New financing from the federal government may help biotech companies develop fuels of the future, helping reduce America’s dependence on oil.

One such company is Agrivida, a small, agricultural biotech outside Boston. Until recently, most of its funding came from venture capitalists. The new government financing will ensure Agrivida can continue its ground-breaking work developing crops into biofuels.

“We’re engineering plants so that they can be turned into fuels and chemicals more easily,” says Michael Raab, Agrivida’s President. “We’re working primarily on the green tissues of plants —leaves, stalks, cobs from corn.”

From corn to cellulosic ethanol and biofuels, Agrivida is one of only a handful of small companies to receive funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, Energy (known as “ARPA-E”); the Obama Administration funded ARPA-E with $400 million from the federal stimulus package last year.

Modeled after a similar program at the Defense Department known as DARPA, ARPA-E funds “high-risk, high-reward” research. “We’re investing in five or six or seven different ideas and we don’t know which one’s going to win in the end,” says ARPA-E Director Arun Majumdar. “But hopefully if one of them does, the private sector can take it up and scale it.”

Yet, hope alone will not help develop projects like Agrivida’s into large-scale, commercial enterprises. Agrivida needs to raise capital too. Thanks to a new council of corporate heavyweights—including General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates—more companies like Agrivida may get the funding boost they need.

The American Energy Innovation Council is urging the government to triple its investments in clean energy technology to $16 billion a year (including $1 billion a year for ARPA-E). The group says a serious investment will not only protect the environment, but is imperative to ensure our national and economic security.

“There’s going to be a good export market here,” says Chad Holliday, Bank of America Chairman and Chair of the American Energy Innovation Council. “This is a time when we can really be a leader again, like we have been in the past.”

For an in-depth look at the development of alternative sources of energy, watch a CNBC special presentation, “America’s Crude Reality,” Wednesday, June 30 at 8pm ET, hosted by Melissa Francis.

© 2010 CNBC.com

URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/37995545/

When Jeremy Johnson and R. Michael Raab founded Agrivida in 2005, they were still finishing their Ph.D.s at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although both are chemical engineers, they based their start-up not on chemical plant technology, but on a technology for making chemicals in plants.

The work, Johnson says, is a sort of homecoming for a kid from Kansas who grew up working on a small dairy farm. And it is farmers who would benefit from Agrivida’s products. The company is developing specialized crops that manufacture their own enzymes to more easily convert their cellulose into sugars for ethanol production.

Agrivida is one of a number of plant biotechnology firms that are hoping to leapfrog current technologies. Making today’s biobased fuels and materials involves growing crops and then using physical and chemical means to extract sugars that can be fermented into the desired product. The firm’s goal is to make plants do more of the manufacturing work.

For example, biobased plastics firm Metabolix is growing polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) resins in switchgrass, and the firm sees a future in biorefineries based on such modified crops. Other companies are forming partnerships in an attempt to engineer chemicals inside crops.

Syngenta is collaborating with research firm Edenspace Systems to develop easier-to-process plants for fuel production. Plant biotech start-up Ceres has worked with Rohm and Haas, now Dow Chemical, to determine whether energy crops could simultaneously produce methacrylate monomers. And Mendel Biotechnology has a partnership with BP to improve dedicated energy crops to speed reactions that break down cellulose and lignin.

Turning crops such as corn, switchgrass, miscanthus, and sorghum into living chemical factories holds the promise of lowering processing costs for renewable fuels and chemicals, proponents contend. Industry analysts agree that the plant biotechnology developments are showing early successes, and they confirm there would be strong demand for the plant-made products.

But for biobased technologies to displace petroleum, farmers will need to gamble on new, risky crops planted on vast acreages. And the new traits do not address questions that face the broader push for cellulose-based fuels and chemicals, including how processors will access and efficiently transport cellulosic feedstocks (C&EN, April 27, 2009, page 10).

It will be a few years before farmers have the chance to plant the new chemical-making crops. In the meantime, research and development of new traits is moving at a brisk pace in the labs of Agrivida and Metabolix, both located near MIT in Cambridge, Mass.

