Euglena is the Future for Bio-Venture euglena Co., Ltd.
by Nobi Oda
As a young boy, his dream was to save the world’s nutrition problems. At first, he looked for something similar to the senzu beans found in the popular Japanese comicDragon Ball. In his search for senzu, he found something called Euglena. He succeeded in mass cultivating Euglena outdoors, something originally thought to be impossible, and created the bio-venture company, euglena Co., Ltd. founded by him and his friends in 2005, euglena Co., Ltd. is the kind of extremely unique company that can only be found in Japan.
Both plant and animal, Euglena
euglena Co., Ltd. is a bio-venture that researches Euglena and uses that research to create food products and supplements that contain Euglena. In Japanese, Euglena is translated as “midori-mushi”: “midori” means “green” and “mushi” means “worm” or “bug”. So when Euglena is referred to as “midorimushi”, most Japanese people will imagine some kind of green worm.
“Euglena is a type of algae, similar to seaweed and kelp, and it is about 0.1 millimeters big. However, it also has animal-like features and produces animal nutrients.”
The man explaining this is Mitsuru Izumo, the CEO of euglena Co., Ltd., a company he created with the slogan “saving the earth with Euglena”.
euglena Co., Ltd. was the first company to be successful in mass cultivating edibleEuglena outdoors in 2005, and Izumo became well known after the company was publicly listed in the TSE Mothers market in 2012.
A shocking experience in Bangladesh and dreams of senzu
Izumo first became conscious of world food problems when he was in high school. After seeing the effects of famine and poverty in a third world countries with his own eyes, Izumo, who was born into a typical, moderately wealthy family in Tokyo, decided he wanted to join the UN in the future to try and fight this problem.
However, that dream changed completely after an experience he had abroad in Bangladesh as a freshman at Tokyo University. As an extracurricular activity, Izumo interned at Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank. This was a few years before Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
“I expected to see many people suffering from starvation, but actually everyone seemed well-fed with plenty of rice and beans for curry.”
That’s when he realized that the food problem wasn’t due to famine, but instead the lack of nutrition. Even if people had full stomachs, the majority of food came from unhealthy carbohydrates and not from nutritious sources like fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy products. Basically, people were suffering from malnutrition due to the lack of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids.
Although the UN’s food aid is viable in an emergency, it doesn’t cure chronic malnutrition. After his experience, Izumo returned to Japan, changed from an arts major to an agricultural major and began to search for an answer to this problem. What he consistently thought about in the back of his mind was senzu, the fictional bean found in Akira Toriyama’s famous comic Dragon Ball, since Izumo was a fan of Japanese comics and anime when he was in high school. In the comic, senzu was so full of nutrition that characters could survive ten days with only one senzu. In addition, senzu had the amazing ability to completely heal the body in a matter of seconds.
“I searched for something in the real world that might resemble senzu. After seeing the malnutrition in Bangladesh, I knew I had to find something like senzu; a source of food packed to the brim with nutrition.”
“Even if I strike out, I want to swing the bat.”
Izumo first learned about Euglena from Kengo Suzuki, a fellow agriculture major who was in the same club as Izumo (a club that planned out business planning contests). Once Izumo heard about Euglena from Suzuki, he knew right away this was the senzu he was searching for. Euglena had both the characteristics of a plant and an animal, and was packed with 59 nutrients including vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and unsaturated fatty acids.
Nutrients found in Euglena (all 59 varieties)
Izumo had finally found his senzu with Euglena, but actually Japan had been conducting research to produce Euglena as a food source since the 1980s. In addition to researching Euglena as a food source, researchers also found thatEuglena was able to absorb carbon dioxide and also showed potential as an energy source due to its ability to replicate energy from the sun through photosynthesis. The fact that Japan depended on foreign sources for food and energy was something the country couldn’t ignore. However, researchers were unable to find a way to mass-produce Euglena outdoors.
Izumo dreamt of finding a way to mass-produce Euglena but he immediately realized how difficult that would be, so after graduating from university he got a job at Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank (now known as Mitsubishi Tokyo UFJ Bank). He planned to start his own company at 35 after gaining valuable work experience and know-how. However, this was also dangerous because it would be easy to settle for a risk-free life with a steady income.
