November 30, 2023: project granted: Start-up Transfer NRW project for the preparation of our next biotech start-up, AgriBluBio

Today, after a long preparation time, our proposal for a Start-up Transfer NRW project, along with its 14 (fourteen!) amendments, has finally been granted. Our alumna Dr. Anne Vortkamp together with our alumnus Dr. Philipp Lemke had applied to set up AgriBluBio as a start-up aiming to develop plant biostimulants based on our second generation chitosans. For almost three decades now, our team has researched molecular structure-function relationships and cellular modes of action of chitosans. To this end, we keep developing biotechnological tools to modify chitosans and tightly control their structures, new analytical tools such as enzymatic-mass spectrometric fingerprinting to characterise these structures, and medium-throughput functional bioassays to also characterise the bioactivities of these well-characterised chitosans. We have patent-protected the key technologies required to produce these second and third generation chitosans and based on these patents, Anne and Philipp are now planning to develop and market products for sustainable agriculture. The first target of AgriBluBio will be plant biostimulants, such as our broad-spectrum all-purpose product CaraPlant, and the functionally more focused products CaraHealth and CaraGrow. AgriBluBio will closely collaborate with our already established start-up Bex-BioTech in which our alumna Dr. Rebecca Melcher together with our alumnus Dr. Tobias Weikert are offering rapid biotesting for the development of new plant biostimulants, as well as with our upcoming start-up greEnCAP of our alumnae Dr. Sruthi Sreekumar and Dr. Carolin Richter who are combining our chitosans with other bio-actives to develop sustainable biopesticides. Our chitosan start-up ecosystem is growing!