Benzinga | Jan 10, 2022 07:50AM EST

Berkeley Lights And Aanika Biosciences Announce Partnership To Improve Food Safety By Commercializing Antimicrobial Peptides through Proprietary High-Throughput, Functional Screening Service

Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI), a leader in digital cell biology, and Aanika Biosciences, a growing biotech start-up using edible microbial tags to improve food safety, today announced a strategic partnership that will enable faster identification of outbreak sources, reduce incidents of fresh produce contamination and minimize the impact of food borne illness related recalls.

In this partnership, Aanika will use Berkeley Lights' high-throughput, functional screening service to rapidly identify and optimize functional, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) capable of killing harmful bacteria, including those that cause outbreaks of foodborne illness. In addition, the Beacon(r) Optofluidic Platform will be leveraged to find peptides that are toxic to bacteria to create a new antibacterial tag that will then be applied to their bacterial spore-based barcoding technology to protect the food supply chain.

"Berkeley Lights' high-throughput, functional screening service, based on our proprietary cell-free expression technology, is accelerating novel discoveries to develop solutions and products in the agricultural space," said Eric Hobbs, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Berkeley Lights. "Specifically, applying the Berkeley Lights platform to AMPs allows us to rapidly map and identify the top mutational sites to further optimize AMP performance."

AMPs are gaining popularity as antibacterial agents across a wide range of applications, particularly as microbes are becoming more resistant to antibiotics, and are a growing focus for both companies.

"Tracking, tracing and identifying the origin of food borne illnesses is just the beginning of what Aanika's 'watermark' technology can do to help improve and protect our global food system," said Aanika co-founder and CEO Vishaal Bhuyan. "The partnership with Berkley Lights will enable us to move faster, and go deeper, into uncovering and unlocking the opportunities to have greater economic, environmental and human health impact."

Berkeley Lights will participate in the downstream economics created by its enabling technology through a royalty arrangement as part of this strategic partnership. Additional terms of the agreement are not disclosed. This is Berkeley Lights' second announced high-throughput, functional screening partnership following the Bayer Partnership announced in 2021.