Patty Tredway
Antenna Group for BioCee
Email: patty@antennagroup.com
Phone: +1 (415) 977-1933

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October 26, 2009 - Minneapolis, Minn. BioCee Inc. announced today that it is the commercialization partner in a consortium that will receive a $2.2-million ARPA-E grant from the US Department of Energy. Research and development partners are the University of Minnesota and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories. The award was featured in comments made by Dr. Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy, in a press conference today.

"We are deeply grateful to the DOE for this honor and for its invaluable support," said Marc von Keitz, Ph.D., Co-founder, CEO and CTO of BioCee. "We also greatly appreciate the lead role the University of Minnesota has taken in combining technologies into a focused biofuel initiative."

"BioCee's latex, thin-film coatings - originally developed by Prof. Michael Flickinger while at the University of Minnesota - maintain our unique biocatalysts in a healthy, stable, and productive state," said Professor Larry Wackett of the University of Minnesota Biotechnology Institute. "The goal is to build an integrated reactor system that very efficiently converts CO2 into biofuel."

Catalysts are essential throughout industrial technology. Living biocatalysts offer many benefits over chemical catalysts, achieving complex chemistries using less energy and reactants, while producing fewer undesirable by-products. However, biocatalysts are rarely available as off-the-shelf reagents but instead require extensive facilities and specialized staff to grow them, on the site where they are to be used.

BioCee's patented biocoating technology immobilizes high concentrations of biologically active microorganisms in nanostructured, latex coatings. The thin-film coatings are self-adhesive and can be printed onto a variety of materials. This technology allows the design of application specific reactive systems that are shelf-stable and can easily be shipped from the biocatalyst production site to the point of use, thus greatly expanding the possible uses of microorganisms in industry.

This month, BioCee also received a Small Business Innovative Research award by the National Science Foundation (NSF - SBIR) in the amount of $150,000. NSF awards SBIR grants to small businesses for novel research with a potential for commercialization.

BioCee Inc.'s mission is to enable the cost-effective and environmentally sound production of clean fuels, chemicals, and water treatment by harnessing the full biocatalytic potential of microorganisms. BioCee's patented, biocoating innovation is a true platform technology that enables the development of novel applications of biocatalysts as well as making existing biocatalysts more competitive by reducing capital and operating costs. Founded in 2007, the company is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For more information see http://www.biocee.com.

ARPA-E is a new organization within the US Department of Energy created specifically to foster research and development (R&D) of early-stage and late-stage"transformational" energy-related technologies. "Transformational technologies" means those technologies that so outperform current approaches that they cause an industry to shift its technology base to the new technology. Early-stage transformational technology R&D efforts focus on drawing a discovery or invention out of the laboratory and determining, through applied research: (1) whether the technology can be made sufficiently robust for real-world applications and (2) whether the technology is capable of achieving a combination of real-world performance values sufficient to transition the technology into industrial use.

Press contact:
Patty Tredway
Antenna Group for BioCee
patty@antennagroup.com
415.977.1933

Download the press release in PDF format here.