TEXTILES.ORG
Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc. announced milestones in production and development of its engineered spider silk for eventual applications in performance, defense and industrial textiles.
The company successfully engineered the largest known spider silk gene insertion into a silkworm. “By increasing the size of the inserted spider silk genes, we are unlocking the potential for new materials with properties beyond what is currently achievable,” says Xiaoli Zhang, Ph.D., the company’s research director. “This breakthrough lays the foundation for the future of high-performance silk fibers.”
The information carried by the genes allows for the creation of more complex proteins and a resulting increase in material performance opportunities with the resulting hybrid silk fibers.
The company also achieved a regulatory hurdle in January to scale production in Lam Dong Province, in the heart of Vietnam’s silk-producing region. In March, it announced that it had begun production of the largest batch of its BAM-1 recombinant spider silk hybrid, created to maximize both robustness and the ratio of usable silk per cocoon.
Last year, the company produced more spider silk than in all previous years combined and publicly set a goal of exceeding all of 2024’s BAM-1 production with a single production batch in 2025. In April it announced it has secured the trademark for the SpydaSilk® brand name.