Public Funding for Zentraxa Limited

Of the many environmental challenges we face in the UK, water pollution has been at the forefront in recent times. The DEFRA outcome delivery plan for 2021/22 lists the improvement of the environment through cleaner air and water, minimised waste, and thriving plants and terrestrial and marine wildlife first in its priority outcomes. Part of the solution will be to develop a 'circular bioeconomy' in which our dependence on fossil fuels for environmental growth is removed, and resources are extracted and recovered from waste products and used as ingredients in new products or as a source of energy. However, personal care products like make-up and shampoo will inevitably introduce a break in this circular economy as they end up in landfill or wastewater at the end of their use. In addition to there being no way of recovering and re-using their chemical ingredients, many of these products contain chemicals that are non-biodegradable and persist in the environment. European regulations prevent the use of certain toxic chemicals in personal care products, due to their impact on the environment from contaminated wastewater. But there are many ingredients for which the effect is unknown or not studied, resulting in a lack of technical innovations that address this challenge. Cosmetics have been used in human societies for over 7000 years and they continue to provide many people with a much-needed opportunity for self-care. Unfortunately, many of the chemicals in cosmetics cannot simply be removed as they give performance properties like ease of application or comfort to wear which are important to users. Consumers are then faced with a difficult choice between environmentally friendly products with poor performance or high-performance products with unknown environmental impact. Our innovative solution is to replace non-biodegradable chemical ingredients with biodegradable alternatives like peptides. We have developed novel, proprietary peptides that perform better than industrial chemical standards, providing the user with the optimal balance of ease of application, long wear time and comfort without compromising sustainability. Peptides can be challenging to produce, but we have developed methods that allow for bioproduction by fermentation and efficient isolation of the product in a pure form. We now need funding to scale our processes to make enough peptide for a launch product with a commercial partner. This will not only demonstrate the potential for replacing environmentally persistent chemicals with biodegradable alternatives, but hopefully encourage greater innovation in this sector.

By 2050, human society is expected to require roughly twice the resources the planet is able to supply to sustain itself. Public awareness of this issue has resulted in an increased demand for sustainable products, and a renewed interest in nature-inspired sustainable alternatives. Biomaterials can be used to provide efficient solutions in a range of areas, creating products that display improved performance and a decreased carbon footprint. However, wide-scale application of biomaterials is historically limited by their costs, difficulties in scaling their production and ethical concerns. Zentraxa's bio-production platform Zentide allows us to ferment specialty biomaterials. Zentide simplifies the production of difficult to make biomaterials allowing us to achieve breakthrough cost economics and scale of production for our materials. This allows us to deliver high-performance biomaterials that meet changing demands and can be easily applied to a range of new markets. Zentraxa have previously developed new types of biological glue for use in skin bonding for medical applications such as dressings & seals. Previous platform development has focused on the production of these adhesive products to deliver use-case demonstrations of specific niche applications. During this project, we aim to improve the production efficiency of our platform and make improvements allowing for production on a larger scale, with greater efficiency and lower cost. We also intend to expand the range of producible materials, and subsequently to apply these to problems in new markets such as personal care (skin creams / hair treatments) and specialty adhesives (for cars and sensor systems). By improving our platform, we ultimately hope to break down the barriers between biotech & new industrial customers, reducing the conventional restrictions of peptides making them and their benefits more accessible & viable for a wealth of new markets.

The methods used across the healthcare industry to measure skin adhesion are limited as they do not accurately represent the real-life context. This impacts innovation in the area of skin adhesion as there is no widely recognised method to compare different products or technologies. This in particular makes judging the potential of new technologies challenging. Zentraxa's team have developed a biological glue that bonds well in wet and salty environments. We are committed to harnessing this into a water activated adhesive system that bonds more strongly, the wetter it gets. The biochemistry of our glue also makes it well suited for applications in healthcare where skin bonding is necessary. This not only includes the performance in wet, or sweaty, conditions, but the in-built design feature that enables gentle de-bonding, or removal, of wound dressings by application of a glue-dissolving spray. In this project Zentraxa and the National Physical Laboratory will collaborate to lay the foundations for a new and improved test method to measure skin bonding. This method will use materials that more closely mimic the skin's chemistry, keeping the focus on reproducibility of the test method. We will build in the capability to fine tune the water uptake during the test and use this to measure the changes on bonding resulting from the wetness of the material. Ultimately, we will use this to provide a demonstration of Zentraxa's water activated skin adhesive system and generate a compelling data pack to leverage engagement of a leading player in the healthcare industry to bring our water activated and easy-to-remove skin adhesive to market.

The global adhesives market is worth over £35 billion worldwide and although synthetic chemical adhesives are widely used in a large variety of manufacturing applications, there remains several challenges for the adhesives industry. These include reducing the environmental impact of the chemical production of adhesives and also the ability to disbond adhesives, allowing the previously bonded components to be recycled. Zentraxa Ltd is a new spin-out company from the University of Bristol that is using the power of synthetic biology to address these challenges. We have previously produced a variation of a peptide-based adhesives found in the natural world and are able to activate the adhesion on demand to bond two materials. In this project, we wish to further develop our range of naturally-based adhesives to make new adhesives that are tailored for the bonding of different materials, including the bonding of highly dissimilar materials, often necessary in the manufacturing of certain goods. Our adhesives also lend themselves being readily disbonded, a property that is highly desirable within many industries as it allows the disassembly of bonded components, either for maintenance or recycling. Since our adhesives are based upon those found in the natural world they are also biodegradable and therefore present no sustainability issues.