I was the founding CEO of one of the very first bio based chemical and materials companies and I can attest to how challenging it is to build a recombinant strain that hits all the performance specs, the downstream purification and the chemical catalysis. DuPont and Cargill’s efforts to scale 1,3 PDO and lactic acid, and their downstream polymers are good case studies highlighting the challenges scaling all the core unit operations and also the huge daunting task of developing a whole new material. Customer adoption is a long, expensive and risky endeavor. I wish Zymergen well and they will need way more money, time and the right talent.
Yeah, I think more time + money is something they might not necessarily get especially since they let it slip that they might pursue traditional organic synthesis routes to hit their targets. To me the sell here to investors is the implementation of machine learning and how it can be used to speed up traditionally slow processes. I hope the succeed.
"...commercially available product called HYALINE – a revolutionary bio-generated specialty film in the polyimide family"
Seems like a polyimide to me. The colorless value prop is interesting for sure, but does it maintain colorless properties after UV exposure or heat aging? 100% aliphatic epoxy resins look great prior to heat/UV exposure too.
I hope they can launch the product and become profitable so that they can keep employing their people.
Probably falling into the polyimide family is a better characterization. I don't think they are just making polyimide monomers and then polymerize it. BTW, there is already colorless PI on the market. It's just twice expensive.
When I look at the Hyaline Z2 spec: https://www.zymergen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/TDS-0006-HYALINE-Z2-TDS-Z2-115_Low-Shrink-UVA_Rev-NC-2.pdf , it claims color stability. However, even though it claims high glass transition temperature, it's still lower than solder reflow temperature (and also much lower than Kapton). Hyaline is incompatible with traditional circuit processes, which uses solder reflow. At the moment, it looks to me more like an upgraded version of PET, rather than colorless PI.
Ouch, I was I under the impression that their PI was going to be replacing traditional PIs in the electronics market. Aside from just the basic synthesis I'm not super familiar with the PI market though so thank you for the comment and the information on colorless polyimides.
Your comment makes me think though about the bigger picture. Let's say Zymergen is successful with their PI, it actually provides some benefits to a customer (over a clear PI already available), which I'm not 100% sure what that value is, but they are successful with the their first product.
Does Zymergen then just enter a completely different end market with new product?
In theory it seems that they want to be in the true specialty chemicals market of low volume very high margin, but they need a shitload of volume to justify their valuation pre-IPO. Further, their process should enable lower prices than traditional materials and ideally higher value on end properties.
If Zymergen is truly a "technology company/AI enabled biomanufacturing company" then the technology should be deflationary compared to traditional synthesis. But right now all I see is a chemical company.
My hypothesis is they try to enter a market where the product's price per kg is high, so as to be profitable from the very beginning of scaling up. I think they probably are targeting a very technically challenging product (the specs in so many dimensions are just so hard to meet. if if they miss some specs, it just becomes dirty cheap PET), ie colorless polyimide.
I may be missing something fundamental about Zymergen -- why make the polyimide monomers microbially in the first place?
Is there something about them structurally that makes them impossible to make using ordinary synthetic chemistry? (I can't imagine what that would be) Is it about improving efficiency? (I can't imagine fermentation would be competitive there, for simple molecules) Is it just the cool factor? Why bother?
Good question. The usual value proposition of these fermentation routes is complexity without the multistep synthesis required by traditional chemistry. For instance imagine BPA prices without having the cumene process that yields near equimolar quantities of phenol + acetone. It might not even be economically viable.
In terms of biobased platform chemicals of interest I'd say there are a few such as levoglucosenone, levulinic acid, 1,4 BDO, alpha-pinene, diacids (succinc, adipic, etc).
Fermentation's real value is in super complex molecules like starting materials for pharmaceuticals or natural products like heparin where the only alternative is a 5-10+ step synthesis with low yields and a lot of purification at every step.
Exactly this -- fermentation is for tricky natural product-like molecules with lots of chiral centres, unusual oxidations, quaternary carbons etc. and I wonder how a polyimide monomer could match that level of complexity. It seems very far-fetched to me.
My guess is traditional organic methods = too expensive and the only potentially cost competitive way to do it would be fermentation. Now, why did they pick a polyimide monomer/precursor to a monomer? No clue.
