Double Rainbow Biosciences
A New Paradigm in Natural Product Manufacturing

Natural products are essential in manufacturing a range of consumer and industrial products that support human health and well-being. More than 40 percent of modern medicines include one or more natural product APIs. However, the pandemic, inflation, climate change, and geopolitical threats have irreversibly disrupted the global supply of these essential compounds. At this juncture, Double Rainbow Biosciences—a sustainable healthcare company—is harnessing the latest advances in genomics, metabolomics, and synthetic biology to pioneer the future of natural product manufacturing and improve people’s health.

Double Rainbow Biosciences strives to access endangered bioactive compounds through its comprehensive synthetic capabilities. It does so by enabling unprecedented volume and purity control, eliminating the dependency on unstable geopolitical regions, and limiting the environmental impact on global health.

Double Rainbow Biosciences develops innovative technologies to unleash the power of chemistry from the natural world to improve people’s lives. Based on the mechanistic understanding of specialized metabolic systems in plants and other organisms, it develops novel biosynthetic strategies that provide sustainable access to high-value natural products of commercial or medicinal significance.

“We believe the next breakthrough treatment for cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, or rare, devastating disorders already exists in the natural world,” says Cavan Farley, senior vice president of Global Business Groups at Double Rainbow Biosciences. “Our HARMONY and PRISM platforms enable our team to explore the full therapeutic potential of the natural world by eliminating purity, sourcing, and pharmacokinetic limitations, to help address the most debilitating diseases facing patients globally.”

HARMONY—its synthetic biology discovery engine—leverages a three-phased approach to enable the biosynthetic production of natural products. The first phase includes obtaining genomics data from all kingdoms of life that produce biological molecules of interest to uncover a de novo biosynthetic pathway and enhance the existing metabolic pathway. The team at Double Rainbow Biosciences then identifies and tests biosynthetic genes, both in vitro and in cellulo, that were discovered through transcriptomics.

The final phase includes designing, building, and testing a host organism to incorporate the newly discovered biosynthetic pathways and enzymes to produce natural products of interest and initiate fermentation scale-up for industrial production. Its flexible approach and unparalleled natural product expertise allow its team to create commercially viable production methods for the world’s most potent therapeutic candidates.

However, the molecules in their natural state are not always optimized to deliver their full therapeutic potential. This is where PRISM—the company’s glycosylation platform—comes in. The platform’s precision glycosylation enables the creation of new molecular entities with potentially enhanced solubility, bioavailability, and tissue specificity. The platform, in turn, allows for iterative glycosylation testing to support aglycone or “branched” glycoside motifs that enable specific sugar additions optimized for specific utility.

A case study that elucidates the real-world impact of Double Rainbow Biosciences’ natural products is its ability to deliver the full therapeutic benefits from bioactives contained within the endangered Rhodiola plant. Over the last ten years, the demand for Rhodiola Rosea supplements has increased to the point that the plant is now exceedingly rare and increasingly at risk of extinction.

In addition, most Rhodiola Rosea supplements today contain low levels of salidroside, one of the plant’s primary bioactives. By leveraging its platform technologies and synthetic biology capabilities, DoubleRainbow Biosciences’, through its health and wellness subsidiary, Landkind, delivers the world’s first sustainably engineered salidroside via its LK-01 Pure Salidroside dietary supplement. This breakthrough product allows Double Rainbow and Landkind to raise safety, purity, and efficacy standards for the consumer health industry by delivering products that have achieved GRAS status under the U.S. FDA code and have been rigorously tested in both preclinical and clinical settings. Its natural products are easily accessible through its e-commerce platform, Landkind.health.
Double Rainbow Biosciences uses its unique full-funnel approach throughout all phases of development, from the earliest stages of genomic sequencing to building optimized production methods for potent natural products. This approach also enables host agnostic development, enabling the team to produce efficient production methods for a given target. Double Rainbow Biosciences strives to position itself as a global leader in the natural biosynthetic product market through strategic pharmaceutical and consumer-health collaborations and unique consumer product commercialization. Building on its success in delivering natural biosynthetic products with high efficacy, the company aims to bring about 20 natural bioactive molecules to industrial-scale production in the near future.