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Dyadic International, Inc. (OTC Pink: DYAI) |
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April 20, 2012 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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CURRENT ISSUE | COVER ARCHIVES | INDEX | CONTACT | FINANCIALS | SERVICES | HOME PAGE |
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THE PROMISE OF BIOTECHNOLOGY IS HERE TODAY, AND DYADIC IS DETERMINED TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE |
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Websites: www.dyadic.com - Dyadic Nederland BV. www.dyadic.nl Dyadic is a global biotechnology company that uses its patented and proprietary technologies for the discovery, development, manufacture and sale of enzyme and protein products for the bioenergy, biochemical, biopharmaceutical and industrial enzyme industries.
Dyadic utilizes an integrated technology platform based on its patented and proprietary C1 fungus which enables the development and large scale manufacture of low cost proteins and enzymes for diverse market opportunities. The C1 platform technology can also be used to screen for the discovery of novel genes and proteins. Dyadic actively pursues licensing arrangements and other commercial opportunities to leverage the value of these technologies by providing its partners and collaborators with the benefits of manufacturing and/or utilizing the enzymes which these technologies help produce.
Dyadic is focused on the discovery, development, and manufacturing of novel products derived from the DNA of complex living organisms - including humans - found in the earth’s biodiversity. By utilizing a proprietary host organism, Dyadic’s "one-stop shop" C1 Platform Technology rapidly discovers and expresses the genes of complex living organisms and can then be used to manufacture those unique biological products for commercial application.
Dyadic's technologies help
to overcome the inadequacy of existing gene discovery and product
development techniques which may have limited capabilities to efficiently
access the full spectrum of earth's biodiversity. Dyadic’s unique C1
Platform Technology helps increase the likelihood that once a useful gene is
discovered, it can also be expressed and mass-produced. Mark A. Emalfarb is the founder of the company. He has been a member of the company’s board of directors since October 2004 and has served as its Chairman as well as President and Chief Executive Officer from October 2004 until April 2007 and from June 2008 until the present. Since founding Dyadic in 1979, Mr. Emalfarb has successfully led and managed the evolution of the company from its origins as a pioneer and leader in providing ingredients used in the stone-washing of blue jeans to the discovery, development, manufacturing and commercialization of specialty enzymes used in various industrial applications and the development of an integrated technology platform based on the company’s patented and proprietary C1 fungus. Mr. Emalfarb is an inventor of over 25 U.S. and foreign biotechnology patents and patent applications resulting from discoveries related to the company’s patented and proprietary C1 fungal microorganism, and has been the architect behind its formation of several strategic research and development, manufacturing and marketing relationships with U.S. and international partners. Mr. Emalfarb earned his B.A. degree from the University of Iowa in 1977. |
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Intracoastal Pointe Drive, Suite 404 Websites:
Dyadic
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Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published - April 20, 2012
CEOCFO: Mr. Emalfarb, you are a global biotech company, would you give us an overview of what Dyadic is about?
Mr. Emalfarb: The technology is leveraging the C1 platform we have developed over the last fifteen years to turn DNA into proteins and it does so in large volumes and very affordably. We are taking the DNA pool and turning it into products, whether those products will be used for fuel, medicines, food, feed, cosmetics, nutraceuticals, pulp and paper or textiles or a myriad of other possibilities. These genes are being discovered by scientists that work in academic labs or in industry. They end up finding interesting genes and turn them into proteins and enzymes in very small quantities, like micrograms, analyze them, evaluate them, and typically write up a paper or publication and then put them on the shelf in a lot of cases. We are taking discoveries that these scientists have identified off the shelf and bringing them to the marketplace in all these different industries by using our technology platform called, “C1.”
CEOCFO: Would you explain your C1 technology platform?
