Insempra, a Munich-headquartered team of biologists, technologists and entrepreneurs focused on new regenerative materials, is making a strategic investment in Solena Materials, a spin-out from Imperial College London developing synthetic proteins for high-performance clothing fibres.

The investment will allow Insempra, formerly Origin.Bio, to accelerate its strategy of harnessing new technologies to advance biological production processes, creating naturally superior products to drive the regenerative revolution. Solena will be a major part of Insempra’s platform to deliver high-performance, intrinsically sustainable ingredients for a broad array of industries.

Solena is using computational design to develop new classes of synthetic proteins to produce high-performance clothing fibres which can absorb large amounts of kinetic energy. Insempra will accelerate the development and production of these synthetic proteins on an industrial scale, offering better, biobased solutions to the petrochemically sourced, non-biodegradable materials or fibres extracted from nature or animals such as silk. The technology also reduces other environmental impacts such as microplastics in water bodies from washing petrochemically-sourced textiles.

“We are hugely excited by this investment in Solena, which will help to accelerate our market-first approach to develop superior, intrinsically sustainable ingredients,” said Jens Klein, founder and CEO of Insempra and CEO of Solena Materials. “We look forward to fast-tracking Solena’s development and the production of its unique synthetic proteins to develop customised, high-performance fibres for a variety of applications.”

“This investment from Insempra recognizes the potential of our technology to revolutionise high-performance fabrics and their supply chains,” added Professor Paul Freemont of Imperial College London. “Together, we can harness our synthetic biology capabilities to develop, produce and manufacture a new class of superior, more sustainable fibres.”

www.insempra.bio