NEWS OF TH E WEEK
SECOND QUARTER: Production hurdles keep industry in the red
T WILL BE SOME TIME before making certain
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chemicals from sugars is profitable, if the secondquarter results posted by six biobased firms are any indication. For now, the best measure of success is progress toward operating smoothly at commercial scale. On that score, Solazyme leads the group with its large-scale plants in Brazil and Iowa. The company is producing and shipping algal oil and lubricant products while it works to increase output at the sites. It booked $9.0 million in product revenues for the quarter. For Amyris, shipments of the intermediate farnesene from its facility in Brazil have started up again after downtime in the first quarter. The plant opened more than a year ago, but output in 2013 was less than expected. Amyris told investors that sales should double this year, leading to positive cash flow. Solazyme and Amyris earned the most revenue of the six firms but also reported the biggest losses for the quarter, showing the need for deep pockets to reach
DIRECTING VENOM TO FIGHT CANCER ACS MEETING NEWS: Encapsulated venom peptide can skip healthy cells
ENOM FROM SCORPIONS or honeybees
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sounds like it wouldn’t do a person much good. But by directing a modified component just to tumors, researchers might leverage it into a drug. Peptides in some venoms bind to cancer cells and block tumor growth and spread. But they have not yet been developed successfully as anticancer agents because they attack healthy cells too. Bioengineer Dipanjan Pan and coworkers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, are now using polymeric nanoparticles to deliver venom toxin directly to cancer cells. Postdoc Santosh K. Misra discussed the work in a session in the Division of Colloid & Surface Chemistry at the American Chemical Society national meeting last week in San Francisco. And Pan, Misra, postdoc Mao Ye, and grad student Sumin Kim reported on it in a paper last month (Chem. Commun. 2014, DOI: 10.1039/ c4cc04748f ). “To the best of my knowledge, a rational approach to develop a delivery system for venom tox-
commercial-scale production. Amyris shored up its cash in May by selling $75 million in convertible notes. Gevo, which raised $18 million in a stock sale, has a new strategy at its Luverne, Minn., plant. To ensure a revenue stream, the company is producing isobutyl alcohol in a single fermentation tank and making traditional fuel ethanol in three other vessels. SECOND-QUARTER RESULTS “I like where we’re headed at Luverne—I As revenues trail spending, biobased firms think we’ve turned focus on scale-up timing and cash balances the corner,” CEO $ THOUSANDS REVENUES EARNINGS CASH Patrick R. Gruber told Amyrisa $9,307 -$35,510 $90,207 analysts in a conferBioAmber 415 -14,145 54,304 ence call. 7,721 -17,156 5,908 Gevo In contrast, operaKiOR 231 -24,444 544 Metabolixa 1,170 -7,239 5,531 tions at KiOR’s celSolazymea 15,939 -42,917 285,166 lulosic fuels facility a Revenues include research grants and collaboration income. in Columbus, Miss., have been suspended, and the firm is running out of cash. In a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, the company said it faces problems with “structural bottlenecks, reliability, mechanical issues, costs, and catalyst performance.” The future looks brighter at BioAmber. The succinic acid producer says its Sarnia, Ontario, plant is on budget and set for completion in early 2015.—MELODY BOMGARDNER
in” has not been tried before, Pan told C&EN. The researchers inserted a derivative of TsAP-1, a toxin peptide from scorpion venom, into spherical polymeric nanoparticles, creating constructs they call NanoVenin. When they used NanoVenin to treat cancerous tissue in the lab, it spared red blood cells (erythrocytes) and other normal cells and killed cancer cells with a potency nearly 10 times that of the toxin alone. They have also found that a nanoparticle-encapsulated version of melittin, a honeybee venom toxin, serves as an effective cancer drug. The venom-laden nanoparticles killed breast cancer cells without detrimental effects to normal cells, Pan said. “We have known for some time that venom toxins have anticancer potential, if only we could deliver them safely and selectively to tumors,” said David Oupicky, codirector of the Center for Drug Delivery & Nanomedicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. The Pan group’s modified scorpion toxin “is new, and the method of incorporation into nanoparticles is fairly new as well,” he added. The finding that it “works against cancer cells but appears not to damage erythrocytes is an important step toward practical application. It will be very interesting to see how the particles behave in vivo.” Pan said he and his coworkers plan to carry out in vivo tests in rats and pigs and that a start-up he founded, VitruVian Biotech, could start human clinical trials in three to five years.—STU BORMAN
CEN.ACS.ORG
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AUGUST 18, 2014
Scorpion toxins may one day be useful as anticancer drugs.
COU RESTY OF DIPANJAN PAN
SCALE-UP COSTS BIOBASED FIRMS
