[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company AgFunder is an investor in Future Fields.]
Platform enables complex protein production
Founded in 2018 by Matt and Jalene Anderson-Baron, Future Fields originally set out to produce growth factors for cultivated meat production. It has since broadened its aperture to focus on more mature markets in biopharma, food, and agriculture.
Compared with microbes fed on sugar in pricey steel fermentation tanks, fruit flies are pretty low maintenance, requiring far less water and food and low-budget facilities, says the firm, which opened a commercial plant in Dec 2024 capable of producing kilogram quantities of high purity recombinant protein products annually.
Fruit flies also possess superior internal machinery versus microbial cells that can facilitate the production of more complex proteins, Matt Anderson-Baron told AgFunderNews.
“Typically, clients come to work with us because they’ve struggled to make proteins in legacy platforms. Often that’s because yields are too poor and therefore costs are high and scale is bottlenecked. But sometimes it’s because the protein cannot be made at all in traditional systems because it’s too complex.”
In biopharma, he said, “Every vertical faces challenges that often cannot be addressed with traditional manufacturing methodologies. That being said, biopharma tends to have a need for more difficult proteins, particularly those that are drug targets, like transmembrane proteins – one of the most notoriously challenging class of proteins to manufacture.”
“Future Fields’ technology is a game changer. It brings about a new way of manufacturing proteins at a much lower cost and GHG footprint.” Pascal Lanctot, partner, BDC Climate Tech Fund
Path to profitability
The new funding will also power the company’s platform expansion to create proteins inside tissues such as neurons and muscle cells to enable next generation disease research, said Anderson-Baron.
“This increases the optionality and availability of the biological machinery for making the protein of interest. Each cell type is characterized by a distinct set of biological tools for making proteins such as enzymes and chaperones. Having access to all these different cell types in the insect means we have exponentially more biological machinery at our disposal for solving complex protein production.
“Moreover, it extends beyond the machinery, but also the cellular environment. Some cell types have more membranes, which can be leveraged for the production of transmembrane proteins, which again, is a very challenging class of proteins to manufacture,” said Anderson-Baron, who also sees opportunities to monetize the insect material left after harvesting and purification down the road.
“We’re not quite at the scale where the economics of this make sense. But as we scale up and begin producing larger quantities of biomass, we can start to utilize these side streams to not only improve our economics, but also the sustainability of our platform.”
Overall, he said, “We’re a highly capital efficient company, particularly compared to others in our industry. We expect to get to profitability with this new financing.”
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