Entomics Biosystems is built around this core concept of insect bioconversion
whereby insects can eat food wastes and other different types of
waste biomass and biochemically convert that into fats and proteins, which are great
sources of nutrition for the animal feed industry. Here in Entomics, very
specifically we focus on enhancing and tailoring these insect derived feeds to
create functional benefits for certain targeted applications. So what
we have here are black soldier fly larvae and they're chewing through food waste
and metabolizing it very efficiently into proteins and fats as they grow. They
grow about 5,000 times their own body weight over the course of two weeks, so a
very efficient conversion engine, and the proteins and fats from these insects are
a really interesting sustainable high-quality ingredient for the farmed
salmon industry, given that farmed salmon in Scotland for example
are currently fed on fish meal which comes from wild caught anchovies
from as far away as Chile in Peru which are then shipped across the world to
Scotland. So insects represent a nice sustainable solution. Each week we pick
up several tons of food waste from local supermarkets and food processing
operators. We feed the insects different recipes under controlled conditions and
test the differences in growth rates and end nutritional profiles.
So what we're doing here in this room is essentially gathering data on a pretty
complex biological system so that we can build out a smart autonomous system for
insect production in the future. So Entomics Biosystems is an insect
biotechnology company and it was formed by a couple of University of Cambridge
students a few years ago and it really was one of those stories where we came
together basically at the pub over a pint talking about weird ideas, and the
team actually comes has members from the Department of Biochemistry, from
Engineering, from the Business School, so it really was a very diverse skill set
but it's one of those weird businesses which kind of needs that input from
different disciplines. So we've developed a bio-processing step which allows us to
optimize and tweak these types of insect based profiles to target specific
nutritional applications for specific animals.
What Entomics is largely focusing at the moment is the advanced processing of the
maggots, of the insect biomass if you could put it that way, and we're doing
that by using a process that we've fancily code-named metamorphosis. In more
lay terms we're essentially fermenting the insect biomass and the various
fractions of an insect, this being protein fats and chitin, which
is the shell of the insect, and there's several benefits of doing this process
from affecting the gut's microbiome and trying to preserve a
healthier community there to training immune systems to make livestock more
resistant to disease challenges and at the same time reduce the need for
veterinary medicines, antibiotics and vaccines. So right now we're doing a lot
of work with partners like the University of Stirling, who are world leading salmon
aquaculture experts to validate and test some of these products in the field. And
it's a really interesting area in general and there's so much potential in
terms of other applications around insect biotechnology and using insects
as a vehicle for creating high-value products and services, and as an example
we're also working on machine learning algorithms to try and track
behaviors of insects during the production process and trying to
understand really complex datasets in terms of how they
behave and how we can actually optimize different types of engineering systems
to address that. The world's looking for more sustainable sources of feed and I
think increasingly there's a recognition that it's not just about basic nutrition but
it's about overall health. So I think we're really trying to take a
sustainable promising ingredient of the future - insect derived feeds - and
trying to add a bit of biotechnology or science focus to it to really enhance
what the effect is in the end application and reduce reliance on
traditional antibiotics and veterinary medicines.