Date: Feb 28, 2012 Author: Steven Brown Source: bizjournals (
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The Joint BioEnergy Institute of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has spun out its first business, a chemical manufacturing company named Lygos.
Emeryville's JBEI is led by Jay Keasling, who is one of the five men who started Lygos. The JBEI itself was started in 2007 and will likely be moved from Emeryville into the lab's new campus, now planned for the Richmond Field Station along San Francisco Bay.
Lygos has so far used sugar as a feedstock to create "petrochemical replacements" on a laboratory scale. They are meant for use in making nylons, polyester and plastics. The process Lygos uses to make the chemicals is itself "nearly carbon neutral," the lab said.
One of the men who started the business, Jeffrey "Clem" Fortman, is CEO of Lygos. Leonard Katz, Eric Steen and Jeffrey Dietrich are the other founders. Katz runs research at the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Though this is JBEI's first startup, it isn't Keasling's first -- he is behind both Amyris Inc., which recently changed its focus from fuels to cosmetics, and also LS9 Inc. in South San Francisco.
Lygos has office space in the QB3 East Bay Innovation Center in Berkeley.
