hero15 wrote: Very interesting article published in Germany by goldinvest.
Last Friday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk offered a prize of USD 100 million on Twitter for the best technology to bind carbon dioxide. If you can do it, you can do it! Of course, Musk is doubly right: We need to radically reduce CO2, and the key is new technologies.
We have a hot candidate: Photosynthesis, or more precisely a company that harnesses the power of photosynthesis on an industrial scale. We are talking about the Canadian start-up Pond Technologies Inc. (TSXV: POND, FRA: 4O0). In more than ten years of work (yes, even start-ups can get on in years!), Pond has developed a technologically leading platform for the cultivation of microalgae. Pond grows microalgae in closed tanks under fully controlled conditions. The CO2 content is one hundred times that of air, 5 percent instead of 0.04%. This causes the algae to grow even faster than in nature. The important thing is that Pond's technology is scalable. Pond can run 1000 liter tanks or 20 tanks of 50,000 liters each. The principle is the same: Algae "eats" CO2 and turns it into biomass. As a rule of thumb, two tons of CO2 from burning gas or coal, for example, yields about one ton of algae. Microalgae are becoming increasingly sought-after as a lifestyle food, but also as high-quality animal feed.
Algae industry suffers from a bad image
The problem for Pond, and for the algae industry as a whole, is that even green investors are now closing down fast on the subject of algae. You heard that ten years ago, they say. The list of failed experiments is indeed long. Biofuel from algae vs. fossil raw materials was the founding program of many companies at the time. Hardly any of them survived. How could it? The task is like squaring the circle. How is a young technology supposed to compete with the world's largest commodity right off the bat? All the more so if the true costs of fossil fuels are not factored in, which is only beginning to happen with the introduction of CO2 prices. Pond seems to have finally found the key to solving this dilemma. The magic word is: Bio-Pharma. Here, microalgae act as living microfactories for the production of high-quality medical proteins.
The fantastic thing about technological progress is that surprising ways are always being found that no one had thought of before. This has also been the case at Pond Technologies. It was the CRISP/Cas9 gene scissors that made the genetic programming of microalgae possible. It looks very much like POND could make a breakthrough with the production of human proteins based on microalgae - not only technologically, but more importantly economically, as Pond Technologies forms an integral part of a larger algae-based bio-economy (see Figure 2).
The logic of this algae-based bio-economy works in stages. At the very top are commodities in huge quantities with correspondingly low prices. At the bottom, at the beginning of the ladder, are the small but high-margin products needed to get an algae-based bioeconomy off the ground. Companies need to make money, after all. That's not possible today in the distorted competition with fossil commodities. With bio-pharma, on the other hand, the situation is completely different. There, it's not a question of tons, but of micrograms of certain proteins. Such quantities are child's play for Pond. That's why Pond is currently systematically preparing its entry into the bio-pharma sector. The company set up a new biotech division specifically for this purpose at the end of last year.
It is a long way from biodiesel to the synthesis of medical proteins. But this is precisely the path that Pond has taken. The company has recently been successfully using its platform to produce human antibodies. The principle is already known from bacteria and yeast fungi. Microalgae do not need sugar to grow, but light. Initial tests indicate that they could have advantages over yeasts and bacteria, particularly in terms of copy fidelity. Compared to mammalian cells, which today are mainly used in the field of biopharmaceuticals, microalgae are characterized by their extremely fast reproduction. Theoretically, large quantities of certain proteins could therefore also be produced quickly, but development is certainly only at the beginning.
A lot of research will certainly have to be done in this direction. Nevertheless, it is already becoming apparent that the topic of bio-pharma could become the long-sought door opener for an algae-based bio-economy. We therefore recommend following the news from Pond Technologies closely. If you want to learn more about the company, we recommend the (unfortunately not very well done) website Technology - Pond Tech or the current company presentation Unleishing the power of Photosynthesis for a micro-algae based bio-economy (pondtech.com). And should Musk award the company with his CO2 prize, the world will certainly hear about it.
We had already reported on the company on Goldinvest.de last fall. The link to our introduction can be found here. or in the company profile of POND.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator