Deinove receives €1.6M from French state innovation agency

DEINOVE, the world's leading specialist in Deinococcus bacteria for biofuels, green chemistry and antibiotics, today announced the receipt of a €1.6 million payment from Oseo (the French state innovation agency). This corresponds to the second tranche of Oseo's financial support for the DEINOL project (granted as part of the agency's Strategic Industrial Innovation programme) and takes the total amount received by the company to just under €3 million. The payment was triggered by achievement of the first key R&D milestone in the Deinol project - the selection of a robust, thermophilic Deinococcus base strain for use in the ethanol production process.

"We are delighted to announce that the technical progress made within the DEINOL Project has been officially validated by Oseo. Accordingly, the agency has paid us the second tranche of project funding. This will help us to finance the project through to the next milestone - the launch of lab-scale pilot tests with the candidate strain, scheduled for 2012", commented CEO Jacques Biton. "In 18 months, we have been able to select our bacterial chassis - a robust, thermophilic Deinococcus whose enzyme profile is now being engineered for optimal biomass digestion and ethanol production."

The goal of the DEINOL project is to open up (by 2014) new pathways for cellulosic ("second-generation") ethanol production by deinococci in existing industrial installations. The €21.4-million project will receive a total of €8.9 million from Oseo. As project leader, Deinove will receive a total of €6 million. The other partners in the Deinove-led project are Tereos (the European leader in ethanol production), its subsidiaries BENP Lillebonne and Syral (Europe's leading producer of starch and sweeteners and one of the world's leading ethanol companies) and two academic labs (the joint CNRS/University of Montpellier 1 laboratory CPBS and the joint INSA Toulouse/CNRS/INRA laboratory LISBP). Deinove's approach is based on leveraging the exceptional biomass digestion capacities of bacteria from the genus Deinococcus.

The DEINOL project is divided in two major phases:

1. The R&D phase (led by Deinove and its academic partners) runs from July 2010 to the end of 2012 and comprises the following series of steps:

• selection of the best candidate Deinococcus strain.
• candidate strain optimization.
• process development in a lab-scale pilot.

2. Once these milestones have been achieved, Tereos will then take over from Deinove and the academic partners for the process industrialization phase. Industrial pilot tests will be performed over a 12-month period starting in early 2013 and the project should complete with testing the Deinol process in a large-scale demonstration trial at the Lillebonne plant in early 2014.