Culturing Industrial Biotech: A Fermentation Skew

Our world today is on the cusp of an exciting era. Biotechnology is poised to steer us away from unsustainable practices in resource utilization. Not only will we have new paths to keystone materials that have driven modern technology; we will unlock entirely new materials, foods, and medicines that traditional organic chemistry could not give us.

Today I would like to start an experiment with you all. Here I present a 10-company portfolio of businesses that leverage cell culture, synthetic biology, and industrial biotechnology as their primary value proposition.

Company	Ticker	Market Cap. (billions)	Stock Price	% of Portfolio
Amyris	AMRS	1.33	$  4.30	3.3%
Chr. Hansen A/S	CHYHY	9.76	$18.56	24.1%
Corbion NV	CSNVY	2.45	$41.00	6.1%
Gingko Bioworks	DNA	8.53	$  5.74	21.1%
Evogene Ltd	EVGN	0.05	$  1.32	0.1%
Evolva Holding SA	ELVAF	0.16	$  0.17	0.4%
Gevo Inc	GEVO	0.73	$  3.61	1.8%
Novozymes	NVZMY	16.99	$61.30	42.0%
Zivo Biosciences	ZIVO	0.03	$  3.69	0.1%
Zymergen	ZY	0.44	$  4.31	1.1%
Total Value: $10,000		40.50

As implied by the table I've put an imaginary $10,000 into the listed companies apportioned by their market capitalization. I'll be assuming fractional shares for easy math. Additionally, one may note that some of these are OTC stocks which are publicly traded but not available in US exchanges.

All prices were pulled from Yahoo Finance as of 2022, Feb. 10th

The 3 Factors:

• Fermentation/Cell Culture:
  the production of useful biomaterials from cells be they microbial, plant, mammalian, or other cell lines

• Synthetic Biology:
  the use of genetic tools, computer science, and biophysics to create, redesign, or optimize biological processes, materials, or tools

• Industrial Biotechnology:
  the scaling and translation of bioprocesses to commercial relevance

 
Companies on this list must embody at least two of these factors. I expect and hope this journey will refine these factors and lead to the list growing beyond the initial 10 members.

Honorable Mentions
There are many notable members missing from this list who have major stakes in the world's supply of talent in this space. I will provide Givaudan as an example. It is the world's largest flavor and fragrance company with a strong portfolio of fermentation-derived products. However as a proportion of the company's total value, their technologies which would fit the bill of this list are small. As such I felt including them would massively skew the portfolio in its present market-cap weighted style. Perhaps a future version will include them in another weighting-scheme.

Another type of company that comes to mind are those like Twist Bioscience. These entities are critical raw material suppliers to synthetic biology companies, but themselves due not utilize cell culture. Some would not even consider Twist a synthetic biology company (though with their rapid advances in enzyme-based DNA synthesis I'm not sure I agree).

Inspiration
The inspiration for this portfolio was frustration with the current connotation of "biotech" in the financial markets. A quick search of "Biotech Factor Funds" will generate a large list of mutual funds and ETFs claiming to be biotech funds. Just a brief glance into the holdings and you will see the overwhelming majority of these funds are exclusively biopharmaceuticals. An exciting topic to be sure, but such a narrow representation of the innovation that is being monetized. The closest thing I have seen in recent history is Cathie Wood's ARK funds. My own expertise and bias is in microbial fermentation and the commercialization of small scale bioprocesses, hence my skew.

Requests for Feedback
If you've come this far, you have my thanks! I would love to hear your thoughts. Did I miss a company? Drop a line!

Looking Forward
This project will bring together a space that I hope will interest both economists and biotechnologists. In the future I hope to continue tracking this portfolio and share an occasional deep dive into the members of this list.

About Me
You can check out my Hive Intro post here. I was brought here by the Splinterlands game of all things, but this is my first post on Biotechnology, which I hope to continue! I've also created a Twitter account to go with my Hive alias, and if you like this you can find me there as the AiOfSyn or @ZoicSash.

Image Sources:
All images are my own photos with editing performed in Microsoft PowerPoint. May I one day learn to draw 🤣

Disclaimer
This post is not financial or investment advice. The contents are solely for educational purposes