Replies to post #103855 on Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[Lebbe1]

Well tech,
The company is ramping up production since 2012 and plan to set up pilot production in the next months in Vietnam.

The company has a deal with:
- The recently moved into new offices with a tremendous view on a
parc
- They have an agreement with the University of Notre Dame
- They have an agreement with Warwick Mills
- They have an agreement with a country (Vietnam) having thousands of years experience with silk. Guess they must be extremely impressed to make an agreement with KBLB in order to, next to letting them producs in vietnam, cooperate in setting up a research center

Pretty impressive, if you ask me......

Did you compare the strength of the silks produced by Spiber with KBLB? Or are you missing some information there?

[Eskaminagaga]

Spiber is a private company, so it is hard to find too much on them, but I have been keeping notes on them as best I can, so here is a basic rundown of what I got:

Spiber Inc.
CEO: Kazuhide Sekiyama
Location: Tsuruoka, Yamagata, Japan
Production Method: Transgenic Bacteria creates proteins which can be processed into threads
Website: https://www.spiber.jp/en/
Subsidiaries: Xpiber Inc.
Notes: Founded in September 2007. They have raised ¥14.64332 billion (~$130 million USD) from various investors and government grants. They have two pilot factories built on the same site, one producing 100kg of proteins a month and the other producing 20 tons of proteins a year (~1.7 tons a month) at peak production rate. They are working in partnership with Kojima Industries Corporation, an automobile part manufacturer, as well as Goldwin Inc., the Japanese distributer for their branch of The North Face.

Their first proof of concept textile was the blue QMONOS dress (http://imgur.com/a/qqmpi#0) and more recently created the Moon Parka in partnership with The North Face Japan (http://imgur.com/a/gzI75). They are not allowing anyone in the general public to touch their prototypes at this time, but they do plan on releasing a limited run of Moon Parkas this year for a price that rivals the already existing Antarctica Parka (http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/crouka-lr/item/thenor-nd91501/?s-id=borderless_recommend_item_en). They have stated that their goal at commercialization it to offer their proteins at a price less than $100 per kilogram. They plan on starting to work with additional companies in 2017 and hope to be at full scale commercialization by 2025.

They are keeping the properties of their fibers a secret currently and are supposedly improving them constantly, but in a public presentation they did in late 2014 to secure funding from the Japanese Government (http://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/sentan/kakushintekikenkyu/7kai/purezen4.pdf), they cited 1.6 GPa strength and 354 MJ/m^3 toughness for their fibers.