Biotechnology will play a central role in the production of most of the materials in our daily lives in a not so distant future. A combination of chemistry, biology, and novel process engineering – in other words, biotech is a key to economically viable biorefinery operations already today. MetGen Oy is a Finnish biotechnology company deeply rooted in science and open innovation with strong market driven development. The company combines synthetic biology with chemistry and process engineering to create full industrial solutions to enable better utilization of raw materials and a new wave of bio-based materials. In EnXylaScope, MetGen will provide its MetZyme® enzymatic solutions and METNIN™ phenolic compounds for grafting of phenolic groups and fatty acid to xylan.  Enzymatically-produced xylan based consumer products covering several market sectors, including personal care, cosmetics and nutraceuticals.

MetGen aims to address these challenges by providing solutions to enable a wider variety of feedstocks, including industrial side streams at a very low cost. MetGen offers tailored enzymes to enhance the cost-efficiency in biomass processing and hydrolysis with our MetZyme® SUNO™ products. MetGen continuously develops new technologies to enable the re-use of enzymes and business models that allow for further lowering the enzyme related costs.

Additionally, MetGen has developed technologies for turning that waste to value and further increasing the value of the biomass fractions: instead of sugars or ethanol and burning lignin, we can take the sugars towards renewable plastics and platform chemicals with our MetZyme® PURECO™ solutions.

Finally, lignin can be refined to customer-specific chemical properties using our METNIN™ technology. This enables to have the largest renewable source of aromatics and phenolics available for industries that have settled for oil until now.

All these technologies and products are available for EnXylaScope to help to valorization of the specific bio-based product stream developed in the project.