Mr. Emalfarb: C1 is a very unique fungus we found in the Russian soil in an alkaline lake in the early 1990’s. We selected that fungus because we were looking at the time for a fungus that would make enzymes that would wash your blue jeans to make them softer, more fashionable, and more comfortable, which were the stonewashed blue jeans back in the early 1980’s. We looked at many different fungi and we identified C1 in terms of its ability to break down cellulose and, of course, cotton, which is cellulose at a neutral pH. At the time, we were looking to not destroy the cellulose, but to soften and fade it and make it more comfortable and fashionable as I mentioned earlier. That led us to taking this discovery, the particular C1 fungus, bringing it back to the United States and then breeding it to make it more productive. It is similar to when you breed cattle over a millennium to make more and more milk or corn over a millennium to produce more and more corn per acre. We did the same thing with C1. We did classical mutagenesis, which means we selected and mutagenized the fungal spores to find better and better producers of cellulase that showed high activity at neutral pH. It is like taking Barney Fife and turning him into Superman. By that, I mean we ended up somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-plus grams per liter of total protein being produced from this fungus, C1, that had the cellulase enzymatic profile we wanted. Where originally, when we found C1 in nature, the wild type fungus produced less than a quarter of a gram per liter of a less than ideal enzyme mixture that wasn’t commercially useful or scalable. So we created a C1 fungal strain and fermentation process that was approximately 400 fold more productive in terms of its total protein and enzyme performance capabilities.
We then took the improved commercial C1 fungus back over to Europe. This time we did not go to Russia. We went to Holland to an institute there called TNO, which was and is one of the world’s renowned industrial biotech research centers. They have very highly skilled scientists there that turn microorganisms into these production systems. We spent over a decade at TNO creating this molecular tool kit to put DNA in and to take DNA out of this particular commercially relevant fungus. Therefore, when we grow it in fermenters, it produces higher levels of the targeted proteins and enzymes we want, and we reduce or eliminate the production of the proteins and enzymes that may be degratory or which may interfere with the performance we are looking for. We basically created a way to make proteins in large scale very affordably.
C1 has been used to manufacture enzymes since 1996 at up to 150,000 liter scale. To give you a picture in your mind, a 150,000 liter fermenter looks like a four-story tall building. We are talking about fermenters that are used by companies like Cargill or ADM, or other large multi national chemical and agricultural companies. This is quite large scale and we used C1 originally to produce the textile enzymes that we wanted to make, to soften and fade denim. Now, we are leveraging the C1 technology and bringing it to the world for all kinds of new and beneficial applications. That is what C1 is - it is a commercially proven fungus used as a production platform that allows us to take DNA (genetic genes, not blue jeans) and program them by inserting them into the chromosome of particular C1 fungal cells so that C1 thinks that the DNA belongs to itself. Then it starts replicating the protein and enzymes encoded by the inserted gene to produce the desired protein and enzyme which is secreted out of the fungus into the water solution at very large scale.
CEOCFO: What is the patent protection and what does Dyadic own regarding C1?
Mr. Emalfarb: We own C1 itself. Not the wild type strain, although it is deposited under the Budapest Treaty. What we have developed from the wild type strain to what we have today, it is like night and day. This is a 15 year journey of constant improvements, modifications, molecular biology, applying genomics, proteomics; all of the things that it takes to create expression systems. We have many patents in various countries across the world, but more importantly we have developed a proven commercially relevant technology platform that we own and created that would take someone seven to ten years and tens of millions of dollars to try to duplicate and they would possibly fail in those efforts. We had various serendipitous mutations and scientific anomalies that happened along the way. Now, we own the particular C1 fungus with all of its novel and unique characteristics and properties. Additionally, we own all the molecular tools used to insert and delete DNA in and out of C1, and we own all the different fermentation protocols and novel methods to produce proteins and enzymes from C1 at up to 150,000 liter scale. We can program it in different ways that only we know, to create C1 fungal cells that produce the desired products that we, our collaborators, or licensees want to develop. Besides that, we have patented and proprietary promoters, vectors, secretion signals and other molecular tools; all the different things that you need to program and produce proteins and enzymes from a fungal organism like C1.
CEOCFO: With the vast number of potential applications, how has Dyadic decided where to focus in general and what are you focusing on specifically?
