Tech startup of the month: company OPX Biotechnologies Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: [small biz]

INITIAL LIGHT BULB:

While earning his Ph.D. in chemical and biological engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder from 2000 to 2005, Michael Lynch developed a better way to engineer microbes to create alternative sources of fuels and industrial chemicals.

In 2006, Lynch started a company, OPX Biotechnologies, and successfully raised three rounds of financing after demonstrating the concept's viability. The company subsequently recruited CEO Charles Eggert, a 30-year veteran of the chemical industries, in September 2008.

"What we're doing with the technology is optimizing these microbes so they can produce the target product very rapidly and at high yield and therefore low cost," Eggert says. "And the platform is very flexible and versatile, so it can be applied to multiple end products from multiple raw materials. That's the beauty and power of the company."

The company is now more than 30 employees strong, with founder Lynch as chief scientific officer.

IN A NUTSHELL:

The company's core technology is the OPX EDGE (Efficiency Directed Genome Engineering) Platform. EDGE allows Lynch and the OPX team to modify microbes currently used in industrial processes to more efficiently produce a target chemical or fuel.

"We make millions of genetic changes to an organism simultaneously, then we measure the effect of those changes in a single experiment," Lynch says. "We usually talk about an analogy that's very apt for Boulder, Colorado: It's like taking a cyclist and making millions of minor changes and having a race and measuring the time for every change we make." This "massively parallel" methodology represents a quantum leap in genetic engineering that is thousands of times faster than traditional processes.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

OPX's first two targets are bioacrylics and biodiesel fuel. Future targets will include other biochemicals and biofuels. "In general, specialty chemical markets represent higher value and higher profit...