At first glance, the activities at Agrivida’s headquarters look like those at any other analytical lab. Scientists watch over automated machines pipetting small amounts of liquid for screening tests, while biological samples grow in stacks of petri dishes. But a visitor might note a curious-looking plant in the corner. The 4-foot-tall sorghum specimen is a source of genetic material for a team of DNA-transfer experts.

Johnson explains that the researchers are working to modify plant genes to produce a specialized enzyme that breaks down the cellulose in the cell wall. In addition to the enzyme, Agrivida will insert a switch, made from a protein segment, that activates the enzyme under specific conditions.

“Cell-wall-degrading enzymes, though desirable for sugar production, are bad for plant growth,” Johnson points out. With the addition of the enzyme alone, plants soon become limp and die. To preserve plant growth, the company is working with enzyme-arresting protein segments called inteins. “An intein is a peptide sequence within a protein that has the ability to cleave itself out and reconnect the rest of the sequence. That way there is no negative impact on the plant when it is inactive,” Johnson says.

The switch can be designed to splice out under different conditions, such as by heating a crop after it is harvested. Then the activated enzymes would begin to degrade the cell wall and make sugar from the cellulose.

Johnson’s team is working with wild-type enzymes and a selection of the 400 known inteins to find a pair that combines low initial enzymatic activity with high sugar production after the switch is triggered. The result for a cellulosic ethanol maker would be to reduce the need for expensive added enzymes, which can cost up to 70 cents per gal of ethanol. In addition, Johnson says, the sugar could be obtained with less mechanical, thermal, or chemical processing of the plant biomass.

The plants are not yet commercially viable. But Johnson says lab tests show that the modified samples produce a larger amount of sugar than control plants in cases where no enzymes are added, as well as when some or a lot of enzymes are added.

In contrast to Agrivida’s focus on sugar, Metabolix is working to produce plastics and chemicals in plants. The company currently uses sugar as a feedstock to manufacture its biodegradable plastic, a PHA resin called Mirel, through microbial fermentation. Its joint venture with Archer Daniels Midland recently started producing Mirel at a 110 million-lb-per-year facility in Clinton, Iowa.

In March, Metabolix told investors it had successfully produced PHA inside switchgrass plants at a dry weight concentration of 6%. The company can also produce PHA in oil seeds and sugarcane. “Our goal is to get to commercially viable crops in field trials within two years,” says Metabolix Chief Executive Officer Richard Eno. By then, he tells C&EN, the firm will have increased PHA content to a level where producing it inside of plants will be more cost-competitive than fermentation.

To get the most value from the plastic-producing crops, Eno says, they could be processed in a biorefinery. “We would harvest the plants, recover the PHA, and convert it to either polymers or industrial chemicals,” he says. The rest of the plant biomass, he adds, could be used for cellulosic ethanol, gasification, or for fuel in the refinery.

Metabolix is already finding a market for the relatively costly PHA made by fermentation, according to Laurence Alexander, chemicals analyst at the investment firm Jefferies & Co. He told investors recently that with recent Food & Drug Administration approval for Mirel in food contact applications, the firm’s addressable market size is about 4 billion lb per year. “Indicated customer interest to date should suffice to sell out the first commercial plant and justify expansions,” he predicted.

But as other firms enter the biobased plastics market, Metabolix will need to compete on price. “Right now, PHA can withstand a certain premium in consumer products because it is biobased and biodegradable,” says Samhitha Udupa, biobased materials analyst at Lux Research. “But that won’t last more than five to seven years.” Udupa says engineered crops may help get the price down, but she questions the scale the company would have to achieve to gain a sizable share of the polymers market.

All of the plant-based technologies face the same problem of reaching significant scale, Udupa says. “In recent years, venture capitalists and governments have been investing heavily in technology to convert biomass or sugar to chemicals or fuel. We’ve focused on how to get there but not on how much stuff goes into the front end.” The challenge, she says, is growing and accessing the large amount of biomass that would be needed to displace a meaningful amount of petroleum.

At Mendel, Donald M. Panter, senior vice president for bioenergy seeds, is optimistic that farmers will want to plant perennial grasses modified for energy production because they can “make use of secondary land without using inputs or taking away from the food and fiber supply chain.” According to the Department of Agriculture, 38 million acres of idled cropland is available for growing energy crops, if farmers feel they would make a profit.

