April 5, 2017 COPENHAGEN, Denmark & BASEL, Switzerland - Biosyntia ApS, an emerging company in development and production of bio-based natural ingredients, and FGen GmbH, a pioneer in droplet-based high throughput screening, today announced that they join forces in the development of microbial strains for the production of a specific B-vitamin. In the collaboration Biosyntia will use its multiplex genetic engineering tools for the simultaneous modification of several targets identified as bottlenecks in the vitamin pathway. The resulting highly diverse libraries will be analyzed by FGen’s proprietary nanoliter-reactor platform and candidates with improved productivities will be isolated. The final goal is the substitution of the current polluting chemical synthesis route by a sustainable, bio-based vitamin production process.“We are excited to have the opportunity to analyze our large libraries with an ultra-high throughput method that enables screening under bio-process relevant conditions at rates of 1 million clones per day” said Hans Genee, co-founder and CSO of Biosyntia. “This approach significantly facilitates later up-scaling and increases the probability to identify a candidate strain with improved performance in the final production process.” Currently the interrogation of engineered microbial library clones is recognized as a bottleneck in strain development. Biosyntia’s sensor strains have already been used to efficiently isolate vitamin production strains and thus reduced this bottleneck. The combination with FGen’s nanoliterreactor platform now enables the screening for extracellular product accumulation and is a logical next step in the generation of a robust production strain.“’You get what you screen for’ is a paradigm in high throughput screening, but if you don’t use a smart way to construct your library you will never get anything” was a statement of Andreas Meyer, co-founder and CEO of FGen. “Biosyntia is among the most innovative European Industrial Biotech SMEs for a reason. Their way of engineering several cellular targets simultaneously is unique and delivers diverse libraries of high quality that we are eager to screen.” The companies expect that the combination of the two matchless technologies in bio-engineering and high throughput screening pave the way to a commercially viable and bio-based vitamin process.

About Biosyntia

Biosyntia is a Copenhagen based biotech company developing competitive processes for biological production of natural ingredients, including vitamins. Biosyntia applies a patent pending biosynthetic selection technology which in combination with advanced metabolic engineering, develops biocatalysts at an unprecedented speed. Biosyntia has received numerous recognitions including Top 5 innovative start-up companies in Europe (2014). For more information, please visit www.biosyntia.com Contact: Hans Genee, hjg@biosyntia.com, +45-29803018

About FGen

FGen is a Basel based biotech company active in the field of biological engineering and high throughput screening. As a service provider FGen offers its expertise in biocatalyst and strain development to collaboration partners in order to develop sustainable bio-based processes or to discover novel biologics. For more information, please visit www.fgen.ch Contact: Andreas Meyer, meyer@fgen.ch, +41-616332910