Apoha: Cross-cutting technology to support adoption of synthetic biology food systems

Synthetic biology is poised to revolutionise future food systems, increasing sustainability, affordability, and quality for consumers, while improving resource efficiency and global food security. But, today, synthetic biology start-ups as well as FoodTech and Fast-Moving Consumer Goods innovators looking to integrate synthetic biology ingredients into novel food and beverage product formulations face three key challenges:

1. Achieving taste and texture parity with traditional food products. 2. Achieving price parity with traditional food products.

3. De-risking supply chain vulnerabilities (e.g., single-source ingredients suppliers) and scaling up synthetic biology food and beverage product manufacture to meet consumer demand.

These three key challenges together create a screening and product optimisation bottleneck limited by the lack of rapid, cost-effective analytical instrumentation technologies that can analyse and model key biophysical properties of complex mixtures.

Apoha is a stealth-stage start-up (UK SME), founded in 2021 by Dr Shamit Shrivastava (inventor of Apoha's core cross-cutting platform technology; ex-postdoctoral researcher, University of Oxford) and Anshika Srivastava (ex-Executive Director/Vice President, Goldman Sachs). Our mission is to prepare the world for the future where demand for new materials and computational power will soon far exceed current capabilities and capacity.

We are developing a "liquid brain", a neuromorphic fluid-based technology that mimics neuron-like activity when it is exposed to a chemical. The fundamental science behind our innovation was highlighted by Scientific American in 2018 as a "Revolution in Science that could change everything".

With Innovate UK support through the Engineering Biology Collaborative Research and Development Round 1 call, we will apply our emerging "liquid brain" platform technology to screening and optimisation of synthetic biology food products, unlocking multiple synthetic biology use cases including similarity analysis (e.g., comparing the taste and texture of synthetic biology food products to traditional and plant-based food products), new product development (e.g., integrating synthetic biology ingredients in place of traditional or plant-based ingredients), scale up re-optimisation (e.g., product reformulation to reduce costs by incorporating more cost-effective raw materials), quality assurance/quality control checks (e.g., analysing ingredients from different suppliers and/or from the same supplier over time), and product optimisation (e.g., to improve quality, nutrition, and/or functional properties).

Our innovation aligns with the scope of this funding call, to develop tools and technologies that support synthetic biology. We are focused primarily on the National Engineering Biology Programme (NEBP) theme: food systems, with a secondary focus on cross-cutting technology and service development (e.g., extending our technology to applications of synthetic biology in biomedicine).