Mr. Emalfarb: One of the things that obviously causes major issues for small companies is that you focus on too many things and get nothing done. We have been mainly focused on cellulases and hemi-cellulases and how different types of cellulases and hemicellulases perform in specific applications, such as turning biomass into fermentable sugars that may be used to produce fuels, chemicals, plastics, polymers and other biobased products. It may seem illogical that coming from the blue jean industry we ended up in the genes (biotechnology) industry. However, since denim is made of cotton and cotton is made of cellulose we have been working on cellulose for over two decades. Therefore, since we started on cellulose we shifted our focus on how to transform cellulose in this case into glucose to make fuels. Glucose is used to feed a variety of microorganisms like yeast, bacteria or algae to produce fuels, chemicals, plastics, and polymers to displace oil. Examples of some of the companies that are working today in the bio-based economy space like Amyris and Gevo who are both using yeasts, Solazyme who is using algae, and Purac, LS9 and Myriant who are using bacteria. All of these companies are using sugar to produce their products. However, industry is shying away from using sugar from food like corn or sucrose from sugarcane. If possible, they want to use the agricultural waste, biomass or energy crops to generate cellulosic sugars which can be used to make these biofuels, chemicals, plastics, polymers and other bio-based products to help the world wean itself from oil. This is one area in which our focus and technologies have advanced and has led to license agreements with Codexis in their collaboration with Shell Oil, and Abengoa Bioenergy one of the world’s largest ethanol manufacturers.
We continue to make our C1 technology better, more robust, and more versatile so it can produce more efficient enzymes in larger quantities, at lower cost and at industrial scale. We have also improved the types of enzyme mixtures coming out of the C1 fungal cells, so those enzyme mixtures can convert various forms of biomass into fermentable sugars more efficiently, more effectively, and at broader pH, temperature and wider operating conditions. The C1 enzymes provide greater flexibility to these large industrial factories that are growing up yeast, bacteria and algae large tanks to try to fuel the world and to replace oil with biologically derived products like ethanol, butanol, plastics, polymers, detergent alcohols, and other types of bio-based chemicals. In regards to our C1 Platform Technology, we have two non-exclusive licensees already inked. By that I mean we signed non-exclusive license deals with some of the best and the brightest people in this biofuels and biochemicals space. We signed a license deal with Abengoa Bioenergy, a Missouri company, which is a subsidiary of the multi-billion dollar Spanish company, Abengoa. Abengoa Bioenergy (http://www.abengoabioenergy.com/corp/web/en/index.html) is one of the leading ethanol producers in the world. They are the third or fourth largest ethanol company today worldwide and they are further developing our C1 technology to turn wheat straw, corn stover, switch grass, and other cellulose materials into fermentable sugars to produce fuels and chemicals. They actually have a commercial plant now under construction in Hugoton, Kansas which is expected to begin operations by the end of 2013 or in the beginning of 2014. Abengoa intends to show the world that this is commercially feasible to produce cellulosic sugars from biomass and ferment those sugars into biofuels and other bio-based chemicals. From there, Abengoa Bioenergy plans on stamping out plant after plant in a variety of countries including the United States to start producing more and more ethanol to get off the oil in a much greater way.
