March Newsletter

gabriele380
Apr 4
2 min read

The Growth Factor | Newsletter | March 30th 2025

Ayanda Hlophe, Chemical Engineer, working in her lab.

What’s happening in the labs?

Immobazyme 🤝 Babylonstoren

We’re proud to announce our collaboration with Babylonstoren, one of South Africa’s most iconic brands.

Together with their team of food scientists, we’ve been working to identify the ideal starter cultures for their cured meat range.

For our non-science friends: Starter cultures are preparations of beneficial microorganisms (like bacteria, yeast, or mould) added to food to initiate and drive fermentation. This process leads to specific changes in the food’s chemistry and sensory profile, enhancing preservation, texture, and flavour.

It’s incredibly rewarding to see our science come to life in real-world products, especially when working with a local partner that shares our commitment to quality, innovation, and sustainability.

Yuchan Park visitng the Babylonstoren team at their facilities.

Contract Research

While recombinant protein production is our bread and butter, contract research is where we get to stretch our innovative legs.

In the past few months, we’ve partnered with teams working on everything from future-forward foods to bioprocessing and clean cosmetics. These collaborations give us a chance to try new science, solve interesting problems, and help bring promising ideas to life.

If you’re working on something exciting and need a team that knows how to make happen - get in touch. We’re always happy to talk shop or give you a tour around our labs.

Protein of the Month: Brazzein

Tastes like sugar, digests like a protein.

Brazzein is a sweet protein originally derived from the fruit of Oubli (Pentadiplandra brazzeana), a climbing plant native to West Africa.

Despite being protein-based, it interacts with our tongue’s sweet taste receptors (specifically hT1R2/hT1R3) to produce a clean, sugar-like sweetness - without the aftertaste that often comes with synthetic alternatives. It’s highly soluble, heat stable, and retains its sweetness across a wide pH range.

So, why does it matter?

As the demand grows for low-calorie, gut-friendly sugar alternatives, Brazzein offers a compelling option.

It’s incredibly potent, about 2,000 times sweeter than sucrose by weight, which means only microgram quantities are needed to achieve desirable sweetness. That makes it attractive not just from a formulation perspective, but also in terms of cost, sustainability, and long-term health outcomes.

It also sidesteps the metabolic concerns linked to traditional sweeteners and has been shown to possess antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-allergic properties, making it more than just a sweetener.

Request A Sample

People of the Pipeline: Nokulunga Maima

Maima Nokulunga is our Head of Bioprocessing and resident fermentation specialist.

As a precision fermentation startup, it goes without saying that her work is central to Immobazyme’s success.

On the day-to-day, you’ll find Nokx overseeing our bioreactor operations - running fermentations, homogenising cells, and fine-tuning every condition to ensure our proteins scale smoothly and consistently.