Japanese Startup to Make Silkworm-Based Drug Materials

June 18, 2018

Fukuoka- A company was founded in southwestern Japan in April to make pharmaceutical materials using silkworms.

The company, based in the city of Fukuoka, is called Kaico, which means silkworm in Japanese. It was established using financial assistance from Kyushu University.

Kaico plans to make raw materials for regenerative medicine reagents using proteins extracted from silkworms, starting as early as this summer.

In the future, the startup aims to develop raw materials for diagnostic agents for animal ailments and vaccines for human use.

Kaico will use technological achievements made by the university, which has a history of over a century of silkworm research. The university raises 150,000 silkworms of some 500 kinds, one of the world's largest stocks.

The university has been designated as a core silkworm research base in the Japanese government's National BioResource Project, a framework for systematic collection and preservation of bioresources.

Kaico will utilize the findings of research by Takahiro Kusakabe, professor of agricultural bioresource sciences at the university, to extract proteins from silkworms.

The startup will select silkworms that have the ability to efficiently create proteins inside their bodies, inject vector, a virus known as gene carrier, into them and extract proteins that increase together with the virus from them.

It will then process the extracted proteins into raw pharmaceutical materials using the technology developed by Noriho Kamiya, professor of applied chemistry at the university.

For making vaccines, 5 milligrams of raw materials can be extracted from one silkworm, enough to vaccinate dozens of people.

As raising silkworms is easy and does not require large-scale facilities, their utilization is expected to help reduce pharmaceutical production costs.

"We want to utilize the intellectual properties that have been accumulated over the past 100 years for the common good," Kusakabe said. Jiji Press