Regenerate Ventures invests in Green Bioactives

Regenerate joins £2.6m investment in Green Bioactives to scale plant-based innovation

Regenerate Ventures has invested in Green Bioactive's £2.6m seed round. Green Bioactives is developing a plant cell biomanufacturing platform. Plants are nature's chemists, capable of producing a vast array of natural biomolecules that are core ingredients in many cosmetic, pharmaceutical, food and agricultural products. Green Bioactives technology enables these plant molecules to be produced at scale with attractive costs. The plant biomanufacturing industry can potentially be a $200bn market.

Green Bioactives improves lives with plant-derived natural products. They do this by sustainably producing high value speciality natural ingredients using our pioneering plant cell culture biomanufacturing technology. They sell business-to-business to customers operating across a range of commercial sectors including agriculture, food & drink, nutraceuticals, personal care & cosmetics and health & wellbeing.

Plants produce a wide variety of natural products used across a range of commercial applications including taxol in oncology, saffron in food flavouring and morphine in pain management. However, sourcing natural products from (often) undomesticated plants can be challenging. They can be expensive to produce, are harvested in an unsustainable manner or are subject to supply chain issues associated with climate change and environmental degradations. To tackle these challenges Green Bioactives is pioneering the development of plant stem cell culture-based biomanufacturing at scale, uniquely enabling improved products for existing applications with committed budgets. By increasing plant-derived natural product yields our patent-protected approach is economical, sustainable, reliable and work-leading; building local supply chains with positive impacts on resource utilisation and the circular economy.

How are they doing this?

Green Bioactives targets and isolates a plant’s stem cells. They then cultivate the plant cell and culture it at scale. Traditionally the yield of these biomolecules from whole plants is typically very low or is limited to specific plant species. Green Bioactives increase the output of particular plant molecules used as ingredients across many products, from cancer drugs to bio-fertilisers.

Who is Green Bioactives?

Green Bioactives is an innovative start-up biotech company from the University of Edinburgh. The company started as a project in the ICURe programme funded by Innovate UK. Green Bioactives platform provides much improved and sustainable access to the vast, diverse, and valuable library of bioactives generated by the world’s plant population.

Why do we love them?

Green Bioactives are reducing the harvesting of rare plants and, through their patented process, are using less land, water, chemicals and energy than the current method of extracting plant molecules.

In crop protection, plant-derived natural product biopesticides are expensive and used only on the highest-value crops. Green Bioactives biomanufacturing process will enable cheaper production of bio-fertilisers and biopesticides, allowing farmers to transition to inputs that aren’t degrading the soil.

For more information about Green Bioactives, click here.

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