the most basic ingredient in this fermentation process is the culture medium that is used for the bacteria to live and expand. You'll see that they use a pretty typical and well known media called "Terrific Broth" (TB). TB is widely used in fermentation. You can buy this in bulk. The cheapest I've ever seen this culture media sell for is about $85/kilo dry. This new "breakthrough" process uses TB at about 45 grams per liter of water. This means that 2000L bioreactor would need 90 kilos of TB. So just this one ingredient would cost over $7,500 to make 16 kilos of this new protein (not even fiber yet!). I won't even get into all the other (and more expensive) ingredients needed in the process. But if you read the Methods I posted below, you can look them up for yourself. And again, this does not include all the other costs of ingredients, extraction process, skilled personnel, tank cleaning/maintenance, large energy requirements, etc.
Now how does this relate to our current "competition" in Spiber, Amsilk, etc? Well if this "breakthrough" just improved efficiency by 8-fold, then you can imagine that our competitors are using a process that is even 8 times less efficient then this new process. So that same $7,500 for that single ingredient would yield only about 2 kilos for Spiber and Amsilk. Notice how I left out Bolt Threads? that's because they already recognized how bad these economics are for fibers, which is why they already pivoted to mushroom leather. The above process is great if you are creating a protein drug that can sell for $100/mg or whatever. But not for making a fiber. This breakthrough shows just how bad of a position Spiber and Amsilk are in.
***This new breakthrough completely proves that Kraig Labs has no competition from the protein fermentation companies.***
New "breakthrough" methods below (from Nature article to help illustrate their complex process):
Spiber is no longer a competitor. They used to be, but not anymore.
Just like when Bolt Threads finally figured out that isolating just the spider silk protein from yeast is prohibitively expensive for clothing. Both companies used the same process. Bolt decided to completely pivot and shift towards mushroom leather. Spiber, instead, decided to sell the protein broth without isolating the spider silk proteins.
Purifying the proteins that the yeast produce (hint: they excrete thousands of different proteins into the medium along with the spider silk analog), is an extremely expensive part. Their original idea was to purify the resulting broth and extract the protein through many stages of centrifuging. The first step in purification is the easiest. It removes most of the suspended solids. Next comes removing the dead and lysed yeast cells. After that, the next couple dozen rounds of centrifuging will be used to separate all the remaining thousands of different types of proteins that yeast use for different metabolic purposes, and purifying it to get a high percentage of spider silk protein analog. Even once they get it to 90% spider silk protein analog, they will need many more rounds of centrifuging. The last few percent are the hardest. This is why insulin is relatively expensive to make (in mass quantities, not expensive for the minuscule amounts needed for drug purposes).
This was one of Spibers biggest issues. In order to make a fiber with even close to comparable mechanical properties as spider silk, they were going to need to isolate it which would be way too expensive for garments. This is why they pivoted to "brewed proteins". Because thats exactly what it is. All they do now is do the first couple steps of purifying in order to remove suspended solids and the dead yeast, and then they dehydrate ALL of the proteins secreted by the yeast. They make a fiber with this "brewed protein". But they could also make a fiber without the trace amounts of spider silk in it. It's not hard to make a fiber from any protein, however, it won't have any useful characteristics so you might as well use something cheaper, like cotton or wool.
Spibers main selling point now is that they are sustainability advocates who make a fiber without traditional agriculture or fossil fuels. They are no longer going after the high tech fibers with incredible mechanical properties. This is why they are no longer a competitor of Kraig Labs.
Kraig Labs uses a silkworm which has specialized silk glands. In normal silkworms, these glands only produce and excrete the very few proteins needed for the structure of its silk. Most notably the 2 heavy chain proteins (about 70%), the light protein (5%), and sericin (25%). The early fibers that Kraig Labs made simply added spider silk proteins to this mix. Somewhere less than 10% of these original fibers was spider silk, but it still gave the new recombinant silk much better properties than regular silk. The Newest Dragon Silks that Kraig Labs announced a couple years ago didn't just ADD spider silk proteins, they REPLACED the 2 heavy chain silkworm silk proteins with spider silk. They only left the minor light protein and sericin on purpose for structural reasons. Once the silkworm makes the fiber, and the sericin is washed away, you are left with more than 90% of the heavy chain spider silk protein, and the rest is the light chain protein for structural purposes. Nothing else. Unlike the fermentation method which has thousands of different proteins in the mix which effect the mechanical properties.
TL:DR - Spiber is no longer a competitor (just like Bolt Threads). They are going after 2 different markets now.
