ANN ARBOR, Mich. — July 6, 2022 — Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc., the biotechnology company focused on the development and commercialization of spider silk, announces that it has produced several new lines of larger hybrid Dragon Silk™ silkworms for its production operations in Vietnam. These new breeds of silkworms were explicitly created for large-scale production.
With a larger cocoon and longer silk filament, these optimized Dragon Silk breeds reduce production costs and increase throughput.
The new breeds were created using a process of hybridization, combining the best properties of Dragon Silk with the best practices in silkworm breeding to improve the size and robustness of the silkworm strain. Commonly used in commercial mundane silk production, the process of creating these production hybrid silkworms delivers between 30 to 100 percent larger silk cocoons than non-hybridized silkworms.
The company first began the development of large cocoon hybrids in 2018. The success of that effort is the foundation of today’s announcement and the rollout of this technology into production. Commercializing this technology required the company to develop multiple strains of Dragon Silk hybrids that, when paired together, deliver a consistent and scalable large cocoon production platform.
“The hybridization program was a key part of the company’s technology roadmap and something our R&D team has been quietly working on behind the scenes,” said company COO Jon Rice. “Today, we announce that this technology is in the factory. This technology will lower our operating costs from rearing all the way through silk reeling and spinning. Over the coming months, our production team will transition egg production to this new, larger Dragon Silk line.”
Accelerating the transition of these new larger breeds of Dragon Silk to production was driven by the Company’s success with 3rd party contract production and our rapidly growing demand for increased quantities of Dragon Silk.
Posted: July 6, 2022
Source: Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc.
