Carbios – a company that focuses on the life cycle of plastics and textiles – and Novozymes, which specialised in biological solutions, have announced a long-term global strategic partnership.

The collaboration involves the long-term production and supply of Carbios’ proprietary PET-degrading enzymes at an industrial scale. Indeed, it represents the world’s first biological PET-recycling plant, due to start production in 2025 in Longlaville, France.

Construction will begin later in 2023 with both building and operating permits having been filed with local authorities. The processing capacity is set to be 50,000 tonnes of waste every year.

Carbios and Novozymes first established a partnership in 2019 to develop enzyme-based solutions and address the considerable sustainability challenge of plastic pollution, both within PET-recycling and PLA-biodegradation.

Under the new agreement, Carbios and Novozymes will extend their collaboration to develop, optimise and produce enzymes that will subsequently be supplied by Novozymes to all licensees of Carbios’ technology.

Hans Ole Klingenberg, vice president, marketing agricultural and industrial biosolutions at Novozymes, reflected: “We are excited to advance our collaboration with Carbios by signing this exclusive agreement and to support the next phase of scaling this new business of biological plastic recycling.”

He added: “By providing biological solutions at a large scale, Novozymes is pleased to contribute in bringing Carbios’ biorecycling of PET-plastics and fibres to market.”

Orbit Discovery (Orbit) – a company that focuses on the discovery of therapeutic peptides – has announced it has entered into a partnership with SanegeneBio (Sanegene), a start-up aiming to develop novel RNAi-based medicines.

The main ambition of the link-up is to identify tissue-specific delivery of RNA (ribonucleic acid) therapeutics to efficiently knock down disease-causing genes.

Furthermore, the agreement covers cell-based internalisation studies, with an additional option for Sanegene to further develop hits resulting from screening activities. Through the collaboration with Orbit, Sanegene is looking to develop a portfolio of advanced RNAi therapeutics.

Orbit’s technology enables the screening of large quantities of peptides using a combination of bead-based presentation and DNA encoded libraries. In addition, the peptide display engine is able to address soluble targets, allowing more rapid discovery times of relevant peptide leads based.

Dr Weimin Wang, chief executive officer of Sanegene, commented: “Orbit has developed an impressive platform technology that is ideal for our requirements. We selected Orbit as our discovery partner because of the team’s experience in overcoming peptide screening challenges alongside an industry-leading platform.

“We are confident that the combination of Orbit’s peptide discovery capabilities and our expertise in RNAi drug discovery and development will facilitate the accelerated entry of our therapeutics portfolio into the clinic.”