I was the founding CEO of one of the very first bio based chemical and materials companies and I can attest to how challenging it is to build a recombinant strain that hits all the performance specs, the downstream purification and the chemical catalysis. DuPont and Cargill’s efforts to scale 1,3 PDO and lactic acid, and their downstream polymers are good case studies highlighting the challenges scaling all the core unit operations and also the huge daunting task of developing a whole new material. Customer adoption is a long, expensive and risky endeavor. I wish Zymergen well and they will need way more money, time and the right talent.
Yeah, I think more time + money is something they might not necessarily get especially since they let it slip that they might pursue traditional organic synthesis routes to hit their targets. To me the sell here to investors is the implementation of machine learning and how it can be used to speed up traditionally slow processes. I hope the succeed.
I think Hyaline is to be a substitute for colorless polyimide, not necessarily it's polyimide.
From their website on April 8th, 2020:
"...commercially available product called HYALINE – a revolutionary bio-generated specialty film in the polyimide family"
Seems like a polyimide to me. The colorless value prop is interesting for sure, but does it maintain colorless properties after UV exposure or heat aging? 100% aliphatic epoxy resins look great prior to heat/UV exposure too.
I hope they can launch the product and become profitable so that they can keep employing their people.
https://www.zymergen.com/all-products-and-initiatives/electronics/hyaline-polyimide-film-for-electronics-the-most-exciting-thing-you-can-barely-see/
Probably falling into the polyimide family is a better characterization. I don't think they are just making polyimide monomers and then polymerize it. BTW, there is already colorless PI on the market. It's just twice expensive.
When I look at the Hyaline Z2 spec: https://www.zymergen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/TDS-0006-HYALINE-Z2-TDS-Z2-115_Low-Shrink-UVA_Rev-NC-2.pdf , it claims color stability. However, even though it claims high glass transition temperature, it's still lower than solder reflow temperature (and also much lower than Kapton). Hyaline is incompatible with traditional circuit processes, which uses solder reflow. At the moment, it looks to me more like an upgraded version of PET, rather than colorless PI.
Ouch, I was I under the impression that their PI was going to be replacing traditional PIs in the electronics market. Aside from just the basic synthesis I'm not super familiar with the PI market though so thank you for the comment and the information on colorless polyimides.
Your comment makes me think though about the bigger picture. Let's say Zymergen is successful with their PI, it actually provides some benefits to a customer (over a clear PI already available), which I'm not 100% sure what that value is, but they are successful with the their first product.
Does Zymergen then just enter a completely different end market with new product?
In theory it seems that they want to be in the true specialty chemicals market of low volume very high margin, but they need a shitload of volume to justify their valuation pre-IPO. Further, their process should enable lower prices than traditional materials and ideally higher value on end properties.
If Zymergen is truly a "technology company/AI enabled biomanufacturing company" then the technology should be deflationary compared to traditional synthesis. But right now all I see is a chemical company.
My hypothesis is they try to enter a market where the product's price per kg is high, so as to be profitable from the very beginning of scaling up. I think they probably are targeting a very technically challenging product (the specs in so many dimensions are just so hard to meet. if if they miss some specs, it just becomes dirty cheap PET), ie colorless polyimide.
I may be missing something fundamental about Zymergen -- why make the polyimide monomers microbially in the first place?
Is there something about them structurally that makes them impossible to make using ordinary synthetic chemistry? (I can't imagine what that would be) Is it about improving efficiency? (I can't imagine fermentation would be competitive there, for simple molecules) Is it just the cool factor? Why bother?
Good question. The usual value proposition of these fermentation routes is complexity without the multistep synthesis required by traditional chemistry. For instance imagine BPA prices without having the cumene process that yields near equimolar quantities of phenol + acetone. It might not even be economically viable.
In terms of biobased platform chemicals of interest I'd say there are a few such as levoglucosenone, levulinic acid, 1,4 BDO, alpha-pinene, diacids (succinc, adipic, etc).
Fermentation's real value is in super complex molecules like starting materials for pharmaceuticals or natural products like heparin where the only alternative is a 5-10+ step synthesis with low yields and a lot of purification at every step.
Exactly this -- fermentation is for tricky natural product-like molecules with lots of chiral centres, unusual oxidations, quaternary carbons etc. and I wonder how a polyimide monomer could match that level of complexity. It seems very far-fetched to me.
My guess is traditional organic methods = too expensive and the only potentially cost competitive way to do it would be fermentation. Now, why did they pick a polyimide monomer/precursor to a monomer? No clue.