Kepley BioSystems Featured Small Business in WRAL and CED Life-Sciences Conference Profiles

The Council for Entrepreneurial Development’s annual Life Science Conference will feature a host of new and returning companies as well as many first-time participants, with Kepley BioSystems being prominently featured in the first of a series that will promoting these ventures ahead of the two-day event set for Feb. 27-28 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

WRAL TechWire and the CED are partnering to present the profiles. Read the profile for Kepley BioSystems below, and read more about the Life Science Conference on the WRAL website.

Kepley BioSystems Inc.

What is the driving mission of your firm?

Kepley BioSystems Incorporated (KBI) is dedicated to disruptive innovation and global solutions in marine ecology and life-sciences. The KBI team is bringing academic and scientific discipline to business with focus on stewardship and unmet demands to address pressing social and environmental challenges. Current projects include: synthetic crustacean and fish bait using naturally occurring molecules; a unique, enriched “fish-free” aquaculture feed; a novel nutritional foraging supplement for migrating shorebirds; and a patent-pending approach to ranch and protect horseshoe crabs to sustainably produce the substance vital to ensuring global pharmaceutical, vaccine, and medical device safety, which is unmatched in detecting endotoxins.

What makes your company unique and therefore of interest to investors?

Since it was founded in 2013, KBI has identified disruptive opportunities and developed patent-pending, global solutions addressing multi-billion dollar markets while adhering to scientifically sound ecological practices.

Developed with National Science Foundation (NSF) support and rigors, OrganoBait™ is the KBI patent-pending, synthetic bait poised to disrupt a $20 billion market and conserve billions of wild baitfish (forage fish) every year. Forage fish, a fundamental species essential to humans and marine life, yield the greatest value when left in the ocean to propagate and feed more valuable species and marine wildlife.

Well received in field tests against a backdrop of increasingly erratic baitfish availability and prices, additional funding would allow full optimization and at-scale raw materials investments for commercialization. KBI is also seeking to ranch and protect horseshoe crabs (HSCs) to sustainably produce the natural substance vital to ensuring global pharmaceutical, vaccine, and medical device safety; it supplies a $110-115 million raw materials market that supports an LAL (Limulus Amebocyte Lysate) kit sector in excess of $1 billion in annual revenues.

Employing a novel catheter and methods to ensure HSC wellbeing, the ranch would work to avert the random, annual capture of over 600,000 wild crabs with a mortality rate approaching 30% from current harvesting practices.

Given successful ranching, increased production of LAL could lead to further innovation, such as bedside septicemia screening for early diagnosis to alleviate a global impact approaching $1 trillion in healthcare costs due to sepsis and its sequela.

What are the most important reasons why investors should be interested in your company beyond your product and/or technology?

KBI has built on a commitment to interventional marine ecology with a mission to identify and address global challenges and make a difference in conservation and preservation of keystone species by developing alternatives beyond the scope of simple quotas and regulatory efforts.

Taking a breakthrough approach to the “business of science,” the company is also uniquely grounded in academia, leveraging the institutional assets of the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering (JSNN) for scholars and graduates to take ownership of their research and develop novel products for market.

This approach will ultimately lead to an increased output of patented inventions driven by unmet needs and market demand, while seizing entrepreneurial opportunities under the experienced guidance of the KBI leadership.

This profile is curtesoy of WRAL WireTech and the CED and can be seen online on this webpage.