Date: Jun 10, 2010 Author: Ron Leuty Source: bizjournals (
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Refactored Materials is heading where spiders fear to tread.
The startup company, formed from research in the lab of UCSF assistant professor Chris Voigt, is seeking a way to produce full-length synthetic spider silk protein. That could result in a flexible material that is tougher than Kevlar or steel threads and have applications ranging from medical device coating to lightweight body armor for soldiers and police officers.
Refactored Materials co-founders Dan Widmaier and Ethan Mirsky — who worked in Voigt's lab at the University of California, San Francisco — and UC Berkeley researcher David Breslauer believe they can use genetic engineering and synthetic biology to design a natural silk gene that would allow a host, like bacteria, to create a silk protein.
Spiders just don't like to be farmed in the same way as silk worms, Voigt said, so a host is needed to bypass a spider's own silk gland.
The trick is in finding a host where the gene expresses and full-length silks will be secreted. "You need one of a certain size to supply the silk," Voigt said.
Salmonella, for one, was a no-go, and Voigt said the lab hasn't expressed full-length silks in any host.
"We've got quite a ways to go," Voigt said.
Once the host is found, though, Refactored Materials believes the technology can be reproduced on a larger scale. Plus, the method would be cleaner than that used for Kevlar because it is water-based and can work at close to room temperature.
Refactored Materials is funded by two federal Small Business Innovation Research grants, including $150,000 from the National Science Foundation. It recently moved into the Garage incubator of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, or QB3, at UCSF's Mission Bay campus.
Voigt's lab has researched artificial spider silk for about five years.
Note for the arachnophobic: Researchers used online sequence databases that are sent to Menlo Park's DNA2.0 — a company started by former UCSF post-doctoral fellows Jeremy Minshull and Claes Gustafsson — that makes the synthetic gene.
"We have yet to touch a spider," Voigt said.