So much about this is wrong it's laughable
Wow. This article confirms basically everything I've ever said about the perceived competition.
So this is supposed to be a big breakthrough in protein fermentation, right? So now, they are celebrating an 8-fold improvement from the best methods of the past. This breakthrough is an improvement of up to 8 grams per liter. LOL, great!
But wait, there's more.
The best performing fibers they made from these yields have a tensile strength of 481 +/- 31 MPa.
What this means:
Point 1
Their 481 MPa tensile strength fibers are about 1/4 the strength of Kraig Lab's Dragon Silk. The extensibility is roughly the same as KBLB between 30%-40%. This gives their fiber a toughness of about 179 MJ/m3, which is about 1/2 of the toughness of Kraig Labs Dragon Silks. Please don't be misinformed by those on here who don't know the very basic difference between tensile strength and toughness. These people may try to convince you that fiber glass is twice as tough as spider silk. That is completely untrue and it exposes the lack of basic understandings of material properties. If I was simple enough to believe those things, I too, might not believe spider silk could have vast applications.
Point 2
This "breakthrough" has increases protein yields from roughly 1g/L to about 8g/L. So that means a typical large scale 2000L bioreactor can produce about 16 kilograms of this new spider silk/mussel fusion protein. So what exactly is in this bioreactor? I know these fermentation companies like to make people think it's just sugar feedstock and bacteria. Well, simply put, it's not. If you click on the full Nature article regarding this breakthrough, you can check out their methods. I will paste them below so people can see the real complexity of simply just growing and expanding the bacteria (we won't even get into extraction/filtration/fiber making, etc).
As you will see, even the most basic ingredient in this fermentation process is the culture medium that is used for the bacteria to live and expand. You'll see that they use a pretty typical and well known media called "Terrific Broth" (TB). TB is widely used in fermentation. You can buy this in bulk. The cheapest I've ever seen this culture media sell for is about $85/kilo dry. This new "breakthrough" process uses TB at about 45 grams per liter of water. This means that 2000L bioreactor would need 90 kilos of TB. So just this one ingredient would cost over $7,500 to make 16 kilos of this new protein (not even fiber yet!). I won't even get into all the other (and more expensive) ingredients needed in the process. But if you read the Methods I posted below, you can look them up for yourself. And again, this does not include all the other costs of ingredients, extraction process, skilled personnel, tank cleaning/maintenance, large energy requirements, etc.
Now how does this relate to our current "competition" in Spiber, Amsilk, etc? Well if this "breakthrough" just improved efficiency by 8-fold, then you can imagine that our competitors are using a process that is even 8 times less efficient then this new process. So that same $7,500 for that single ingredient would yield only about 2 kilos for Spiber and Amsilk. Notice how I left out Bolt Threads? that's because they already recognized how bad these economics are for fibers, which is why they already pivoted to mushroom leather. The above process is great if you are creating a protein drug that can sell for $100/mg or whatever. But not for making a fiber. This breakthrough shows just how bad of a position Spiber and Amsilk are in.
***This new breakthrough completely proves that Kraig Labs has no competition from the protein fermentation companies.***
New "breakthrough" methods below (from Nature article to help illustrate their complex process):
Nice find. Once again, silkworms, not protein fermentation, is highlighted for the production of spider silk fibers. Another U.S. government entity corroborating interests
U.S. Government Accountability Office article on Synthetic Biology (and Spider Silk from Silkworms)
First Paragraph of the report:
Their will likely be a lot of automation. There has been a lot of breakthroughs in silk manufacturing using high tech machines. A lot of this innovation is coming from South Korea and Japan.
But to answer your question, there will still likely be high labor costs. But that will be balanced out through DOD procurement. The fibers made domestically will likely sell to the U.S. government or the medical industry for much higher prices. The fibers KBLB makes in Vietnam will likely be used for the other industries.
Spider silk made from silkworms, even domestically, will still be orders of magnitude cheaper than using fermentation methods.
Okay so let me get this straight.
Jetow asked for proof that Spibers new "Brewed Protein", that they recently pivoted to, is still associated with spider silk proteins. And your proof is a patent that Spiber first filed in 2012 showing they can turn spider silk protein into a gel (with a max MPa of 70).
I'm not sure you understand what Jetow is asking for.
Kraig Labs spent $461,000 in the last quarter of 2022. At that burn rate, they have enough of a cash runway to last 8.3 more quarters. So over 2 years of operating cash. I'm guessing they recognize revenues long before then.
