Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[GTman1]

My comments:

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" As AMSilk [120] (a German company specializing in high-performance spidroin-based biopolymer) claimed in 2011"

11 yrs ago?...thats an eternity in cutting edge tech where you have a hundred scientists working to make improvements and have hundreds of millions of dollars to work with...

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I agree. 11 years is an eternity in cutting edge biotech research. However, that would assume that AMSilk was on the cutting edge of research in 2011. In reality, they are producing custom recombinant proteins using a process that was already decades old (same with Bolt Threads and Spiber). The only thing they did different was choose the recipe for which protein they wanted to produce using this established platform. They decided to make a spider silk analog (because the bacteria and yeast don't have the metabolic pathways to create full length spider proteins regularly). The advances in the recombinant protein production field since 2011 indeed have been incremental (which is good), but absolutely not exponential to reduce production costs by orders of magnitude.

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"and it is also close to the estimation from Kraig Biocraft Lab [121] in 2018 that the high yield of 20 grams of protein per liter of fermentation broth is $35,000~$37,500.”"

well thats coming from kim, sooooooooooooo...

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It's actually coming from the literature coming from our competitors (and also any recombinant protein manufacturer worth their salt). Not only that, the 20g/L is for their highest yield protein. There is an inverse relationship when they present efficiency for their largest proteins. Simply put, the larger the proteins they target, the less efficient the prokaryotes are at producing the protein. So some of their smallest molecular weight proteins were responsible for even those modest yields.

i just think that if spiber is still getting huge funding from multiple sources all these years, they likely have a lot more going on than many here are willing to admit...and its not happening at the lofty costs that is being rumored here either...

There is a good reason that private money can invest in Spiber with a relatively low risk. The facilities Spiber is building are highly modular for the protein production industry in general. Even if Spiber fails at producing a marketable product, the market for protein production, biosynthesis, bioreactors, is only increasing with the increasing momentum of gene editing and gene therapies (also gene regulation and cell therapies). So regardless, the facilities that Spibers investors are pouring money into could always pivot to becoming a contract manufacturer (CM) for some other pharmaceutical. So if Spibers silk doesn't work out, the VCs that own them will have no problem utilizing the same equipment for other therapeutics. This would be akin to Kraig Labs spending 10's of millions of dollars on their own silk manufacturing plant. Worst case scenario, Kraig labs could use this plant to produce regular silk.
The margins would be much lower, but it really wouldn't have been a waste of money. This is the same with what Spiber is doing. Unfortunately for Spiber, they would be out of the spider silk game (If KBLB commercializes their tech), but they have a decent chance of being competitive in becoming a recombinant protein producing manufacturer.

Just my thoughts. Happy 4th of July everyone