G'day.
What a fun way to turn up.
Chief Commercial Officer at eXoZymes,
a company that I've been looking at for a little while,
really impressing the socks off me as a company and a
place that's moving so quickly with new discoveries,
new developments.
I have been wayfinding green chemistry for the last 25 years,
and during that time I've had the privilege
to commercialise several biotechnologies.
for personal care,
for plastics,
textiles,
fragrances,
performance fuels, and fine chemicals.
And along the journey I've been constantly
inspired by our ability to use the tools of biology
to make stuff.
However,
I have to acknowledge the challenges of doing so economically.
I think if we're honest about our industry we would say the scorecard
has been one of lots of learning and lots of progress but limited
commercial success at industrial scale.
I see exozymes as the logical successor to SynBio (synthetic biology).
And I base that reflecting back on the
journey I know I've been involved in.
The beginning of my career we started looking at using fermentation,
microbial pathways to make naturally occurring molecules
at industrial scale,
believing the world would embrace them
and find new applications for them.
That adoption rate for the new materials,
the new drop-ins,
was very,
very slow.
We then found ways of unlocking pathways
inside these microbes to make the exact
same chemicals,
drop-ins.
But the development journeys and the scale-up
journeys of those were expensive and challenging.
Then along came a bunch of DNA tools trying to
accelerate the speed and pace of innovation.
And whilst it might have brought down the cost of reagents,
it didn't really change the pace of innovation.
It didn't improve the targets we're able to go
after and did little to change the process economics
which are necessary for performance at the end of the day.
When we marched a lot of our technologies to scale,
one of the things we felt hampered by
was the large scale of investment necessary to build
globally relevant capital projects.
With eXoZymes,
it isn't just about driving the pace of R&D experimentation.
It isn't just about improving the quality of
the enzymes that you can select and develop.
It's also about operating free of the constraints of the microbe.
Being able to operate at really high concentrations.
Being able to build smaller plants that are
still commercially and globally relevant.
That bringing down of the CapEx profile brings down your project and
investment risk.
It brings in investors that were previously
shied away from these first-of-a-kind projects.
The more projects we deploy at commercial scale,
because this risk is lower,
the more successes we'll see,
the more payback we'll see,
the more growth in the industry we'll see.
And that's what we want.
Impact comes from commercial deployment.
This company,
in its world of AI-driven learning,
has been able to move very,
very quickly through the development of pathways,
the development of tools.
I think that sets themselves up to be a strong partner for companies
who are looking at products that perhaps haven't been served well.
And as I think about the evolution of this SynBio space over
the 25 years I know I've been kicking around is this really
feels like an exciting new chapter for us to be moving into.
It's an exciting group but it's an important mission.
Continuing this journey towards making sustainable products
reliably that don't overtax the environment behind us,
that delivers consumers with things that can excite them.
And really important,
that can actually deliver back to our
shareholders a return on investment.