Large agriculture businesses such as seed firm Monsanto and ethanol giant Poet would make good partners for the biotech firms, Udupa says, because they already have supply chains and distribution channels in place. Johnson agrees, and says Agrivida is looking to enter licensing deals with a large seed company or processor.

Plant biotech executives insist that the industry as a whole is developing more efficient technologies and processes that will make growing, collecting, and processing biomass for energy and chemicals profitable. But for now, the promise of large-scale cellulosic fuel production has yet to be fulfilled, and that concerns Johnson. “For our model to be truly successful, we’ll be somewhat dependent on the success of others,” he says.

Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2010 American Chemical Society

Ligon Discovery has been discovered, and I could argue that I was there the moment it happened. Patrick Kleyn, co-founder and CEO of Ligon, was sitting in the back of a crowded conference for drug industry dealmakers in Harvard Square last month when a senior pharmaceutical executive on an industry panel noted Kleyn’s fledgling firm as one of the promising young life sciences companies in the Boston area. Kleyn was seated next to me, and I saw him beaming after receiving the shout-out.

There are a few ways to get discovered as a new biotech startup: exciting science, big-name founders, success in raising venture capital, or any combination of these. Ligon falls into the “exciting science” category, because its small-molecule microarray technology could revolutionize the way researchers go from identifying a potential disease protein or target to finding a drug that can home in on that target. It’s been just a year since Cambridge, MA-based Ligon spun off from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the firm is already generating some positive buzz at venues like the Boston Biotech Business Development Conference in Harvard Square last month.

Ligon might have the right technology at the right time. Genetic research has uncovered a plethora of proteins in recent years that play key roles in human diseases. Yet it can take several months or more than a year to design a test or assay that can be used to screen libraries of small molecules for ones that can bind to the newly uncovered disease proteins. Ligon’s technology is designed to greatly reduce those long turnaround times in drug discovery.

“One of the key benefits for a [pharmaceutical] company, when you talk about time to market, is the ability to go from an idea of screening certain targets to looking at structures or hits from a screen within weeks,” Kleyn says. “Whereas, a very typical turnaround time for that [process] in a large pharmaceutical company would be a year plus.”

Ligon’s technology borrows a concept from open-source software development for designing tests for drug discovery, says Kleyn, the former director of scientific planning for the Broad Institute. While open source gives programmers common codes for developing software, Ligon has a single form of chemistry that can be used to make any number of drug-screening assays. Angela Koehler, a chemist at the Broad Institute and co-founder of Ligon, discovered several years ago that an isocyanate chemistry could be used to bind a majority of small molecules to glass slides used to find drug candidates, without requiring time-consuming chemical modifications that are typically required to develop such tests.

The startup can use the chemistry to attach thousands of small molecules onto slides, which are used to identify molecules that bind to disease proteins in a high-speed screening process. The chemistry enables Ligon to link more than 75 percent of the small molecules in a typical compound collection to the glass slides, providing them the ability to screen hundreds of thousands of molecules against dozens of protein targets at the same time, according to Ligon. Koehler (who made the company’s key discovery with colleagues in the standout chemist Stuart Schreiber’s lab at Harvard) has in recent years published numerous research papers that demonstrate its use in identifying drug candidates against transcription factors and other proteins that have historically proved very challenging for drug discovery.

Ligon has a two-pronged business strategy to exploit Koehler’s discovery, according to Kleyn. First, the company is seeking partnerships with drug companies that would pay to use the startup’s technology as well as provide future payments based on the success of drugs it discovers with the technology. Thus far, the startup has formed such a partnership with the Cambridge, MA-based biotech Lycera, which plans to use Ligon’s technology to discover small molecule drugs for immune disorders. (Last week Lycera, which is covered by Xconomy’s new Detroit site because it has a key R&D site in Plymouth, MI, raised $11 million from investors.) The second prong of Ligon’s strategy is to use its technology to discover its own drugs against difficult-to-drug targets like protein-protein interactions. Ligon has completed initial screens against over 50 such targets and is now moving ahead with its first drug candidates in cancer, inflammation, and metabolic disease.

