*Strong As Silk-WTIN Complete Article From PR*
Spider silk is an intriguing natural material with characteristics that could revolutionise the technical textiles industry, and Kraig Biocraft Laboratories is on the cusp of cracking the secret to its mass production... Kami Kountcheva reports
Kraig Biocraft Laboratories is a small company with a big ambition. Founded
in 2006, Kraig Labs works to develop and commercialise new types of protein-based fibres for the consumer, industrial and defence sectors.
With a lot of the company’s production and development occurring outside of the US
at the facilities of independent contractors, Kraig Labs has only a handful of employees at its small corporate office in Lansing, Michigan. However, the size of the company is not indicative of its vision, becausethis business is on the brink of cracking a long-running conundrum which has been puzzling many manufacturers in the textiles industry: how to commercialise spider silk.
Spider silk has been identified as oneof the strongest natural substances,
with extraordinary elasticity, durability and water resistance. Nature has been perfecting this material over millennia and the textiles industry has zoned in on it. Jon Rice, Chief Operations Officer at Kraig Labs, explains that the market for this fibre is vast and full of potential.
“The most documented benefit of spider silk is its combination of strength and flexibility. Combined, these two properties create a material without match either in nature or synthetics,” Mr Rice says. “That said, there are other perhaps even more exciting properties that spider silk protein offers; many sources report that spider silk protein is biocompatible with living tissue and that it can be used within the human body to repair tendons, create skin grafts, stitch wounds and all without adverse reactions.”
The textile industry is a clear starting block for spider silk technology, according to the COO, but the potential of this material goes beyond our understanding. “With any new technology, what’s most exciting is not the applications we expect, but those we’ve
yet to dream up. We are very excited to see where the applications for spider silk take us over the next five years.”
The industry has been very aware of this material but nobody has ever managed to produce it in a commercially viable way. Rearing spiders in a laboratory setting to mass-produce spider silk is very challenging due to the biology and behaviour of the animals themselves. While other companies have focused on genetically engineering goats and bacteria like E. coli to secrete
the protein, none have yet succeeded in creating a feasible paradigm for a cost-effective way of producing meaningful quantities of it.
Monster Silk
Kraig Labs, however, has been working with scientists in the state of Indiana, at the University of Notre Dame, to develop transgenic silkworms, which can produce the fibre. In 2013, the company launched a commercial production programme for Monster Silk at an undisclosed location, which aimed to bring the concept out of the lab and into larger-scale production. “That programme is still running and continues to supply us with material that is being used to develop end products and applications,” Mr Rice explains.
“The goal of our ramp-up programme was to establish a process capable of delivering metric tonnes of our Monster Silk material. The process improvement recommendations by our experts in early 2014 outlined the actions necessary to meet that goal. Production capacity notwithstanding, we have and continue to make strategic decisions about the quantity of material we produce on a quarterly and annual basis,” he adds.
The company also recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with a provincial government in Vietnam, outlining a framework for the creation
and rearing of transgenic silkworms in the country. “The power in our approach is our ability to leverage the inherent efficiency of the silkworm, nature’s silk factory. With this we can produce meaningful amounts of our recombinant spider silk with minimal infrastructure and overhead.”
This new MOU seemingly builds on the previous efforts made by Kraig Labs to bring production out of the lab. “The work done to transition our technology from the lab into our existing production facility gives us the confidence that we will have a similar experience transitioning into Vietnam. Vietnam offers a highly skilled workforce with expertise in sericulture. Opening a production operation in Vietnam has been a long term plan for Kraig Labs that we see as a next step for improving our recombinant silk fibre materials,” Mr Rice says.
Genetic engineering
Genetic engineering seems to featurein most of the methods that manufac- turers have tried in order to produce the spider silk protein. Mr Rice believes this is a powerful tool allowing companies to tailor the performance of the resulting silk. “We’ve developed a number of different genetic strains, some of these target pure elasticity, others target optimising strength, while yet another aim is to balance these two properties. By developing a working knowledge of what elements of the genetic code return these properties, we can design performance into the code and fibre.”
Mr Rice explains that the market demand for different types of fibres and functions s already apparent in synthetics. The question is whether different types of recombinant spider silk will meet the needs of the market better than existing or future alternatives, he adds.
Kraig Labs has already designed a composite fibre, Monster Silk, comprising a combination of spider silk proteins and silk from a silkworm. Since its development,
the product has made some waves in the market, Mr Rice explains. “The response we’ve had so far has been overwhelming.
I usually keep a hank of Monster Silkin my bag and it’s always fun to drop it in someone’s hand and say ‘this is that recombinant spider silk everyone has been talking about’, it’s usually followed up with a big smile and a ‘you can’t get this material to me fast enough’,” he says.
The company has been working with partners to explore the properties of Monster Silk in both knitted and woven applications, and last year it collaborated with Warwick Mills to develop a pair of gloves; the world’s first textile to use Monster Silk. These were called the first of many textiles to be created as part of the partnership.
