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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

collagen

Jellatech Announces Successful Production of Animal-Identical Cell-Based Collagen

From connective tissue, skin health, lunchroom JELLO, and your inner ear to injections to create fuller lips, collagen is one of a body’s vital chameleons. Until now, the best way to introduce this protein to your everyday health is by eating animal products or substitutes such as Keratin and other amino acid supplements.

Raleigh-based Jellatech has announced the development of a full-length, triple-helical, and functional collagen made from their own proprietary cell lines. Others have worked on a solution to create lab-based collagen, but Jellatech’s stands alone as bio-identical to the animal-based variety.

In a recent interview with The Spoon, Stephanie Michelsen, Jellatech CEO, explained that, like others wanting to make an impact in the alt-protein space, she looked for a white space that was undeveloped and in need of a solution.

“I came across collagen and its roots and gelatin because it’s a unique protein only found in animals. And we use it for such, I mean, a crazy number of different applications,” Michelsen said. “So, I saw it’s going to be a future problem, so let’s try to solve it using cellular agriculture.”

Jellatech’s process differs from the fermentation approach to building alternative proteins. “It’s not fermentation because fermentation is more like yeast or bacteria using big vats,” Michelsen explained. “We use mammalian cells and those cells, so in that way, it’s different.”

Given its role in health and pharma, it’s no surprise the global collagen market size was valued at USD 8.36 billion in 2020, according to Grandview Research. It’s a space that is precited to grow at a 9.0% rate from 2020 to 2028, and much of that growth comes from increasing demand from the cosmetics markets. With that in mind, Michelsen sees pharma as low-hanging fruit and why taking the business-to-business approach is the best way to start.

Rob Schutte, Head of Science for Jellatch, emphasizes that what gives his company an advantage over possible competitors is the two years’ worth of work they put in to build a perfect collagen replica. “We’re thrilled to see that our cell-derived collagen appears bio-identical to collagen derived from animals. Because of this, we have a wide range of exciting applications from biomedicine to cosmetics to food and beverage.”

Jellatech will face the same issues as other companies creating either plant-based or cell-based proteins—cost. The number of bioreactors and the infrastructure to support a complex process can be enormous to build at scale. Without being specific, Michelsen believes that smart growth and innovation can play a crucial role in managing capital expenses.

We hope to do some innovation on our own to try to drive those costs down,” she said. “It’s true; there’s there are a lot of steps to get there. We are soon moving into the pilot and commercial-scale sometime after that. But, you know, I think there are a lot of avenues to explore to be able to cut those costs down.”

Podcast: Talking Cell-Based Collagen with Jellatech’s Stephanie Michelsen

Over the past few years, a number of startups have popped up to develop new and more sustainable alternatives to animal-derived collagen.

The reasons are obvious: Collagen is used everywhere, from cosmetics to food to health and wellness applications, and because animal-derived collagen is a by-product of the animal farming industry, it has all the same downsides as factory farming.

While some companies, like Geltor, use precision fermentation technology to create animal-identical collagen, a relatively new arriver to the alt-collagen space by the name of Jellatech is using the same cell-based technology powering many of the new cultivated meat startups’ products. Only instead of using bioreactors to reproduce animal cells for consumption or microbial hosts to generate collagen protein (like Geltor), Jellatech instead uses cells to produce collagen and then harvests the collagen produced by those cells. In other words, the cells are not the end-product, but instead the engine producing Jellatech’s collagen.

It’s an interesting new approach, so I decided to catch up with the CEO of Jellatech, Stephanie Michelsen, to hear more about this young company and its effort to reinvent the collagen industry.

You can listen to the podcast here or just head over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Geltor Debuts Animal-Free Collagen For Food and Beverage Markets

Geltor, a startup that bioengineers animal-free proteins, announced today the debut of its vegan collagen product called PrimaColl. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, PrimaColl, which the company claims is the world’s first vegan collagen for food and beverage markets, is a nature-identical replica of poultry collagen derived using precision fermentation technology.

Collagen has lots of health benefits for humans and is especially important for us as we age. Because of this, animal-derived collagen, which is sourced from the bones and other byproducts of farmed animals such as chickens and cows, has become a crucial ingredient in food and beverage markets in recent decades.

But for vegans, traditionally derived collagen is obviously problematic. With no true substitutes on the market up to this point, many consumers abstaining from animal products are forced to use collagen “booster” products which claim to help increase human collagen production, but are not collagen substitutes.

Which is why Geltor sees such a potentially big opportunity (and also why the company has raised eye-popping amounts of capital). With traditional collagen being a $7.5 billion market opportunity, delivering the first-to-market natural replica of animal collagen could be a massive opportunity across a number of different products.

“As a next-generation bioactive, PrimaColl was designed for use in ‘beauty-from-within’ formulations,” Geltor CEO Alex Lorestani told The Spoon via email. “And these could take form in anything from ready-to-drink beverages or powder mixes, to collagen-infused snack foods, gummies, and more.”

One of the biggest opportunities will be nutritional supplements. According to the company, while there have been a number of supplements that claim to boost human production of collagen, there are not any widely available replicas of animal-free collagen that include the less common amino acid core of Type 21 collagen.

“Like most collagens, natural production of Type 21 decreases into adulthood,” said Geltor co-founder and CTO Nick Ouzounov in the release. “The functional collagen core of Type 21 was selected in the biodesign of PrimaColl due to its important role in interacting with other collagen types, and signaling activity for additional collagen production.”

According to the release, the company has started production of PrimaColl through a manufacturing partnership with Swiss contract manufacturer Lonza Specialty Ingredients (LSI), and is building inventory this summer with plans for wide commercial availability this fall. The company, which had interest from dozens of companies who got an early preview of the product, already has some partners who are making products with PrimaColl, Lorestani told The Spoon.

The release of PrimaColl is a big milestone for Geltor, a company that was founded in 2015 and was an early member of Indiebio. Like fellow Indiebio graduates Clara and Perfect Day, Geltor is one of a group of companies that have been building animal-identical proteins using microbial fermentation technology.

Jellatech Raises $2M for Its Animal-Free Collagen and Gelatin

Jellatech, a company making animal-free gelatin and collagen ingredients, announced today it has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding. Green Queen was first to break the news. The round included participation from Big Idea Ventures, Sustainable Food Ventures, Iron Grey, YellowDog, 7 Hound Ventures, Capital V, Sentient Investments and Bluestein Ventures. 

Raleigh, North Carolina-based Jellatech came out of stealth mode in November 2020. The company grows gelatin and collagen in bioreactors, rather than sourcing those ingredients from the bones and skin of animals and fish. The company says it does not need to ship animals anywhere or slaughter them in order to develop its products. Rather, it uses animal cells to grow the collagen and gelatin.

Once inside a bioreactor, these cells produce the collagen, which can then be isolated and used in a range of different products in the food, skincare, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, to name just a few areas. As Green Queen points out, plant-based alternatives like pectin or agar haven’t yet been able to replace traditional collagen and gelatin because of their limited functionality.

Jellatech’s cell-cultured method isn’t completely animal free, since animal cells are required. However, as noted above, the cell-based method doesn’t require ant animal slaughter. 

Geltor is another company developing alt-gelatin, albeit via an entirely different method. Geltor uses microbes to “grow” collagen and its constituent proteins, including gelatin, via fermentation.

Both startups aim to decrease dependence on the traditional collagen/gelatin market, which Jellatech says is worth $3.5 billion dollars is expected to grow 9 percent annually.  

Funds from this pre-seed round will go towards further developing products for the food, skincare and medical industries. Jellatech also said its first samples will be sent out by the end of April 2021.