Wasn't there a big fuss that they were going to run out of cash in a few months and would need another "dilution solution" or some other nonsense?
Kraig Labs hadn't said anything about protective textiles and the defense space in a few years, and then all of a sudden, they add what seemed like a forced two-sentence paragraph about it in the shareholder letter. I think this was a heads-up that military applications are actively in play.
I don't know if KBLB will sell directly to the DOD. But their partners, like Polartec, will likely be their conduits. In fact, the last joint PR with Polartec, the company even said:
"In joint development since 2016, Polartec and Kraig are applying the performance characteristics of spider silk into yarns for military-grade textiles."
I wouldn't be surprised if something comes of that once Polartec has a steady supply of Kraigs dragon silk.
I feel like I have to write a similar post like that almost every year because people forget how different Kraig Labs approach is. And people also tend to forget how many times fermentation companies fail and realize making a fiber out of a single protein is prohibitively expensive.
Also, just a side note; many of Spibers patent applications (especially their early ones) were for processing the broth into something useable. The many different steps they needed to take just to get it to a powder, then from a powder to a fiber.
Kraig labs doesn't need any steps to purify the silk because the silkworm glands only produce the desired silk proteins.
The rest of Spibers patent applications mostly focus on transforming their powders into other things like cosmetics, hair, meat substitutes, etc.
Spiber and Kraig Labs are going after different markets. Only when both of the companies start going after gels and powders, will they overlap. But Kraig Labs will mostly be focused on spider silk "fibers" for the foreseeable future.
Spiber is no longer a competitor. They used to be, but not anymore.
Just like when Bolt Threads finally figured out that isolating just the spider silk protein from yeast is prohibitively expensive for clothing. Both companies used the same process. Bolt decided to completely pivot and shift towards mushroom leather. Spiber, instead, decided to sell the protein broth without isolating the spider silk proteins.
Purifying the proteins that the yeast produce (hint: they excrete thousands of different proteins into the medium along with the spider silk analog), is an extremely expensive part. Their original idea was to purify the resulting broth and extract the protein through many stages of centrifuging. The first step in purification is the easiest. It removes most of the suspended solids. Next comes removing the dead and lysed yeast cells. After that, the next couple dozen rounds of centrifuging will be used to separate all the remaining thousands of different types of proteins that yeast use for different metabolic purposes, and purifying it to get a high percentage of spider silk protein analog. Even once they get it to 90% spider silk protein analog, they will need many more rounds of centrifuging. The last few percent are the hardest. This is why insulin is relatively expensive to make (in mass quantities, not expensive for the minuscule amounts needed for drug purposes).
This was one of Spibers biggest issues. In order to make a fiber with even close to comparable mechanical properties as spider silk, they were going to need to isolate it which would be way too expensive for garments. This is why they pivoted to "brewed proteins". Because thats exactly what it is. All they do now is do the first couple steps of purifying in order to remove suspended solids and the dead yeast, and then they dehydrate ALL of the proteins secreted by the yeast. They make a fiber with this "brewed protein". But they could also make a fiber without the trace amounts of spider silk in it. It's not hard to make a fiber from any protein, however, it won't have any useful characteristics so you might as well use something cheaper, like cotton or wool.
Spibers main selling point now is that they are sustainability advocates who make a fiber without traditional agriculture or fossil fuels. They are no longer going after the high tech fibers with incredible mechanical properties. This is why they are no longer a competitor of Kraig Labs.
Kraig Labs uses a silkworm which has specialized silk glands. In normal silkworms, these glands only produce and excrete the very few proteins needed for the structure of its silk. Most notably the 2 heavy chain proteins (about 70%), the light protein (5%), and sericin (25%). The early fibers that Kraig Labs made simply added spider silk proteins to this mix. Somewhere less than 10% of these original fibers was spider silk, but it still gave the new recombinant silk much better properties than regular silk. The Newest Dragon Silks that Kraig Labs announced a couple years ago didn't just ADD spider silk proteins, they REPLACED the 2 heavy chain silkworm silk proteins with spider silk. They only left the minor light protein and sericin on purpose for structural reasons. Once the silkworm makes the fiber, and the sericin is washed away, you are left with more than 90% of the heavy chain spider silk protein, and the rest is the light chain protein for structural purposes. Nothing else. Unlike the fermentation method which has thousands of different proteins in the mix which effect the mechanical properties.
TL:DR - Spiber is no longer a competitor (just like Bolt Threads). They are going after 2 different markets now.