The other non-exclusive partner we have is a company called Codexis. It is a biotech company based in Redwood City California, one of the leading cutting-edge companies in its space. It is a leading biotech company that avails over very interesting and promising technologies. However, what attracted Codexis to Dyadic’s C1 technology was that Codexis was missing an industrially proven filamentous fungal production platform like C1 that also contained genes that encoded for enzymes that they could transform into even more efficient enzymes to create lower cost sugars from biomass. We entered into a license with Codexis on a non-exclusive basis in November 2008 and they are using our C1 Platform Technology in a partnership with Shell Oil to make ethanol for example, while they are also developing a bio-based detergent alcohol technology that can be used in conjunction with cellulosic sugars. Shell is trying to do the same thing that Abengoa Bioenergy is attempting to do, which is turning biomass into sugars to make fuel. Shell, of course, is involved in Brazil with a company called Raizen, a $12 billion joint venture between Shell and Cosan, and trying to expand and grow the Brazilian ethanol market from not just sugarcane, but additionally to take the bagasse, the waste of the sugarcane mills, and make more glucose or sugars from the bagasse to produce fuels, chemicals, plastics, and polymers. Additionally, Codexis, has a partnership with the Mossi & Ghisolfi Group (”M&G”), an Italian company that is one of the leading plastic bottle manufacturers in the world. Coke and others are trying to make plastic bottles now out of biodegradable materials, so it is more environmentally friendly and greener. This whole movement to a green economy is, of course, something Dyadic and our technologies have been involved in for over fifteen years.
In this biomass to sugars space, we at Dyadic have trademarked the term “Green Sugars™” and have a variety of companies that I cannot name that we have been having discussions with. We have been doing research and development on trying to create fermentable sugars from their biomass, whether it is empty fruit bunch from Malaysia, sugarcane bagasse from Brazil, corn stover and wheat straw from America or Europe, etc. There are a whole slew of other biomass or energy crops that we worked on here at Dyadic to try to create sugars from those materials using enzymes affordably and efficiently. I equate it to the computer industry. If you think about how Moore’s Law worked when we went from a 384 chip to a 486 chip to a Pentium chip to today’s fastest most powerful computer chips. These things just got quicker, faster, better, cheaper, so the computer that cost us a billion dollars for the Apollo moon landing probably today is like a PC that costs you $1,500 on your desk. We anticipate making similar advancements through modern biology and biotech, genomics and proteomics, and all of the information and technology we have learned from the sequencing of the human genome which was a watershed event for the biotech community. In our case, it is all about the designer cells we are creating from our engineered and constantly improved C1 fungal cells, and how to ramp them up to be more and more productive as we continue to learn about its biology. This includes what genes are contained within the C1 genome, where these genes are, and the pathways inside C1. From this knowledge and the continued advancement of our C1 Platform Technology, we are creating new C1 cells to make higher and higher levels of enzymes and proteins that are encoded by the genes we insert copies of into the C1 organism of choice for the research and development project at hand. We are constantly getting better at deciding what enzymes we want to make, and for what purpose, and are improving what levels you can ultimately make these enzymes and proteins at. We continue to make progress on driving the cost of producing the targeted enzymes and proteins of interest to our company, and those of our collaborators down and the productivity up. It is our expected goal to keep driving efficiency up by learning to better program these fungal cells to make, for example, fuels, chemicals, plastics and polymers from renewable sugars. We have trademarked the word “Green Sugars” at Dyadic by which we mean they are renewable. They are sugars based on renewable materials that are out there today such as biomass or grown to be used for tomorrow’s energy crops like switchgrass which is unlike oil that is irreplaceable once it is taken out of the ground. After all, what is oil anyway? It is plant matter created by heat and pressure over a billion years. But we do not have a billion years to create new oil. We can do what nature does in terms of the carbon in 72 hours or less; we can turn biomass into sugars into carbon to use it to replace oil. The use of these fermentable sugars in turning sugar into fuels, chemicals plastics and polymers to displace our dependency on oil is what we call a bio-based economy.
Some of the other things we are doing with the C1 platform technology is we use it for the industrial enzyme business for use in food, feed, pulp and paper, textiles, starch, etc. There, we are using it to grow our own industrial enzyme business, and the businesses of our licensees and collaborators to develop new products or lower cost products. For example, we have launched this year a product called Fibrezyme® G5000, which is an enzyme that can be used in the pulp and paper process for the refining of pulp. It makes the pulp flow at a much easier and quicker rate. By adding this G5000 biorefining enzyme into the pulp process we have seen that you can in some cases take refining energy offline by as much as 33% to 66%. This can create energy savings as we have seen in some cases when you put this in the water in a pulp mill, all of a sudden they can turn off one or two of the three refineries that they have online. Then, if the refiner has a bottleneck in the pulp plant, not only can you use G5000 to save energy, but they can alternatively process more paper through that mill by having better refining capacity. Another benefit they may want to use is to swap out more expensive pulp for lower cost fiber, so they might be able to use higher percentages of recycled fiber versus virgin fiber. What does that do for them? It potentially could save them a great deal of money because they can typically buy recycled fiber for less than virgin fiber and, of course, you cut down less trees, leaving less environmental damage. There are so many benefits in using enzymes in all these different areas. That is just one example.
