SOUTH BEND, Ind. — January 6, 2012 — Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc. is very happy to start the
New Year by announcing that the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a
peer-reviewed scientific article describing the breakthrough creation of a spider silk fusion
fiber, which was achieved by university scientists within the University of Wyoming and the
University of Notre Dame, who are working cooperatively with Kraig Biocraft Laboratories.
The article is the first peer-reviewed scientific publication describing the creation of
transgenic silkworms, which have been specifically designed to spin a spider/silkworm silk fusion
fiber. The article’s abstract states, “these composite fibers were, on average, tougher than the
parental silkworm silk fibers and as tough as native dragline spider silk fibers. These results
demonstrate that silkworms can be engineered to manufacture composite silk fibers containing stably
integrated spider silk protein sequences, which significantly improve the overall mechanical
properties of the parental silkworm silk fibers.”
“The fact that a publication as prestigious as Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences has chosen to publish these results speaks for itself as to the significance of the
scientific breakthrough,” said Company founder and CEO, Kim K Thompson. “When I founded Kraig many
people in both the business and scientific community said that what we were setting out to do was
impossible. By maintaining a focused vision and by recruiting the very best minds in molecular
biology, we have made the impossible a tangible reality.”
“Congratulations to the scientific team as well as to the University of Notre Dame and the
University of Wyoming. They deserve the accolades they are receiving with this publication,”
continued Thompson. “Our next steps are to commercialize these developments while accelerating our
development of even more advanced products. The commercial license agreement we signed in the
fourth quarter of 2011 was an essential element of the former. As we move toward commercialization
of these fibers, we are simultaneously moving into an advanced stage in the development of new,
second generation spider silk polymers.”
The scientific article described above is published, online before print, January 3, 2012, by
the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled, “Silkworms
Transformed with Chimeric Silkworm/Spider Silk Genes Spin Composite Silk Fibers with Improved
Mechanical Properties”
“The recent publication of the analysis of genetically engineered silkworms to produce
chimeric spider silks with properties of increased strength and flexibility in the prestigious
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences represents a significant vindication of our
methodology for genetically engineering and producing commercial quantities of novel protein fibers
for medical, structural, and textile fabrics,” said Dr. Malcolm Fraser. “If it were not for Kraig
Biocraft Laboratories initiating this project and bringing the technologies together these results
may never have materialized.”
“The work is the culmination of a research effort begun more than 10 years ago with an
internal award from the University of Notre Dame to my lab to develop silkworm transgenics
capabilities, a two year NIH R21 grant awarded to Drs. Jarvis, Lewis, and myself, and several years
of supplemental funding from Kraig Biocraft Laboratories,” Fraser continued. “The success of this
research would have been impossible without the ability to carry out silkworm transgenesis,
mastered by Bong-hee Sohn and Young-soo Kim in the Fraser lab at the University of Notre Dame. This
manuscript was published after an in depth peer review process, and was deemed by the publishers as
a newsworthy article of the issue in which appears, further indicating its relative importance to
science and technology.”
Posted on January 10, 2011
Source: Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc.
