Technology is transforming everything faster than ever imagined. When used correctly, artificial intelligence is already helping people, businesses and organizations work quicker and more intelligently. Self-driven taxis are already on the road, and there are smart homes, smart vehicles and even smart cities are set to exist worldwide.
These are just a few technological advancements thrusting humanity into the future today.
Yet, biotech firms such as Triplebar are more under the radar. They use advanced technology to speed up the production of healthier and more sustainable foods and create medicines to help solve the urgent issues threatening the livelihoods of billions of people worldwide.
The problems humanity faces
By 2050, an estimated 9.8 billion people will live on Earth, all sharing the same resources and confronting new diseases.
But there’s no need to look decades ahead to understand today's problems.
Triplebar CEO Maria Cho said the global population faces new threats, including climate change, economic concerns and biodiversity loss, which could increase health crises in many countries.
“In 2023, acute food insecurity record levels will persist due to protracted food crises,” Cho said, according to her research. “In 48 countries, 238 million people face high levels of acute food insecurity -- 10% more than in 2022.
“As of today, nearly 700 million people do not have sufficient food consumption across 87 countries,” she added. “Nearly two billion people have no access to the drugs they need to alleviate the illnesses they suffer. Many of them can’t even get lifesaving medication.”
In light of these issues, some of the most important questions today could be: How can food be ensured for so many people? How can disease be mitigated on a mass scale? How will technology advance quickly enough to solve the problems of the next century and beyond?
International organizations believe they have the answers to those questions, but most seem more like demagoguery than pragmatic, although most realize the benefits new technologies bring.
Maria Cho said artificial intelligence (AI) holds tremendous promise, and digital health technologies are increasingly significant in many facets of our health and daily lives. AI/ML is powering essential advancements in this field, she said.
Millions of times faster
Triplebar’s microprocessor for biology uses the power of evolution at hyperspeed. The Triplebar™ Platform can find solutions to humanity’s existential crises millions of times faster than any other biotech platform worldwide.
“Our platform has proven that it has the power to do what we say it can do to achieve meaningful progress for humanity,” said Cho. “That is critical and differentiates us from the others in our industry.”
The Triplebar CEO explains that her biotech firm has miniaturised: “We have taken this test process in biology and sped it up to hyperspeed, and therefore we can look at tens of millions to hundreds of millions of tests in a single day -- or, in other words, tens of thousands of times more testing than any other firm in our sector.”
She adds, “We analyze, test and measure the effect of billions of mutations. We oversample the genome daily and use this amazing and innovative ability to find solutions to our world’s greatest problems quickly.”
And then there’s Triplebar’s Hyper-Throughput™ Screening system (HyTS). It enables the biotech company to screen through millions of biological and synthetic library candidates to find the right antibody with the best profile on an accelerated discovery timeline. That leads to better pharmaceutical solutions with early commercial access.
Facing climate change and biodiversity loss
Triplebar is applying state-of-the-art technology to solve food scarcity problems by sustainably increasing access to high-quality nutrition. They are working with biology-accelerating evolution to allow them to use biological systems, like microbes and cell lines, to bring abundance to the global food system.
“Our planet is losing approximately two million hectares to deforestation for cattle raising. Baby formula shortages, tightening supply chains, drought and global instability will only intensify the growing nutritional scarcity,” Cho pointed out. “We urgently need new ways to produce food, and that’s what we do at Triplebar.”
“We focus on the potential of technologies like cultivated meat and seafood to increase our chance to democratise access to sustainable, high-quality nutrition,” she added. “We evolve microbes orders of magnitude faster than any other biotech firm to make protein accessible commercially.”
Cho explained that Triplebar uses its patented Hyper-Throughput™ System to oversample every position in a microbial genome in one day to find optimized, scalable production hosts. “This system enables us to measure the effects of billions of mutations daily to evolve these traits in many species and tissue types.”
Triplebar’s ecosystem partners
“We set out to find the right partners who share our vision and mission to support the biotech and food tech sectors to solve the food security, healthcare and environmental issues the world faces today by continuing to speed up innovation,” Cho said.
Triplebar is a foundry business of The Production Board (TPB), a venture established to solve the world's most fundamental problems.
TPB, Triplebar’s first and most significant investor, is re-engineering global production systems across food, agriculture, biomanufacturing, human health and the broader life sciences.
Rabobank, a cooperative Dutch Bank and a top 50 banking institution globally, invested in Triplebar as part of Rabobank’s commitment to contributing to a future-proof food system. Synthesis Capital, a prominent investor in early-stage food system companies, also led Triplebar’s most recent funding round. Essential Capital, Stray Dog Capital and iSelect Fund also participated.
Rose Wardle of Synthesis said: “Business-as-usual for the food sector simply isn't possible if we're to feed the growing global population sustainably and within planetary boundaries. Triplebar's technology has the potential to unlock a new, sustainable food system by enabling a paradigm shift in cost and scale.”
FrieslandCampina Ingredients partnered with Triplebar to develop and produce innovative cell-based polypeptides using advanced precision fermentation. This significantly increased the production of Lactoferrin, a highly demanded but scarcely available bioactive dairy milk protein.
The strategic partnership enables the two prominent international companies to produce microbial cells through precision fermentation, creating bioactive proteins that support and enhance human health and nutrition.
In 2023, Triplebar partnered with Singapore-based Umami Meats to create cell-based seafood, starting with Japanese eel. The collaboration focuses on developing cell lines to ensure low-cost cultivated fish and leverages science and technology to afford and sustain high-quality food.
Helping save the environment
Triplebar, headquartered in California and highly committed to diversity, has significantly reduced its carbon footprint, including plastic waste and other hazardous materials.
“We aim to minimize our impact on climate. Our testing time is also significantly less than that of other technologies used in our sector,” said Cho. “This progress has put us in a position to hit this 2050 vision because we’ve tapped into this evolution algorithm for the first time in history. We do feel that we are the next generation,” she concluded.
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