Charlie Walch, Pluton CEO
“We’ll be able to use the biggest sequencing company in the world – an all you can eat buffet of sequencing” Pluton Biosciences CEO Charlie Walch told the 4thEst8. “We will do in six months what would have taken us two years and about ½ million dollars.”
Last week, Pluton was inducted into the latest cohort for Illumina Accelerator, a San Diego-based DNA sequencing company. This accelerator inclusion comes hot on the heels of Pluton’s acceptance into IN2, the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator, that came with $250,000 cash and technical research services at the Danforth Center in St. Louis.
Pluton is a microbial testing and discovery company, focused on finding unique microbes to replace synthetic chemical applications in agriculture, using a technique called biomining (but that Walch likes to call Micromining(r) ).
“This biomining approach has been around about a century but it hasn’t kept up with technology like genome sequencing,” Walch said, adding that the company started in 2017 when he was approached by molecular geneticist, co-founder, and CSO Barry Goldman, who proposed “using computational biology and some classic lab techniques to rapidly scan samples to find microbes to do whatever question you’re asking it to do. The first one was to kill mosquitoes.”
Earlier this year Pluton acquired Inotech Laboratories in Maryland Heights, Mo. after Walch brought in 38 investors to raise nearly $800,000. The move tapped Pluton into the $7 billion global microbial testing business, but more importantly — for the biomining side of the business — Pluton picked up lab space and a potential treasure-trove of microbial samples.
“When you have a microbial testing company like Microbe Inotech… you get a double-leverage play,” Walch said. “I get to build up my sample base and take a mature service, streamline its service offering… and building Micromining customers which are royalty-based customers collaborating with manufacturers, using microbes.”
The Ilumina deal allows Pluton to quickly dig through the Microbe Inotech sample base to find out what the microbes do.
“Step two is to take all that information and build it into a database that sorts out the microbes based on what they do and their genetic profile,” Walch added.
Illumina.com
