Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 2:48PM Novophage raises $5.75 million to battle bacterial build-up in the industrial world
Posted by Scott Kirsner May 31, 2011 11:00 AM / Innovation Economy
A small Boston University & MIT spin-out company, Novophage, wrapped up its first round of funding last week, raising $5.75 million from a trio of local investors and Chevron Technology Ventures, an arm of the energy conglomerate. The start-up is engineering customized viruses called phages whose job is to seek and destroy the bacteria that gum up all kinds of industrial processes, from paper-making to oil exploration to heating and cooling big buildings.
Anywhere there's water and humidity, explains Novophage CEO Micah Rosenbloom, you get colonies of bacteria that produce what are called "biofilms." "Right now, people use all kinds of chemicals and biocides to eliminate the bacteria, but that isn't very environmentally-friendly," Rosenbloom says. "What we did was to go in and analyze the microbial community — we sequenced its genome — and then we developed a targeted phage that can seek and destroy. It is a predator of bacteria." Biofilms, he notes, tend to make production processes less efficient and more energy-intensive. "They clog up the system," he says, "so it costs you more money to run it, and in the case of paper-making, you sometimes need to stop the production line to deal with the biofilms."