Berkeley Lights and Amyris collaborate to improve testing of microbial strains

Berkeley Lights, Inc. (BLI), the leader in digital cell biology, and Amyris, Inc., a leader in the development and production of sustainable ingredients for the Health & Wellness, Clean Beauty, and Flavors & Fragrances markets, announced today that they have entered into a collaboration focused on improving the production of high-value, small molecule, natural products from Amyris' microbial strains. This is the first application of BLI's Beacon® platform for microbial strains within synthetic biology.

The goal of the collaboration is to implement the Beacon platform to identify and isolate microbial strains that produce the highest quantities of non-therapeutic product. The Beacon platform is currently used to compress timelines and increase capacity in drug discovery and development by transforming previously fragmented macrofluidic workflows into automated nanofluidic workflows. Initial proof-of-concept has shown that the Beacon platform has the potential to increase Amyris's strain testing capacity tenfold, thereby adding capacity and further increasing the speed of product development at Amyris. The synergy between the Beacon platform and Amyris's proven ability to commercially scale multiple products has the ability to further increase the availability of sustainable, renewable products.

The Beacon platform is one of the few technologies we've seen that potentially offers a truly advanced solution to synthetic biology by making it possible to test engineered microbial strains in a fraction of the time and at unprecedented scales. This collaboration with Berkeley Lights is expected to not just increase our screening capacity for a high-value, commercial asset, but to also deliver high-producing strains at a fraction of the overall cost. This would help to support increased speed to market for commercial-scale products at reduced cost."

John Melo, President and CEO of Amyris

At Berkeley Lights we are on a mission to accelerate our customers' product development cycles. Our goal is to enable partners like Amyris, an early pioneer and a current leader in the bio-manufacturing space, to dramatically reduce the time to market for key assets in their small molecule pipelines. By applying our workflows that target increased process yields with reduced lead times, we can quickly help our partners realize scalable and sustainable manufacturing across a large range of bio-based products. Additionally, given Amyris's proven ability to commercially scale across multiple products, we see Beacon as having a positive commercial impact."

Dr. Eric Hobbs, CEO of Berkeley Lights