Kleyn says that his firm is in talks with multiple potential partners, the names of which he was unable to disclose because of confidentiality concerns. However, it came to light during the Boston Biotech Business Development Conference in April that Ligon had met with executives at the London-based drug giant GlaxoSmithKline’s Center of Excellence for External Drug Discovery (CEEDD), which does option-based deals with biotechs to enhance Glaxo’s pipeline of potential drugs. Michelle Dipp, the head of the CEEDD, mentioned her outfit’s interaction with Ligon during the conference but did not disclose the nature of talks between her group and the startup.

Nevertheless, the buzz about Ligon bodes well for its future. Kleyn says that his firm, which raised $1 million in seed money from the investment firm IncTANK Ventures last year, wants to raise between $3 million and $5 million in a Series A round of venture capital. The money would help fund its internal drug-discovery efforts and support its search for new partners. The Ligon crew knows how to raise cash for biotech startups. Kleyn was chief scientific officer for Gemini Genomics (now part of San Diego-based Sequenom), where he took part in the firm’s $96 million initial public offering. Ligon has also recruited Errol De Souza, the former CEO of Cambridge-based Archemix, as its chairman.

Now that Ligon’s been discovered, the startup faces the even bigger challenge of finding a drug that can go the distance in human clinical trials. We’ll see how they handle this hurdle in the coming years.

Ryan McBride is Xconomy’s correspondent. You can reach him at rmcbride@xconomy.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Ryan_McBride.

Plants wouldn’t have been able to thrive for hundreds of millions of years if they weren’t tough. Which is why humans are having such difficulty breaking down plants in the quest to turn plant matter into biofuels.

So one company called Agrivida is trying to use plant power against plants themselves in hopes of making this process cheaper and easier. The company is coaxing plants to produce, as they are growing, the very substances that break down plant cell walls into sugars.

Now, in order to get at the sugars in the tough parts of plant matter, called cellulose and hemicellulose, biofuel companies first have to bombard it with acid, heat or both. This step is called pretreatment, and it doesn’t get nearly the attention that the later steps in the biofuel process do, the wizardry of cutting the cellulose into sugars and turning those resulting sugars into fuels. (See: “Biofuels Battle.”)

“The sugar conversion is flashy, neat science that is doable,” says Jeremy Johnson, a chemical engineer and cofounder of Agrivida. “But when it comes to the costs of producing biofuels, that’s not where the biggest impact can be made.”

Johnson estimates that 40% of the cost of cellulosic ethanol is from the cost of the pretreatment and cutting up the cellulose into sugars, called hydrolysis. Agrivida thinks it can avoid all this by inserting special genes from microbes like fungi, bacteria or yeasts into plants. These genes instruct the plants to produce enzymes they wouldn’t normally produce, ones that liberate cellulose and chew it up.

The problem, of course, is that the enzymes can’t work while the plant is living, or else the plant wouldn’t be able to grow properly. So the company modifies the enzyme slightly, by inserting something called an intein into the enzyme. The intein, which is a section of a protein, blocks the part of the enzyme that allows the enzyme to do its work, called the active site.

After the plant is harvested, though, the intein can be removed simply by adding heat, exposing the active site and allowing the conversion to biofuels to start.

Agrivida is far from commercializing a new biofuel crop, and success is far from certain. Companies working on more traditional methods, like the enzyme company Novozymes, are making progress in cutting costs and increasing effectiveness. If they can continue to make big strides, it will be tough for Agrivida to compete.

Also, other, big agribusiness companies could beat Agrivida to the punch. Syngenta has already developed a strain of corn designed to make fermenting corn kernels into ethanol more effective.

“Obviously, we have to deliver,” says Johnson. “We don’t want to be coming to market when the industry has built itself out already.” But Johnson thinks that the relatively slow pace of cellulosic biofuel development will give Agrivida time to catch up.

The biofuels industry failed to hit a government mandate for advanced biofuels this year because no commercial advanced biofuels facilities were built in time.

Agrivida was backed by the venture firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and by DAG Ventures. It also recently nabbed a pair of government research awards, one from the Department of Agriculture for $1.9 million and an ARPA-E grant of $4.6 million.

