Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[Eskaminagaga]

It is a price point that Spiber is gunning for, but has yet to achieve. The 2017 date is speculation on my part based on their current goal for commercialization.

Spiber Inc. recently updated their website with new information on this which is where I drew from. The points in particular are:

Cost Barrier

Given the incredible potential of proteins and the materials they can produce, why hasn't the world already seen a revolution in industrial materials? The primary reason is cost. The fermentation process uses microorganisms to manufacture recombinant proteins, and driving the cost of this protein below $100 per kilogram was regarded as impossible—we have dubbed this idea as the "$100 Barrier." On the other hand, conventional wisdom in the materials market suggests that the threshold for widespread adoption of any given material—synthetic or otherwise—is a cost of about $20-30 per kilogram. Even then, when the objective is a mass-market scale of $10 billion or above, this cost must drop below $10 per kilogram. The gap between the per-kilogram cost of proteins produced via fermentation and what will gain widespread adoption on the current market is vast, and pioneering a new market requires massive investment. These factors resulted in recombinant protein material research remaining a largely uncharted territory.

Followed by:

Breakthrough

Eleven years of countless innovations produced through our core feedback loop have helped us significantly reduce the cost of silks produced through fermentation, which is one of the largest obstacles to widespread adoption. Since we began researching the fermentation process in 2008, productivity has increased by 4,500 times, and the manufacturing cost is now a mere 1/53,000 of what it once was. We are rapidly approaching the key cost threshold for exponential proliferation.

I personally feel that this indicates that they are aiming for a $100/kilo ($45/lb) price at the time of their initial commercialization launch in 2017. I may be reading too far into it and could definately be wrong, but thats what I get from it.