SilicoLife’s ORIGIN: developing sustainable routes to high-value natural ingredients
The ORIGIN Consortium, coordinated by SilicoLife, was awarded Horizon Europe funding through the 2025 ‘‘Bioprospecting and optimized production of the terrestrial natural products: new opportunities for bio-based sectors” call. With an overall budget of €5.5 million, the four-year project will develop a digitally integrated bioproduction platform to accelerate the transition from promising natural compounds to pre-commercial ingredient production.
We heard from Paulo Maia, Director of Innovation at SilicoLife, about what the funding means for the company, the importance of the consortium, and the role of Catalyze in supporting the successful proposal.
Rethinking botanical ingredient supply chains
Botanical ingredients play an important role across nutraceutical, cosmetic, pharmaceutical and consumer product markets. However, growing demand is placing increasing pressure on fragile supply chains and natural ecosystems.
Many medicinal and aromatic plants are still wild-harvested, while some species face ecological pressure, regulatory protection or threats to long-term availability. This creates challenges not only for biodiversity, but also for manufacturers that need reliable, scalable and high-quality sources of ingredients.
ORIGIN aims to address this challenge by developing alternative production routes for high-value molecules where ecological impact and market demand make new approaches especially valuable.
For SilicoLife, the Horizon Europe funding comes at an important moment.
“ORIGIN is a major opportunity for SilicoLife to take our technology and capabilities to the next level.” Says Paulo. “We have strong foundations in computational biology, metabolic engineering and precision fermentation, and this project allows us to build on them in a much broader and more integrated setting.”
Paulo continues, “Through the consortium, we will have access to exceptional expertise in bioprospecting, lab automation, fermentation scale-up, ADME/tox and techno-economic/life-cycle assessment. For us, the value of ORIGIN is not only in delivering project results, but in learning with world-class partners, maturing our AI-driven bioproduction platform, and increasing the long-term value and applicability of SilicoLife’s technology.”
SilicoLife is building an AI-driven bioproduction platform
At the centre of ORIGIN is a platform that combines AI, digital bioprospecting, biotechnology, enzyme engineering and precision fermentation.
By bringing these capabilities together, the project aims to identify promising natural compounds and develop fermentation-based routes to produce them more sustainably. In doing so, ORIGIN supports a shift away from sourcing models that depend heavily on wild harvesting and towards more controlled, scalable biomanufacturing.
“One of the biggest bottlenecks in precision fermentation is that many valuable natural molecules come from complex plant pathways that are difficult to reproduce in microorganisms,” Paulo explains. “ORIGIN addresses this by combining large-scale bioprospecting, AI-driven pathway design, enzyme engineering and multi-host testing to identify better biological routes and accelerate development.”
Paulo adds, “If successful, this approach can help redefine how society accesses natural ingredients: moving from fragile, geographically constrained and sometimes unsustainable botanical supply chains towards more controlled, traceable and scalable bioproduction. In the long term, precision fermentation also creates the possibility of producing ingredients closer to target markets, improving consistency and reducing exposure to harvest variability, long-distance transport disruption and fluctuations in logistics costs.”
A consortium spanning the bioproduction value chain
The complexity of ORIGIN’s ambition requires expertise across the full bioproduction value chain, from bioprospecting and pathway design to strain engineering, fermentation, safety assessment and industrial application.
The consortium brings together SilicoLife (coordinator) and NOVA University Lisbon in Portugal, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), CSIC/Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics (CBGP) in Spain, Basecamp Research in the United Kingdom, EPFL in Switzerland and dsm-firmenich in the Netherlands. Together, the partners contribute expertise in large-scale bioinformatics and bioprospecting, AI-driven pathway design, multi-host strain engineering, pilot-scale fermentation, techno-economic and life-cycle assessment, and pre-regulatory safety assessment.
“The ambition of ORIGIN requires expertise across the full value chain,” says Paulo, “No single organisation can do this alone. We need biodiversity data, AI-driven design, enzyme engineering, strain development, fermentation scale-up, safety assessment, sustainability analysis and industrial perspective. The strength of this consortium is that each partner brings a critical piece of that puzzle, and together we can build something much more powerful than a set of isolated technologies.”
Together, the consortium aims to create a practical route from digital discovery to pre-commercial production, helping make sustainable natural ingredients more accessible for Europe’s bio-based sectors.
Working with Catalyze
Catalyze supported SilicoLife in developing and writing the successful Horizon Europe submission.
“SilicoLife conceived and structured the ORIGIN concept, but preparing a Horizon Europe proposal of this scale requires focus, discipline and a strong understanding of the funding framework,” Paulo explains, “Catalyze supported us in aligning the proposal with the call expectations, and managing the submission process. Their contribution helped turn a complex scientific and industrial vision into a competitive European proposal.”
With ORIGIN now underway, SilicoLife and its partners aim to move from vision to impact: enabling more sustainable access to natural ingredients, reducing pressure on biodiversity, and supporting the transition towards climate-neutral biomanufacturing.
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