DSM will invest an initial $25 million in a 12% stake in bioscience company Amyris, helping to establish a ‘long-term’ partnership on vitamins and other nutritional ingredients.
The agreement includes the option for DSM to invest a further $25 million in Amyris by August, subject to the fulfilment of certain conditions.
As part of the agreement, DSM and Amyris will focus on a number of short-to-medium-term product development and production opportunities. DSM said that Amyris’ technology supports its own strategic markets in health, nutrition, and materials as well as a growing consumer shift to natural-like products derived from sustainable sources.
“We are very excited about DSM’s strategic focus in health and nutrition markets and its commitment to sustainable sourcing and production of better-performing products,” said John Melo, president and CEO of Amyris. “The Amyris technology platform and potential synergy can lead to significant cost improvements for DSM while accelerating Amyris’s market access. We expect this will lead to incremental revenue in 2017, growing annually based on the number of products we develop in our partnership and our pace of delivery.”
Chris Goppelsroeder, president & CEO of DSM Nutritional Products, added: “Amyris has a unique yeast-based strain engineering platform that is very complementary to DSM’s capabilities in this area and will create great synergy with DSM’s know-how in fermentation, downstream process development and large-scale manufacturing. Working closely together with Amyris and leveraging DSM’s route-to-market will accelerate our innovation towards cost-effective, fermentation-based processes for both existing and new products.”
In April, DSM opened a new biotechnology centre on its campus in Delft, in the Netherlands, which it said would allow it to expand its research and development capabilities in fermentation and biotechnology for food.
[“Source-foodbev”]
