Moving from Charlottesville to Indianapolis
In 2022, the IBRI was pleased to welcome Ourobio to its Indianapolis, Ind., labs from Charlottesville, Vir. Co-founder Alec Brewer said, “Moving to the IBRI has enabled us to start expanding our team, allowed us to accelerate our progress in developing engineered microorganisms, and provided us with access to higher throughput fermentation equipment we haven’t been able to use since moving out of our university lab.”
This pre-revenue company started as an academic research project called Transfoam in early 2019 and was spun out into a company in March 2020, and rebranded to Ourobio in 2022. The company’s goal is to reduce the creation of microplastic pollution and the barriers to biodegradable plastic adoption.
Co-founders Brewer and Kobe Rogers met in a synthetic biology class at the University of Virginia, where the team bonded over their shared passion for sustainability, synthetic biology and biochemistry. “I’ve witnessed the beauty of the ocean, but also how it’s being treated,” said Rogers. “I realized I could use my knowledge and passion to make a big change in the world.”
This past year, in addition to moving to Indianapolis, Ourobio has conducted a significant amount of market research that showed they have an opportunity to solve an unmet need in the biomaterials/plastics industry. Brewer notes that, “Outreach and interacting with the biomaterials/plastics industry has been our mission since day one. We strive to best meet the needs of consumer-packaged goods manufacturers and consumers.”