Our Technologies

Molecular Engineering

Lybradyn offers services for cloning, manipulating genes and optimizing expression of target proteins. The company develops custom genetic systems for clients with applications ranging new protein discovery to commercial enzyme production. Our scientific team works closely with clients to design, execute and deliver genetic products economically on time.

Biocatalyst Products

Lybradyn is developing a number of specialty enzyme products designed to help a number of businesses create environmentally friendly and economic applications. The company has prototype enzyme products for decontamination of chemical weapons such as nerve agents, and insecticide residues which is the result of government grant activity.

The company is also working on a racemase/acylase product that can be applied by the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industry to prepare amino acids and related chemical products. The enzyme products portfolio is completed by a set of five hydrolytic enzymes that find application in a number of markets including fine chemical synthesis, food processing, and consumer products.

Spore Display Technology

One of the limitations to modern drug discovery is often the inability to express proteins in a format that replicates protein structure and function in the human body. Often the expression environment of a target protein leads to misfolding or other altered structures that lead to misleading assay data in discovery applications. Lybradyn's spore display technology allows target proteins to be produced in a environment that more closely resembles “in vivo” conditions.

In addition, this product technology allows for many copies of a target protein to be expressed on an easy to manage particle surface well suited for processing and high throughput assay development commonly used in drug discovery applications. This product is expected to be marketed as either a bundled service/technology offering or as a single unit reagent type sale.

Universal Protein Expression System

A major challenge associated with producing protein products is the common occurrence of poor expression or insoluble production of target protein in recombinant systems. The current process for managing uncooperative proteins is to manipulate the genes coding for the desired protein or alter the host microbe to accommodate the characteristics of the cloned protein.

Lybradyn is creating an alternative approach to the expression challenge by developing a genetic system that is flexible enough to be placed in a palette of potential host organisms. By introducing the target gene simultaneously into a number of different hosts it is possible to rapidly find the host organism most compatible to produce the target protein. This product is expected to be part of a bundled technology/service offering for discovery and development applications.

Fermentation

Synthetic Culture Media Systems

The industry standard for growing cells in solid phase involves agar, a gelatinous inert material derived from kelp that transitions from solid to liquid when heated. This culture support is dispersed in water, culture nutrients added and the entire mix is heated and sterilized prior to pouring into Petri dishes.

Lybradyn has recognized that this process is time and labor intensive as well difficult to manage at room temperature. The synthetic polymer under development has a number of advantages over existing products including pre-made ready to hydrate format, no temperature dependence for processing, pre-sterilized, resistance to cracking and tearing and resistance to extremes in temperature and environmental conditions. The synthetic media can also be applied to scale up fermentation systems beyond Petri dishes. Finally, the cost of material is substantially lower than conventional agar products.

Fermentation System

One of the driving motivations for Lybradyn has been the focus on cultivating unknown microbes from the environment. The dogma of microbiology dictates that microbes need to be handled in pure single species culture in order to be studied, characterized and reproducibly grown. This has provided a collection of microbes that amount to less than 1% of all that is believed to exist in nature.

One potentially fertile opportunity for culturing a substantial number of the remaining 99% of organisms is the ability to culture multiple microbes in a community. Lybradyn is developing a fermentation system to allow a simulated “community” to be established that takes advantage of the chemical communication that occurs between microbes while adhering to the dogma of microbiology.

In the Communal Fermentor, microbes are grown in physically isolated chambers that are designed to have the culture media transport microbial chemicals between the chambers. This chemical mobility allows individual microbes within the community to communicate and grow. The Communal Fermentor can also be applied to sets of known microbes in order to create environments that cause each microbe in the system to alter its natural product profile in response to the presence of other microbes. This provides an opportunity to generate novel compounds from well established microbial systems and create additional value from these organisms.

The advantage to Lybradyn is that Communal Fermentor is expected to add new organisms or new natural product profiles to the Wellspring Library products. In addition, the system is also being used on a service basis with clients to find more value from existing microbial collections or develop new and more efficient fermentation systems to produce natural products. In both cases, the Communal Fermentor provides a basis for multiple revenue streams for both discovery and development applications.