NAMBAWAN Spain SLU (“NAMBAWAN”), in collaboration with NOMAD Bioscience, Halle, Germany, (“NOMAD”) and Instituto de la Grasa, Seville, Spain, announces successful pilot-scale manufacturing of highly pure Thaumatin II, its lead product for sweetener and taste modifier markets.  Thaumatin II is a natural noncaloric high intensity sweetener protein that is being industrialized by NAMBAWAN, starting 2025, as its first product under the trademark Thauma™.

Successful pilot-scale manufacturing of Thaumatin II allows to define the purification process and equipment needed for the industrial scale production, and it provides NAMBAWAN with sub-kilogram quantities of Thauma™ needed for extensive testing of the sweetener by NAMBAWAN’s prospective commercial partners.

Thaumatins are intensely sweet-tasting proteins up to 13,000 times sweeter than sucrose on a weight basis. Thaumatin mixtures (consisting mainly of Thaumatin I and Thaumatin II) and  purified from its natural source plant Thaumatococcus, they received regulatory approvals as sweeteners or taste modifiers decades ago and are on the market in US, EU, Japan and other countries; however, wide use of these niche products is limited because of low and unreliable supply of natural plant raw material resulting in high price of the product, and because the microbial fermentation, alternative production method for recombinant proteins, is not competitive in this case.

Thauma™ is the NAMBAWAN’s lead product candidate with new superior taste attributes; it aims to reduce sugar and eliminate artificial sweeteners in food products, and it can be efficiently produced in plant seed using tobacco biofactories, thus assuring an unlimited product supply at commercially competitive prices. NOMAD, Thauma™ developer, has already received its regulatory GRAS clearances for Thaumatin II in USA.

About NAMBAWAN Spain SLU. NAMBAWAN Spain is a fully owned subsidiary of NAMBAWAN Biotech GmbH, a NOMAD’s spin-off company that is the exclusive licensor of all NOMAD products, technologies and assets for the markets outside medicine. NAMBAWAN Spain has been founded in 2023 with the mission to industrialize and commercialize NOMAD’s food additives – sweet and taste modifying proteins. NAMBAWAN Spain currently is at a pre-industrial phase and plans to start manufacturing and selling its lead product Thaumatin II in 2025.

Corporate office of NAMBAWAN Spain is in Badajoz, Extremadura, Spain.

Contact info: www.namba-wan.com

About NOMAD Bioscience GmbH. NOMAD Bioscience GmbH is a plant biotechnology company developing a broad range of biotechnology products manufactured in plants. Among the product candidates in development are antiviral proteins for prevention of respiratory viruses including influenza and corona viruses, non-antibiotic antimicrobials (bacterial bacteriocins and phage endolysins) for food safety and medicine, as well as natural high intensity non-caloric sweetener proteins Thaumatins as sweeteners and taste modifiers.

Corporate offices are headquartered in Munich, Germany and the Company’s Research Division is located in Halle, Germany.

Contact info: www.nomadbioscience.com

About Instituto de la Grasa.

The Instituto de la Graça is a Food Service and Technology research centre of the Spanish National Research Council located on the Pablo de Olavide University campus in Seville. Since its founding in 1947, the Instituto de la Grasa specialises in research on food lipids and derivatives of oleaginous products, especially table olives.

Contact info: www.ig.csic.es