Another popular use of enzymes is using cellulase enzymes for making denim more comfortable and fashionable. We have been selling enzymes for the stone washing of jeans since the mid 1980’s and before that we were selling the pumice stones to Levis, Guess, Wrangler, Lee, etc. as we helped pioneer the stonewash and acid wash blue jean industry.
Another important area where enzymes are used which we are focusing our efforts on is the use of enzymes in the animal feed industry. Here we are growing not only our own feed enzyme business, but in 2011 we are developing a new, better and more cost efficient enzyme for one of the world’s largest animal nutrition companies that has licensed C1 from us to help them create their next generation enzyme to break down grains in a way that is more efficient and effective for a lower cost. You can then feed, for example, more chickens for less, by putting enzymes in an animal feed mixture like wheat and barley or corn/soy diets. You end up being able to feed the same amount of chickens with a lot less grain by putting enzymes into the feed mixture. Therefore, you end up feeding more people for less money with the same resources. Grains in the world are becoming scarcer and the price is going up, so the contribution of these types of enzymes is growing on an exponential basis. As I mentioned we have our own animal feed enzyme business that we sell to our customers in various countries around the world through our own industrial enzyme business. However, in this field we also have entered into a license to develop a feed enzyme for this multi-national company that has an existing global infrastructure, as well as the ability to conduct feed trials, and regulatory experience and knowledge. We anticipate that when the research program and regulatory process are completed, the new enzyme manufactured by using Dyadic’s C1 Platform Technology will displace the existing enzyme they sell worldwide today, because it is expected to be more efficient, effective and less costly to produce than their existing feed enzyme. They expect to be able to offer these benefits to their customers which should translate into more abundant quantities of lower cost foods for a growing worldwide population.
We also recently announced a new C1 research and potential commercial agreement in the food industry, with a major multi-national food company. This company wants to be able to make the same enzyme they have today at higher yields for a lower manufacturing cost, so they can bring their cost of goods down and be more competitive in the world economy in a much more efficient way. We hope in this case that we can take C1, put their genetic gene into a pre-selected fungal C1 cell line in a way that ramps up the productivity of the enzyme encoded by their gene, and therefore lowers their cost and provides them with greater efficiencies. In addition, if this project is successful, we anticipate it will lead to several other projects for them in the food industry that they have expressed an interest in.
Last but not least, last year we announced another research deal where we are trying to leverage our C1 Platform Technology for use in the development and manufacture of enzymes and proteins in the biopharmaceutical market. We have always thought that since C1 is very proficient at producing proteins, and because we have seen it can express human proteins such as Embrel that we may be able to develop a breakthrough way protein drugs are developed and manufactured. Examples of some of the proteins we would like to produce using C1 are things like antibodies, human insulin or vaccines. In the particular case of vaccines, as mentioned above last year we have entered into a research and development project with EnGen Bio and Sanofi Pasteur, which is one of the largest and innovative vaccine producers in the world. Often, vaccines are late to get to the marketplace, too costly, and it seems they are also often in short supply. We think C1 might be able to solve many, if not all of those problems. If we are successful in these efforts we anticipate that we might be able to develop vaccines faster, bring them to marketplace quicker, cheaper and in larger volumes resulting in being able to treat more people for less.
