Introduction - Renewable Energy Biofuels

While much has been written about the Department of Energy-sponsored work by Verenium (Diversa), Genencor, DuPont, Cargill and others to develop an improved process for ethanol production, their effort has been to make short-term, incremental improvements to the traditional fermentation process. While this is worthy work, the traditional process remains vulnerable to being displaced by a more efficient process. This is because it is fundamentally an old process that was developed before modern biotechnology gave us the power to redesign biological processes. Its dual weaknesses, energy inefficiency and batch-wise nature, are serious, costly flaws. The AthenaBio process, based on a continuous, high-temperature design, will produce significantly cheaper ethanol, especially because AthenaBio has the ability to increase the volumetric productivity of the bioreactor, the key parameter that has thwarted previous attempts to improve the process. This is our key competitive advantage, and it is predicted to lower production cost by about 23% via HTCBP™ and an additional 35% due to the efficiencies brought by MYGE™.

Additional synergies will come from AthenaBio's ability to improve the biological catalysts that are the work-horses for both the pretreatment of the cellulose and hemicellulose and the conversion of the resulting sugars into ethanol. Directed Gene Assembly™ (DGA™) technology is a powerful, patented tool used to impart unique and desirable properties to industrial and therapeutic enzymes and other proteins. DGA™ is a unique Directed Evolution approach that integrates Rational Design principles. DGA™ surpasses current DNA "shuffling" approaches by using a uniform and systematic set of procedures that are amenable to algorithm-based mapping of genomic-proteomic sequence space. By using information to direct the search for useful variant proteins, DGA™ moves beyond the paradigm of DNA "shuffling" to a more powerful Directed Evolution methodology with typical efficiencies of more than 90%.

Our DGA™ technology is the only approach to Directed Evolution that is systematic and allows for information-directed management of the diversity generation and product evolution processes. It is also the only Directed Evolution technology that allows for exchange of entire low homology domains between often distantly related proteins to produce new variants with highly desirable characteristics not typically achieved by random mutation. Improved enzymes are forecast to reduce ethanol production cost by 10 - 15%.

The third competitive advantage we have in this race is using our Quorum Sensing Quenching™ (QSQ™) technology to find superior organisms in nature for ethanol production. Since we have the ability to cultivate entirely new microbes from the 98% of the microbial world that will not grow in captivity without our technology, we have a vast, untapped world of microbes to search for organisms that behave closer to the way we want for ethanol production. Sometimes it is quicker to engineer the 'Bug of your Dreams', and sometimes it is quicker to find it already made by Mother Nature. We have both avenues open to us, as well as the combined use of both approaches. Microbes that utilize more carbon from cellulosic waste will reduce ethanol production cost 10 - 15%.

AthenaBio uses our Directed Gene Assembly™ (DGA) technology to optimize industrial and therapeutic enzymes for our clients to improve the performance of natural enzymes in specific applications.

AthenaBio holds exclusive license to a revolutionary method for growing previously non-culturable bacteria in the laboratory. We are using this proprietary technology, termed Quorum Sensing Quenching™ (QSQ) for antibiotic discovery and for culturing bacteria suspected of causing or contributing to chronic diseases.