This is enough, says Johnson, to hit the company’s first goal: a strain of corn ready for field-testing by the end of next year. Johnson hopes to be able to have seeds for sale by mid-decade. “That’s when the cellulosic ethanol market will be starting to grow,” Johnson says.

Sanofi-aventis selected AgaMatrix as its global BGM partner based on AgaMatrix’s accurate and innovative products in the market. Accuracy is particularly important to patients in order to safely adjust their insulin dose.

“In building our Global Diabetes Division, our objectives included conducting an exhaustive search for potential partners that have excellent core science, are highly innovative, and have the potential to develop a broad range of products. With AgaMatrix, we’ve found a company that can meet all three objectives in the BGM category,” said Eric Petreto, Vice President of Device Strategy of the sanofi-aventis Global Diabetes Division.

AgaMatrix’s proprietary WaveSense technology personalizes each test to provide world class accuracy by employing a new detection method called dynamic electrochemistry to detect and correct for errors caused by differences in blood samples, manufacturing variations and environmental conditions. In addition, tests are fast, require very little blood, and do not require coding.

“Our unwavering message to patients, health care professionals and industry leaders has been that people with diabetes need more accurate BGMs and that our WaveSense technology delivers high accuracy, so naturally we are thrilled to find a partner that shares these beliefs,” said Sonny Vu and Sridhar Iyengar, Co-Founders of AgaMatrix. “With sanofi-aventis’ global presence and sterling reputation, we believe this partnership will enable us to finally fulfill our original vision of making high accuracy blood glucose testing easily available to patients worldwide.”

About AgaMatrix:

AgaMatrix is a private company based in Salem, New Hampshire, that invents, develops, manufactures, and markets a line of blood glucose meters, biosensors (strips), and diabetes management software. AgaMatrix’s products are designed to improve the quality of diabetes care by using the company’s proprietary WaveSense technology to personalize each test to provide world class accuracy. The technology employs a new detection method called dynamic electrochemistry to detect and correct for many errors caused by differences in blood samples and environmental conditions. Current AgaMatrix products include the WaveSense KeyNote™, Presto™, and WaveSense Jazz™ BGMs, and the WaveSense Diabetes Manager™ iPhone® App. AgaMatrix’s WaveSense line of meters and strips are covered by insurance and are available by mail order and at popular retail outlets. For more product information, go to: http://www.agamatrix.com

About sanofi-aventis:

Sanofi-aventis is a leading global pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops and distributes therapeutic solutions to improve the lives of everyone. Sanofi-aventis is listed in Paris (EURONEXT: SAN) and in New York ( SNY). More information can be found on http://www.sanofi-aventis.com

AgaMatrix, WaveSense, KeyNote, Presto, WaveSense Jazz, and WaveSense Diabetes Manager are trademarks of AgaMatrix, Inc. Sanofi-aventis, Lantus, Solo STAR, ClikSTAR, Apidra, and iPhone are registered trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE AgaMatrix, Inc.
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But at an innovation summit organized by the Department of Energy’s high-risk, high-reward research branch, ARPA-E (modeled after Darpa), it’s not just power generation that’s getting a makeover. The companies hawking their ideas there, which all received grant money from ARPA-E or were finalists, are trying to reinvent the entire energy system. Everything is getting a technological re-evaluation from the actual wires that power is transmitted on to the waste heat produced in industrial processes.

And of course there are also new ways of making electricity beyond just burning some rocks or oil to create steam to drive a turbine.

Here are 10 companies that caught our attention. Any one technology is unlikely to solve the looming climate change and peak oil problems, but working together within the larger system, they could tilt the globe away from catastrophe and towards a sustainable future.

Above:
Agrivida

Now, ethanol is made with corn cobs, which are just a small amount of the corn plant’s total biomass. For years, people have been trying to come up with ways to use all the rest of the plant to make fuel. They call that stuff “cellulosic ethanol,” because it doesn’t just use the sugars in the cobs, but the cellulose in the rest of the plant. It turns out, though, that it’s not so easy to do the chemistry that transforms a corn stalk into a liquid fuel that works.

