Saku Biosciences and Sable Fermentation Offer US Customers One Agreement From Strain Engineering Through Scale Up

The arrangement replaces the multi-vendor model most biomanufacturing customers work within today with one relationship from strain engineering to final formulation, with no back-end royalties and no claims on customer IP.

Aaron Blotnick

Sep 23, 2026

LOS ANGELES and WAKE FOREST, N.C., September 23, 2026 | Saku Biosciences and Sable Fermentation, Inc. today announced an arrangement to offer clients an integrated development continuum, or full stack solution, from strain engineering through scale up and beyond. The arrangement covers the United States.

Bringing a bioproduct to market has typically meant stitching together four or more separate vendors. Each one comes with its own master service agreement, its own legal review, and its own tech transfer step. Every handoff adds cost and time, and the customer carries the risk of keeping it all connected. The industry has long treated that fragmentation as the cost of doing business.

Saku and Sable are changing that model. Under the arrangement, a customer works through one agreement, begins at strain engineering, and finishes with a formulated product ready for contract manufacturing. Sable manages the customer relationship across the full development continuum. Saku’s PicoShell screening platform is integrated directly into Sable’s bioprocess development and scale-up operations.

“The question we kept coming back to was simple. Who is the client sitting across the table from?” said John Alden, co-founder and chief business officer at Saku Biosciences. “Biotechnology has been a collection of disparate firms for a long time. We wanted the answer to be one team.”

The arrangement removes the intermediate tech transfer steps between strain development and scale up. Saku screens millions of encapsulated colonies under bioreactor conditions rather than in well plates, which means strains are selected from the start for the conditions Sable will actually run them in. Customers reduce legal spend, shorten development cycles, and scale without building their own fermentation capacity.

“We saw an opportunity to solve one of the biggest inefficiencies in bioprocess development: the disconnect between strain selection and the conditions a strain will ultimately face at scale,” said Toni Bucci, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Sable Fermentation. “Saku’s technology allows us to start with strains selected for performance under relevant bioreactor conditions, and then carry those strains directly into process development, scale-up and formulation. For our customers, that means fewer handoffs, less technical risk and a much more efficient path from biology to a commercially viable product.”

Neither company takes back-end royalties or ownership positions in customer IP. Compensation is structured around success fees.

“Platform technologies in this industry have been hard to commercialize,” said Mark van Zee, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Saku Biosciences. “We recognized early that we needed to innovate on the business side as much as the technical side. Two specialized companies, designed to feel like one to the customer, gets you the best of both models. You keep the depth, and you drop the friction.”

The arrangement also grew out of necessity. Both companies were seeing more service demand than either could absorb alone, and customers were asking for a simpler way to move from problem to product.

Saku Biosciences remains venture backed and focused on developing its own host cell products. Mark van Zee will continue to lead development of the Saku platform, its strain engineering capabilities, and new molecule programs.

The two companies were introduced through the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, which connected van Zee with Bucci after he relocated to the Research Triangle for the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator program.

“We were very keen to partner with a company bringing an innovative solution to strain engineering,” said Bucci. “The North Carolina ecosystem made that introduction happen.”

Both companies said the arrangement opens regional development and workforce opportunities they expect to announce in the coming months.

About Sable Fermentation, Inc.

Sable Fermentation is a biomanufacturing process development and de-risking facility focused on bringing innovations to scale. Based in Wake Forest, North Carolina, Sable provides bioprocess development, fermentation from 1L to 200L, downstream processing, formulation, and analytical services, taking customers from early development through readiness for commercial manufacturing. Sable serves food, agriculture, and industrial biotechnology customers developing crop enhancement and protection products, food proteins, enzymes, and specialty chemicals.

Learn more at sablefermentation.com or contact Toni Bucci at toni.bucci@sablefermentation.com.

About Saku Biosciences

Saku Biosciences is a venture-backed Los Angeles company engineering host cell products that improve biomanufacturing economics. Saku’s PicoShell technology encapsulates millions of individual cells in hollow, porous hydrogel microparticles that can be grown and screened under real bioreactor conditions rather than in well plates or microfluidic chips, so that selected strains translate to production. The technology originated in the Dino Di Carlo lab at UCLA and is exclusively licensed to Saku. The company is backed by Big Idea Ventures and continues to develop its own host cell products alongside its work with partners.