Oliver Peoples CEO of Yield10 (NASDAQ:YTEN)
Oliver P. Peoples, Ph.D., was named President and Chief Executive Officer of Metabolix in October 2016 in conjunction with the transition to Yield10 Bioscience as the company’s core business.
Dr. Peoples was a co-founder of Metabolix and served as Chief Scientific Officer from January 2000 until October 2016, and was previously Vice President of Research and Development. Dr. Peoples has served as a director since June 1992.
Prior to founding Metabolix, Dr. Peoples was a research scientist with the Department of Biology at the MIT where he emerged as a pioneer of the new field of metabolic pathway engineering and its applications in industrial biotechnology.
The research carried out by Dr. Peoples at MIT established the fundamental tools and methods for engineering bacteria and plants to produce Mirel biopolymers.
Dr. Peoples has published numerous peer-reviewed academic papers and is an inventor of over 90 patents and patent applications worldwide. Dr. Peoples received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
In this 3,541 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, Dr. Peoples explores the challenges that face his company.
“A key part of our gene trait — gene discovery platform — is the oilseed Camelina, which is an oilseed that’s native to Northern Europe. It’s been used in food and industrial use for well over a century, but it’s basically like rapeseed or canola or soybean.
It really has two major components in the seed. The first is the oil — vegetable oil — and the second is the protein.
The protein is usually used in animal feed, similar to what happens with other oilseeds. And that oil is important for a number of reasons.
One, it’s actually got some interesting nutritional properties, so it’s used as a food oil in Europe. It also has some omega-3 fatty acids in it, which are important in the diet. And there are also applications in aquaculture feed for salmon, for example. There’s proof of that.
The third area is obviously Camelina, which has a very fast growth cycle of about 100 days, and it opens up the potential to produce more oil per acre if you were to use that as what they call a winter cover crop in the corn belt, for example.
So the general concept of cover crops is you plant your soybean as usual in the spring, you harvest it in the fall, and after you’ve harvested the soybean, you plant a cover crop — an oilseed cover crop like Camelina — and that crop will sit in the ground over the winter, and it comes up very quickly in the spring.
And by the time you’re getting close to being able to plant soybean again, you’ve got a new harvest of oilseed — Camelina oilseed. That of course gives you a way to increase the productivity of land.
But more importantly, the use of cover crops actually has tremendous environmental benefits in terms of reducing the runoff of nutrients into the water system.
Of course, that ties into things like NOx — nitrogen oxides — emissions. It also increases the soil organic content, which again is an issue regarding climate change. And so as a result of great Camelina as a cover crop, what you’ll end up with is an oil that has a very favorable carbon footprint.
And, of course, when you look at the renewable fuels — particularly the new renewable diesel that’s being mandated in California — and you look at the industry, including many of the big oil players, like Exxon (NYSE: XOM), Phillips 66 (NYSE: PSX) and several others, they’re all basically converting existing petroleum refineries over to renewable diesel.
Of course, that’s going to result in significantly increased demand for vegetable oils in addition to the waste oil that comes from restaurants and all those types of things, plus tallow from the meat sector. So there’s going to be an increasing demand for oil and, in particular, for vegetable oils that actually have a very good carbon footprint or a low carbon intensity index.”
Dr. Peoples explains that the applications for Yield10 products vary considerably:
“We’re testing PHA Camelina for the first time this year. And the PHA is a new crop product. It is a natural polyester material that’s produced in microorganisms.
And Yield10 transfers the genes for that into Camelina, so we can produce the PHA biomaterial directly in Camelina seed. And there we see the potential for a very large-scale production capability, addressing the market for fully biodegradable, renewable, sustainable plastics.”
Near term commercialization for the former MIT researcher’s company Yield10 is the goal:
“Our platform has turned out to be very successful. In addition to testing our traits in Camelina, we are working with a number of seed companies — spanning Bayer, Forage Genetics, Simplot and GDM Seeds — for testing our new traits. They’re testing genetic changes in some of the major crops.
But in the Camelina space, the main milestone is really around the beginning of the commercialization of that platform.
Last year, we planted our first 50 acres of seed production and it went very well. We are currently in the process of preparing samples of oil and protein for various customer testing programs.
We will be reporting out the data from last year’s field trials in the first quarter. That will include the oil trait and yield genes. That will also include the PHA biomaterial genes.
And then one of the things that we are really being very pleasantly surprised about has been the tremendous interest from across the globe on new technologies for reducing the pollution caused by petroleum plastics and the researchers’ interest in the biodegradable plastics.
Actually, there was a recent IPO through a SPAC — special purpose acquisition company — by a company called Danimer Scientific (NYSE: DNMR). But generally speaking, we believe we’re on a path to the fairly exciting new, potentially disruptive technology for the plastic space.
There is now the potential to produce plastic as a cool product with low carbon index fuel, and another cool product in the form of plant-based protein that we can use for food production.
So it’s a nicely integrated story; a lot of pieces are beginning to come together, and have been coming together over the last year. We’re now becoming increasingly excited about the prospects for this approach — we’re just working very hard to move forward into commercialization.”
Get the complete details on the MIT Biotechnology pioneer Dr. Peoples’ near term plans for Yield10 by reading the entire 3,541 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.
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