Agrivida is working on plants that release enzymes to degrade the cellulose in their own cell walls — on command. They throw a molecular switch, and the plants start turning themselves into sugar, saving fuel processors a key and energy-intensive step.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/energycogallery/#ixzz0h7txJDfD

AgaMatrix’s WaveSense BGM’s are available in nearly 20 countries throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. In the United States, the products are available at popular retail outlets such as Walmart®, Kroger®, and will soon be available at Target®, as well as through mail order services such as Liberty Medical® and Diabetes Care Club®.

AgaMatrix has 8 FDA-cleared products: the WaveSense KeyNote™, KeyNote Pro™, Presto™, Presto Pro™, Amp™, WaveSense Jazz™, and WaveSense Jazz Wireless™ meters, and Zero-Click™ software, for data download to a computer. In addition, AgaMatrix was the first BGM maker to launch an App that runs on the iPhone® and iPod touch®. The App is called the WaveSense Diabetes Manager™ and is available on the iTunes App Store® for free.

AgaMatrix’s BGM products uniquely use WaveSense technology. This technology personalizes each test to provide world class accuracy. It detects and corrects for errors caused by different environmental conditions and blood samples.

“We’re excited that patients and health care professionals have adopted our products so quickly, especially in the last few years when the entire community has become more focused on the importance of accuracy. This tells us we’re focused on the right things - high accuracy and affordable testing,” said Dave Conn, Chief Commercial Officer. “We are looking ahead to selling our 2,000,000th meter soon.”

About AgaMatrix:

WaveSense blood glucose meters, strips, and software are designed to improve the quality of diabetes care by using a new technology that personalizes each test to provide world class accuracy. The technology detects and corrects for many errors caused by differences in blood samples and environmental conditions. Current AgaMatrix products include the WaveSense KeyNote, Presto, WaveSense Jazz, and the WaveSense Diabetes Manager iPhone App. WaveSense meters and strips are covered by insurance and available by mail order and at popular retail outlets such as Walmart and Kroger. For more information, go to: http://www.wavesense.info.

© 2002-2010 AgaMatrix, Inc. WaveSense, KeyNote, KeyNote Pro, Presto, Presto Pro, Amp, WaveSense Jazz, and WaveSense Jazz Wireless, Zero-Click, WaveSense Diabetes Manager are trademarks of AgaMatrix, Inc. Walmart, Kroger, Target, Liberty Medical, Diabetes Care Club, iPhone, iPod touch, and iTunes App Store are registered trademarks of their respective owners.

(1) IDF Diabetes Atlas, Fourth Edition (2009).

SOURCE AgaMatrix, Inc.
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By: David Bauman

Surrounded by corn growing in a greenhouse alongside UConn’s BioScience Complex, Michael Raab stands amidst what may be the fuel of the future.

Over the next few decades the world will need to wean itself from dependence on fossil fuels to help reduce global warming. One way could be with “green crude,” a new generation of transportation fuel made from nonfood crops.

The corn around Raab has been engineered so that the whole plant, including leaves, stalks, and husks – the so-called “stover” that is commonly discarded after the corn is harvested – can be converted into high-value biofuel.

“We’re on the right path,” says Raab, president of Agrivida, a startup company he co-founded that is using biomolecular technology to develop an alternative fuel in the state-of-the-art greenhouses and labs of UConn’s Technology Incubation Program. “There’s no question our energy future is going to be more diverse than it is now.”

Scientists around the globe are racing to discover ways to turn biomass – such as lumber, garbage, algae, and crop wastes – into competitively priced fuels. Agrivida is part of the rush, seeking an economically sound and renewable, biologically based fuel to replace gasoline.

Ethanol, a clean alternative fuel produced from sugars in crops such as corn and sugar cane, has been supported by federal blending incentives and has come under scrutiny for potentially affecting the price of corn and other basic foodstuffs. The Obama administration is betting that nonfood crops can eliminate these issues and provide a new generation of sustainable biofuels.

A 2008 federal law requires companies that blend gasoline to add increasing amounts of renewable fuels into the gas they sell over the next decade. Raab believes Agrivida’s patented process for creating biofuels from agricultural biomass, which combines horsepower and green power, will appeal to those companies.