Last year, Warwick was making jersey knit and woven samples to help identify areas
of development for the fibre and exploring some possible applications. Mr Rice says: “I know that others have focused on designing spider silk show pieces or garments, but we’ve opted to focus our time and material in creating one-of-a-kind solutions.”
Multitude of materials
While Monster Silk is the company’s most iconic product, Kraig Labs has produced other fibres. “Monster Silk, SpiderPillar and Big Red are just three of the many different transgenic lines we have and are developing.
While we have produced more MonsterSilk than any of the other material lines, SpiderPillar, Big Red, and others continue to be tested and evaluated for future applications,” the COO says.
“Each of our materials offers a different combination of the elastic and strength properties of native spider silk. We expect that when released, SpiderPillar will offer the market a stronger fibre than Monster Silk with similar or better elasticity.”
Very recently, the company also unveiled its newest innovation in the spider silk family – Dragon Silk. This new fibre represents a leap in the company’s recombinant spider silk technology, combining both the elasticity and strength elements of native spider silk. A small number of samples of the new fibre have demonstrated tensile strength as high as 1.79 gigapascals, exceeding spider silk strength by as much as 37%, depending on source literature, Kraig Labs said.
Several samples of Dragon Silk have also demonstrated elasticity above 38%, exceeding native dragline spider silk, the company added.
Company founder and CEO, Kim Thompson, says: “We have never believed that native spider silk is the limit of strength and flexibility performance. A few superstar individuals, within the genetically engineered colony we call Dragon Silk, have demonstrated extremely high levels of performance in the laboratory.
We are now working to obtain that standard throughout the Dragon Silk line.”
The technical textiles market has really ramped its pace up over the past few years, with innovations springing up from all its different sectors. It is currently worth around US$127 billion and growing at an average rate of 4% annually. The potential of textiles in the world today is vast as they become increasingly intelligent to tackle any demands that consumers have.
However, Mr Rice believes that the textiles industry doesn’t receive the global acknowl- edgment it deserves for its progress. “I think the textile market often gets overlooked when it comes to recognising innovation at work. Nowadays if it doesn’t have a semi-chip or an app it seems to be ignored. We have an incredible material in our Monster Silk and the response we’ve had from the textile market has been fantastic.”
A number of other companies are working on the production of spider silk, including AMSilk, Bolt Threads and Nexia Biotech- nologies. The competition in this niche area of fibre production is mounting as people recognise the value of spider silk, and companies are having to establish firm USPs to set themselves away from the pack. “Probably the most significant difference between our approach and that of others
in the industry is the work we don’t have to do. Our selection of the silkworm as our base wasn’t an accident. Nearly all of the other firms developing forms of spider silk have to artificially spin the silk protein into fibres, but we let the silkworm do that work for us,” Mr Rice says.
Quality challenge
Where competition exists between manufacturers, cost and quality always comes into question. Companies are currently battling the issue of cost to try and find a viable model for its production, but quality will be the next challenge.
“Certainly within our process of rearing and harvesting silkworms, the production process has an impact on the ultimate product quality and performance. This is one reason we’re excited to have recently announced the signing of an MOU with Vietnam; we expect to establish a pilot production facility there, where we will be able to utilise their expertise to further improve our products. I would expect that the other production approaches, such as engineered bacteria, will have similar if not more correlation between material process and final material quality,” Mr Rice says.
The difficulty in producing this fibre on a mass scale, which has prompted genetic engineering to try and reproduce the substance, begs one important question: is the fibre natural or synthetic?
Mr Rice believes the answer is not so black and white. “Ah, the great debate of ‘natural’ versus ‘synthetic’. Corn wouldn’t exist had it not been for the work of selective planting and harvesting by farmers 10,000 years ago, so is that natural or synthetic? Monsanto took it to the next level with its engineering of corn to produce more kernels, become drought tolerant and herbicide proof. So where do we draw the line in defining human attempts to manipulate or enhance our environment?
“Certainly our hybrid silkworms are not the result of natural evolution, nor are they something purely synthetic. These are real, living silkworms making real silk, that’s pretty natural, we’ve simply changed the sheet music our silkworms are playing to. I think as technology evolves, so too will our need for more sophisticated language to describe it, it’s no longer simply a matter of farm or factory made,” he adds.
With all of that in mind, Kraig Labs aims to work with nature to replace toxic technologies that pollute the environment with natural production methods that also yield improved materials. Part of the company’s ethos is to work in partnership with the environment and be responsible guardians of natural resources, Mr Rice says.
The first half of 2015 has been fruitful for Kraig Labs, Mr Rice explains. The development work is yielding good results and the recent MOU with Vietnam is launching the company forwards in cracking the mass-production challenge holding back the spider silk industry.
“We are seeing a lot of interest from new market segments challenging us to think about our materials in new ways. We believe the second half of 2015 will be just as exciting,” the COO says.
The company is currently working to innovate and develop new transgenic fibres, experimenting with methods to improve the performance of the materials. While Mr Rice could not answer the big question of when he expects Kraig Labs will be producing spider silk products as a result of the collaboration with Vietnam, Kraig Labs has taken another big step forwards in bringing this extraor- dinary fibre to the market.
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