Amyris partners with COFCO Nutrition and Health Research Institute of China

Amyris, Inc., the industrial bioscience company, recently announced a collaboration partnership with COFCO Nutrition and Health Research Institute Co Ltd. ("COFCO NHRI"), a 100% owned subsidiary of China National Cereals, Oils, and Foodstuff Corporation ("COFCO"). The agreement calls for Amyris to provide improved strains via its high-performance HI-RYSE™ (Hyper-Integration for Rapid Yeast Strain Engineering) technology for COFCO NHRI.

“We are very excited with the opportunity to enable COFCO to grow more sustainably as it works to feed and fuel the world’s most populous country,” said John Melo, President & CEO of Amyris. “This initial project poses an exciting opportunity for Amyris to apply the world’s leading bioscience platform to lower the cost and improve the performance of the many products we rely on in our day-to-day lives.”

Continued Melo, “COFCO NHRI has been leading the way in China with pioneering technology and is continuing its legacy by pursuing even greater adoption of bioscience. We are proud to have COFCO as our partner and look forward to expanded opportunities with them in the future. This agreement includes the potential for a long term income stream based on the performance of our improvements and is consistent with our business model of enabling the world’s leading companies to grow sustainably, while providing Amyris short-term payment and long-term economics on these improvements.”

The HI-RYSE advanced bioengineering platform dramatically increases the speed and achievable design complexity for genome engineering, accelerating fermentation-based product development.  The end result is the production of target molecules with improved supply security, and lower cost of production at commercial scale. COFCO NHRI joins a growing list of companies worldwide that have chosen to partner with Amyris to leverage this platform in the development of organisms for producing molecules renewably and at lower cost.