It seems that the opportunities to use our C1 technology to develop and manufacture enzymes and proteins are nearly endless. There are genes and their corresponding enzymes and proteins being discovered and characterized in laboratories every day of the week and people are classifying those genes. They are then making proteins in Petri dishes, or in test tubes, and trying to find out the properties and the benefits of many of those proteins and enzymes that are encoded by those genes. These scientists and their organizations in many cases will write an academic paper on their results, maybe even file a patent as well. Quite often, since these institutes do not have a way to move these discoveries forward commercially, as they don’t avail over commercially viable expression systems like Dyadic’s C1 Platform Technology, the discoveries they make get lost and never get commercialized. We are trying to reach out and inform the academic institutes or industry across various markets, like the five non-exclusive licensees that we have already in place, who want to utilize our C1 technology platform to help turn the world of genes into useful products helping to make our planet cleaner and greener, and to bring more efficient, more profitable, and new products with novel benefits to humankind.
CEOCFO: Sounds like Dyadic can solve three quarters of the world’s problem with C1!
Mr. Emalfarb: What you have to realize is C1 is an aspect of biotechnology. We own the trademark “Green Sugars” in the biofuel and bio-based chemical space. We also have a trademark called “INSIDE®,” so we coined that word for biotech and registered the trademark. It is Dyadic Inside® and by Dyadic Inside we are really talking about biotechnology as we at Dyadic and the biotech community are really where the next wave of many of mankind’s benefits are going to come from. One of the watershed events for biotechnology came from the sequencing of the human genome which originally cost around $1 billion. Today, you can probably do it for far less than $1 million and the cost is going down rapidly. Therefore, as the sequencing costs have come down, the knowledge of biology and living cells such as C1 has gone up tremendously. We are mining and harvesting that knowledge and we are gaining information that allows us to continue to improve the ability of things like C1 to make proteins and enzymes in large volumes even cheaper, faster, and quicker, as well as being able to make even greater varieties of proteins and enzymes that can be made in the C1 system. It is a matter of identifying which gene makes what protein or enzyme for what purpose. It is also who has that gene and the ability to fund the research and development to turn that into a product, as well as distribution, marketing and regulatory experience and knowledge to go through all those hurdles. Therefore, we have decided as a small company we would take on a few of those projects on our own, but we are leveraging the use of our C1 Platform Technology by doing funded research and development for companies like Abengoa Bioenergy, and Sanofi Pasteur. In another case, we licensed the C1 Platform Technology and all its molecular tools to a leading biotech company based in Redwood City, California called Codexis (NASDAQ: CDXS) and they have reported recently that they have over 100 scientists working on using our C1 Platform Technology to create fermentable sugars to create biofuels in their collaboration with Shell Oil, and detergent alcohols in their collaboration with M&G of Italy. There are a variety of other companies across different industries we are talking to, in trying to see if C1 can be used to turn their genes into products for them and how we may share in the common benefits of bringing those products to market using our strengths and their strengths in overcoming each of our weaknesses.
CEOCFO: Do enough of the companies and organizations that should know about Dyadic know of you, and how do you get people to know you exist?
Mr. Emalfarb: That is our biggest challenge. We are a small company that has an incredible powerful C1 platform that is getting more powerful and versatile every three to six months. However, when you get partners like the ones we have in Abengoa Bioenergy, Codexis, Sanofi Pasteur, etc., people start realizing that C1 is for real. It is not just us saying it. They are seeing actual concrete results.
Abengoa has successfully produced commercial quantities of enzymes from C1 in a plant called Antibioticos in Spain. In February 2011, they announced to the world that they were successful in scaling up C1 to produce enzymes in 50 cubic meter fermenters for use to make fuels at their 3 million liter pilot plant in Salamanca, Spain. Therefore, when people hear that, it is not just us telling them that we produced industrial enzymes using C1 since 1996 in large volume affordably and sold them in 35 countries plus all over the world. They are getting the same story now from Abengoa.