“Our development of nonfood energy crops will significantly increase ethanol production,” he says. “I think it’s reasonable to be shooting for providing half of the nation’s liquid transportation fuel with sustainable biofuels.”

Almost everything that grows on earth has cellulose that can be fermented into ethanol. Yet the main economic barrier to increased cellulosic ethanol production is the high cost of processing plant biomass into biofuel. The challenge lies in breaking down cellulose – the main component of plant cell walls – and converting it into useable sugars for biofuels production.

Agrivida is developing a variety of energy crops – including switch grass, sugarcane, sorghum, and corn – to make ethanol production from cellulose commercially viable. The corn plants in UConn greenhouses have been engineered to make them capable of breaking down cellulose to provide rapid access to the sugars used to produce biofuels.

Company researchers have bioengineered enzymes that are incorporated into the corn plants’ cell walls. Agrivida’s novel technology is a molecular switch that enables those enzymes to remain inactive while the corn plants grow.

At harvest, these enzymes are activated to degrade the entire mass of plant cellulose material into small sugars that can readily be converted into ethanol, thereby reducing processing costs for this raw material. By enabling the production of cheap sugars from cellulosic biomass, Raab estimates Agrivida can reduce processing costs by more than 30 percent, making the process commercially competitive with gasoline.

Corn-based ethanol was established in the U.S. on an industrial scale because most of the elements to commercialize were in place: vast cornfields and an infrastructure for moving corn to processors, Raab explains. The search for better ethanol – or “cellulosic ethanol” – just takes the experience of corn ethanol a step further.

“There’s a lot of sugar in cellulose, so there’s a lot of energy in it,” he says. “Cellulosic ethanol is still more expensive to produce [than corn ethanol]. Yet the development of Agrivida’s optimized enzymes to enhance cellulose degradation will help advance the commercialization of technologies that will dramatically increase cellulosic ethanol production.”

After completing graduate school in 2005, Raab started the company with money from grants and investment partners. In 2007, he located the company’s plant engineering group in Storrs, after learning about UConn’s technology incubator and greenhouses.

Aimed at nurturing the successful startup of high-tech companies, the Technology Incubation Program offers fledgling entrepreneurs lab and office space with ready access to UConn researchers, facilities, and equipment, and to a variety of business and university services to help ensure their success.

Agrivida now has 35 employees – including four UConn alumni and several current students – and has plans to expand its workforce in the coming years, when the company hopes to be able to sell its modified corn seed to ethanol production plants.

“By partnering with Lycera, a leader in the discovery of novel therapeutics for immune disorders, we can demonstrate the unique capabilities of SMMs, in particular, to screen challenging targets to identify unique starting points for novel drug discovery,” Dr. Patrick Kleyn, Chief Executive Officer of Ligon Discovery explained.

“Ligon’s Small Molecule Microarray technology allows us to rapidly screen any protein target irrespective of its biological function, against Ligon’s and our compound collection,” said Dr. Gary Glick, Lycera’s founder and Chief Scientific Officer.

About Small Molecule Microarrays

SMMs are manufactured by spotting unmodified compound collections at high density onto glass slides using a proprietary chemical attachment. Hundreds of thousands of compounds on SMMs can be rapidly screened in parallel against hundreds of protein targets. Ligon’s SMM surface chemistry was specifically developed to allow the attachment of chemical collections whether synthetic, natural, bioactive, or diversity-oriented. No special moiety is required for attachment, so Ligon’s SMMs are compatible with almost any existing chemical collection. The unprecedented throughput of SMMs offers a fundamentally different paradigm for drug discovery based upon complete screening of all potential targets in a molecular pathway or protein family, and upfront assessment of drug selectivity among related proteins, versus the conventional paradigm of single target screening and after-the-fact selectivity optimization.

