Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[GTman1]

If this webcast is just another fiber line or knockout worm or 100% spider silk that may or may not ever come to fruition then I'm afraid it will be another long line of yawns.

Really? The platform silkworm would be a yawn? Because I think it would be a game changer and a giant leap for the industry.

The technology behind protein expression platforms hasn't really changed in many years. The main platforms use bacteria (e.coli), yeast, or mammalian cells (i.e. Chinese hamster ovary cells). When your target is complex proteins which need post-translational modifications like glycosylation, then mammalian cells are preferred. The only issue is that all these processes are very expensive because they use large bioreactors to create extremely small protein yields. Bolt Threads is finding out the hard way which is probably why they are pivoting to mushroom leather that they've licensed from another company.

I know I've brought up Human insulin as a protein target before because the industry is very large and competitive (more than $40 billion per year). But one industry I haven't brought up is monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). This is a massive industry ($120+ billion per year) that uses mostly mammalian cells as a protein production platform. In fact, the best selling drug in the world, Humira, is a monoclonal antibody and is made this way. That drug alone rakes in about $20 billion a year. The only issue is that making these drugs using mammalian cell lines is very expensive. Even at large scale manufacturing plants it can cost between $20,000 - $80,000 per kilo (and sometimes much higher).

Creating a new platform to produce recombinant proteins efficiently and relatively cheap through silkworms is a game changer. I still have my doubts on whether or not it's possible to make silkworms, given their different metabolic pathways, to produce varieties of non-native proteins with comparable traits (ie. antigen binding affinities, cytotoxicity, etc) to their CHO derived counterparts. But if they have created this, it will be a boon for the industry.

The best part is that Kraig Labs isn't in the business of developing drugs. They would be a manufacturer. That would mean this breakthrough would eventually have to be partnered with a pharmaceutical company(s).

I'm not saying this is the breakthrough that is being announced on Thursday, but if it is, I will have much more respect for it than a "big giant yawn" just because I don't understand the implications of this achievement.