Codexis has also announced they have successfully scaled up their technology based on C1 both in Mexico, at a company called Fermic, and in Canada, at a company called Iogen Bioenergy, which is jointly owned by Shell Oil. So there are a growing number of commercial successes originating independently from our licensees that have successfully scaled up C1 in large industrial scale. Therefore, where others have failed scaling some of their technologies, Dyadic can point to over fifteen years of C1 successfully, and repeatedly being used to produce enzymes at between 25,000 and 150,000 liter scale. Dyadic itself has successfully and repeatedly produced our own industrial enzymes in the U.S., Poland and Mexico, which have been sold worldwide since 1997. We continue to use C1 to do just that, but now you have additionally these two large companies that have started to make these types of announcements, so people are finding out that this really is a great platform and that C1 can do a lot of things for a lot of people. It cannot do everything for all people, as there are certain things and challenges that we would have to overcome to produce certain types of DNA or proteins. However, as you pointed out, there are plenty of opportunities. It is a matter of matching up the best opportunities with the strengths of C1 and putting them together. Then, taking our strengths and the strengths of the academic and industrial scientists who are discovering all these wonderful things and figuring out a way to share in the value of bringing these discoveries to market for the benefit of our planet and humankind. Not only do we benefit from these commercial successes, but the planet and humankind also benefits, because it is a greener and cleaner way of doing things, and it is also done in a renewable way. Through our collaboration with Sanofi Pasteur, and hopefully additional licensees in the future, we can hopefully bring new, better, and more affordable medicines to an aging society. There are just so many great things that biotech is bringing to the world and if the public were only aware of some of the benefits that are possible, they would just be amazed at what capabilities there are. It is not just our company. There are a lot of companies in the biotech space creating all kinds of wonderful things and we want to marry up our strengths with theirs and make two plus two not equal four but make it equal twenty-four or more.
CEOCFO: What is your focus as CEO?
Mr. Emalfarb: My focus day-to-day is to make sure that the company has enough cash to continue to grow and expand and do so in a way that is as non dilutive as possible to our shareholders. My family and I own approximately one third of this company, so I am not the typical CEO. I am interested in all of our shareholders gaining the best value, so I have a constant balance between raising capital and not diluting shareholders. Our preference is to do deals like we did with Codexis where it was a $10 million upfront fee and it is non dilutive capital. That capital has been used by us to continue to grow our business to advance the C1 Platform Technology and make it better, more robust, and more versatile in the things that can be developed and manufacture from using C1 so we can continue to license C1 to the next organization to help them bring their discoveries to market sooner, with greater probabilities, affordably. I also oversee in a general sense the research and development, and with the board of directors, and our employees help set the direction, and the vision of the company and where we go from here. I am actively involved in all the licensing agreements and all the negotiations for new licenses with different people in different industries trying to figure out how we can bring our technology to bear on their problems and give them solutions in a way that we both win.
CEOCFO: Why should investors pay attention to Dyadic today?
Mr. Emalfarb:
Investors should pay attention in the biotech space to companies that have a
proven track record of actually turning things into products. Dyadic has
been making industrial enzymes since 1994, initially with a different
platform technology and since late 1996 with C1. We are a company with a
proven track record and we believe we know what we are doing. We have been
in business for over 32 years. I founded the company in 1979 selling pumice
stones and teaching Levis, Lee and Wrangler and others how to stone wash and
acid wash blue jeans and we helped to pioneer the stonewash and acid wash
industries. This led us to the enzymes, as cotton (denim) is cellulose,
which led us to the sugars such as glucose produced from cellulose, which
led us to where we are today. The key here is to look at our partners, the
strength of the C1 technology, and the science, people, collaborators and
licensees behind the C1 technology. We are just unleashing these
possibilities, but we cannot do it all on our own, because we are small
company with limited resources. Therefore, we are partnering up with some of
the best and the brightest partners today. In addition, we are on the hunt
for additional great, smart, large companies that can help us move things
forward in their different fields where we believe our technologies might
help them develop and manufacture some of the products that they want to
bring to marketplace. |
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“The promise of biotechnology is here today, and Dyadic is determined to make a difference.” - Mark A. Emalfarb |
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