ORIGIN - Optimized Routing and Industrial Generation of Ingredients from Nature​

The ORIGIN project (Optimized Routing and Industrial Generation of Ingredients from Nature) directly addresses the Horizon Europe call HORIZON-CL6-2025-01-CIRCBIO-08: Bioprospecting and optimized production of terrestrial natural products, which seeks innovative, sustainable routes to bio-based ingredients. Current supply chains for high-value natural products; used in nutraceuticals, cosmetics, F&F and Pharmarely heavily on wild harvesting of species such as Rhodiola rosea and Panax ginseng. This unsustainable practice threatens biodiversity, consumer safety, and the resilience of European industries. Precision fermentation offers a solution, but today’s fragmented, costly, and slow pipelines require up to a decade to deliver a single product.ORIGIN introduces a digitally powered, end-to-end bioproduction platform that radically shortens development cycles and de-risks innovation. Its five core breakthroughs are: (i) AI-powered large-scale digital bioprospecting, leveraging the world’s largest proprietary, Nagoya-compliant metagenomic database (>10 billion sequences, >1M new species); (ii) AI-driven retrosynthesis and host-aware pathway design; (iii) generative AI-guided enzyme engineering; (iv) multi-host rapid prototyping across E. coli, S. cerevisiae, Y. lipolytica, and A. niger. These are unified by the (v) ORIGIN Co-pilot, a central LLM-based agentic AI serving as an “automated scientist” that integrates data streams across the whole project into a closed-loop Design–Build–Test–Learn cycle.By project completion, ORIGIN will deliver AI-optimized pathway blueprints for 50 molecules, 10 validated microbial strains, and 3molecules demonstrated at pilot scale (30L to 100L), achieving >10 g/L titers and >95% purity. This will reduce time-to-market from 5–10 years to 2–3 years, cut land use by >90% and GHG emissions by 30–50%, and ensure EU leadership in climate-neutral, biodiversity-friendly bioproduction.