Discussing his company’s collaboration with Munich-based AI biotech startup Differential Bio, Dr. J.F. (Jake) Burlet, CEO of Canada-based CanBiocin, noted that the first project involved optimizing commercially available strains with subsequent projects to focus on developing new strains earlier in the process.
“We [CanBiocin] are a young company, a small company, but we found a place and a niche which allows us literally to go from discovery of probiotic candidate organisms, evaluate them, classify them, validate them as being as bona fide probiotics to support health and wellness, primarily for animals, and then take them through the validation and commercialization to create an ingredient,” he explained.
The collaboration with Differential Bio was born over an informal coffee at a mid-day break at the IPA World Congress + Probiota 2025 in Copenhagen.
“Our interaction with Martin [Patz, Chief Technology Officer at Differential Bio], and their ability to use machine learning and robotics to accelerate the upstream process captured my attention immediately, and I have to give them a lot of credit, because they can explain what they do very concisely and elegantly,” Dr. Burlet said. “It didn’t take me a lot of time to hear their story and figure out that there might be a fit.”
CanBiocin decided to embark on a project with strains that it already had in market, strains that were already optimized, and explore if Differential could further optimize those strains.
“We’ve got a number of commercialized strains, and we sent a handful of them to Differential Bio via a material transfer agreement that allowed them to have them in their hands to do the robotic work with 3, 4, 5,000 different media and bioreactor combinations, and then they took that data and put it through their machine learning to give us a prediction of the three strains that they [Differential] think are the highest probability things that we’re going to get bang for the buck,” Dr. Burlet said.
All-in-all, from handing over to the strains to receiving the final report was about eight weeks.
“We then took that information and tested it at flask level and then took it into bioreactors, and I won’t say that we were astonished, but we were incredibly pleased that what they predicted manifested in our hands,” he added.
That work from flask to bioreactor took another two or three months, taking the total time from two years down to four or five months.
Having explored strains that were already commercialized, CanBiocin is now working with Differential Bio on the development of new strains.
A Probiota success story
“When Probiota talks about meaningful connections, to me, this is a personification of a meaningful connection,” Dr. Burlet said, before adding that this is just one of three projects that the company has initiated on the back of a connection at an IPA World Congress + Probiota.
“I could tell the story all over again with much different subject matter, but it [Probiota] helps accelerate things for them [our partners], and it helps accelerate our business as well.”