About Ligon Discovery

Ligon Discovery is a Harvard University spinout that leverages a patented platform technology to identify pre-clinical drug candidates. The company’s high-throughput microarray “chip” transforms the speed of the drug discovery process and expands the scope of new drug prospecting to include previously intractable targets. With funding from incTANK Ventures, the team has deployed the SMM technology, originally invented at Harvard University and further developed at the Broad Institute (founded by MIT and Harvard University) in Cambridge, and has established one of the largest small molecule screening capabilities in the industry. Using this facility, Ligon has successfully completed screens in the fields of coagulation and cancer, and is actively pursuing drug discovery in other areas of high unmet medical need. For more information, visit www.ligondiscovery.com.

About Lycera

Lycera Corp. is focused on the discovery and development of small-molecule immunomodulators for the treatment of patients with autoimmune diseases including psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus erythematosis, inflammatory bowel disease and transplant rejection. Lycera is developing drug candidates that target two novel therapeutic pathways and have the potential for first-in-class oral efficacy without the adverse effects of current standard-of-care antiproliferative and immunosuppressive agents. Visit www.lycera.com for more information.

SOURCE Ligon Discovery

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The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, part of the Energy Department, was conceived during the George W. Bush administration but only got its first funding in the stimulus bill — to the tune of $400 million.

Agency director Arun Majumdar says that the nation lags in energy security and that his agency is key to helping the country address the problem aggressively. He aims to invest early in ventures that he says could deliver huge gains if they pan out.

He calls it investing in “American pioneers.”

“Invest in high-risk, high-payoff R&D to get innovations from the lab into the market,” Majumdar said.

So far, ARPA-E has committed to 37 projects worth $151 million after receiving more than 3,000 applications in the areas of renewable power, new technologies and efficiency. The average investment is about $4 million.

Among the programs:

• Researching how to help make plants and their waste easily transformable into biofuels and to reduce the costs of doing so

• Developing a new type of high-efficiency wind turbine that could deliver more energy and reduce noise and safety concerns

• Creating an all-liquid metal battery that would dramatically increase electrical energy storage

Other projects include one that would split water into hydrogen and oxygen for solar fuel; research into a technology that would use silicon wafers to dramatically cut the cost of installing solar power; and installing magnetic materials that would decrease the weight and increase the efficiency of motors for hybrid and electric vehicles.

After getting more than 500 applications for its second round of $100 million in grants, program directors are deciding which ones will make the cut.

While agency officials hope all of the initiatives they fund will become commercially profitable, they acknowledge the chances of that are very remote.

“Let’s say a few of them are successful. They will be game-changing. They’ll change the landscape of the energy field — not just in our country, but globally,” said Majumdar, a former associate director at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a former professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

He also believes these investments will help spur innovation and market success that will create a large number of jobs down the road — ones that, with the Department of Energy’s help, will stay in the U.S.

Companies receiving funds say government money is essential for this risky research.

“I think this is just the kind of research the government should be getting behind because it is higher-risk, it has the potential for very high payoffs,” said Michael Raab, president of Agrivida, the company doing the biofuels plant project.

“But, particularly in this kind of an economic climate, it is hard to find investors that are willing to invest in high-risk opportunities. And so the government can fund this research and get it to a point where others will invest in it and really push it forward into the marketplace.”

Tom Schulz, co-founder of BioCee, which does research in solar fuels, said the program will produce the next “Energy Google.”

“We don’t know which company of the funded projects it will be, and we don’t know when it will ‘tip.’ However, most of the projects will create only a few (but very qualified) jobs over the next two years,” Schulz said. “The real question is how many jobs will be created and saved in 5 to 10 years.”

Some critics say, however, that the government should not be investing in particular projects with the aim of getting them to the marketplace.

“Government is terrible at picking winners and losers,” said Kevin Book, an energy consultant and former Wall Street analyst.

Book supports government-sponsored scientific research but not having the government trying to help determine which projects should get a financial boost toward the marketplace.

“Turning science projects that nobody wants into products that no one can afford to buy is a terrible idea,” he said.

To help make the best decisions possible, ARPA-E has recruited staff from the private sector, including some with hedge fund experience, and also consults with experts in particular scientific fields.

ARPA-E is based on the concept of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which was created in 1958 to push technological research and development after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite before the U.S. could get off the ground. Among DARPA’s accomplishments is helping to spur the creation of the Internet.

CNN’s Francesca Johnson and Bob Crowley contributed to this report.