NovoNutrients, a Sunnyvale, California, US-based company that's using industrial carbon dioxide fermentation, cheap hydrogen, and naturally occurring microbes to create high-grade proteins for human and animal consumption, including aquaculture feed, on Tuesday announced four new hires:

Joachim Ritter, who is the new chief technology officer, comes to NovoNutrients from Dupont Central Research, where he led teams for the better part of two decades. Ritter is also Zymergen's former vice president of research and technology. Kedar Patel has been added as the senior vice president of biology, where he is responsible for developing NovoNutrients' foundational molecular biology and microbiology capabilities and, ultimately, for creating and characterizing the production cell lines at the core of its product offerings, according to the company. Patel led a large team of scientists and engineers at Zymergen to create and operate a high-throughput platform for DNA assembly and microbe engineering in a broad range of industrially relevant organisms (bacteria, yeasts, filamentous fungi).  Satish Lakhapatri, the new vice president of engineering, joins NovoNutrients after nearly four years with industrial biotech company Calysta, where he was the director of engineering. At NovoNutrients, Satish will be responsible for scale-up, reactor design and process development.  Bhupendra Soni joins NovoNutrients as its technical director of food. He helped lead the food fermentation program at MycoTechnology as vice president of fermentation for more than five years and brings more than three decades of experience in biosciences and fermentation. He is the inventor for 12 granted patents and eight filed patents, several of them on food protein applications. 

In September 2020, as reported by Undercurrent News, aquafeed giant Skretting agreed to trial a fishmeal replacement using protein made by NovoNutrients in aquafeed. In the US, NovoNutrients' pilot project has been backed by a grant from Chevron Technology Ventures' Fund VII, linked to oil giant Chevron Corp [...]