If this happened in America, the young Izumo might have been able to start his own company at a young age by raising funds from venture capitals. But in Japan, this was very difficult because the system of investing in ventures wasn’t widely understood and also because it was expected for employees to work for the same company until retirement. In Japan, getting hired by a company isn’t about doing a job as much as it is becoming part of a certain community, i.e. a citizen of a village. And since Japanese society puts so much weight in a person’s educational background, graduates of Japan’s prestigious Tokyo University often choose to become high-ranking government officials or employees of major corporations. The fact that Izumo chose to work at a major bank instead of starting his own company would come to no surprise to most Japanese people.
But Izumo ended up deciding to leave his bank job much earlier than expected. After one year, he quit his job and bet everything he had on Euglena.
“For example, if a baseball player were to make it to the world series and stand in the batter’s box, there’s no way he would want to watch three strikes go by without swinging his bat. For me, the important was to swing the bat, not what happened afterwards. In Japan, if swinging the bat resulted in a bad result, most people would say ‘I told you so.’ In my case, I was lucky because my swing ended up with a positive result leading to many people praising my work and my company becoming listed on the stock market. But at the time, swinging the bat was the most important thing to me, whether that ended up in a strike out or a home run.”
Many things alluded to his decision. As a sophomore at Tokyo University, Izumo studied abroad at Stanford University and America’s silicon valley really made an impact on him. There were also people who urged Izumo to start his own company when he was conflicted between his job at the bank and Euglena (although there were many more people who warned him to stay with the bank). Also, Izumo was part of the generation of younger Japanese who had no guarantees of a steady quality of life, even if they were to become a “citizen” of a major corporation. Izumo was a high school student in 1997 when Japan had a major economic collapse where companies who were considered too big to fail, like Yamaihchi Shoken and the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, ended up filed for bankruptcy.
But ultimately, the reason Izumo decided to pursue work with Euglena was something he equated to as “being in love.” People in love are resolute. They don’t hesitate to enter dangerous situation and are not concerned with pleasing their country. No matter what negative effects it might bring, being next to the one you love is the most important thing. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that his love for Euglena is what brought him to start his company.
Receiving the baton for Euglena research
Suzuki, who told Izumo about Euglena, proceeded on to graduate school to continue his research. After quitting his bank job, Izumo worked feverishly to start his company with the help of Suzuki. After accumulating enough capital and meeting and asking for the help of Euglena researchers all across Japan including Yoshihisa Nakano (currently a professor at Osaka Women’s Junior College), Izumo successfully acquired the land he need to produce Euglena on Ishigaki Island in Okinawa. Until then, the biggest problem when it came to mass-producing Euglenaoutdoors was the inability to prevent biological contamination. Euglena is located at the very bottom of the food chain. It doesn’t feed on other animals, only reproducing through photosynthesis. The food chain is made up of smaller animals that feed onEuglena, and then larger animals that feed on those smaller animals, and so on. Basically, for animals higher up on the food chain, Euglena is easy pray, so if any other small animals were to start feeding on Euglena it would be completely annihilated. No matter what guards were put up, researchers were unable to deter biological contamination.
Eventually, Izumo and Suzuki went with an opposite approach. Instead of trying to prevent biological contamination directly, they came up with the idea to change the environment to grow Euglena. They began to work towards creating a culture fluid that would be difficult for any organisms other than Euglena could live in. After numerous experiments, they finally succeeded in mass-producing Euglena on December 16, 2005.
“It was about 4:25 PM. I was on the 38th floor of the office building we were renting when I got a call from Suzuki, who was in Ishigaki at the time, and he said ‘We did it. The pool is full of Euglena. There is no doubt that we have succeeded in producingEuglena. I’m going to start collecting them now.’ Of course I was happy to hear the good news, but more than that, I was relieved that we had finally lived up to what our elder researchers expected from us. In my mind, I always wanted to contact the other researchers, many who spent tens of years researching Euglena, with the good news that we were successful.”
At that time, they harvested dry Euglena. Up until then, the biggest harvests were no larger than a swab from a 1-liter flask, so the progress was extremely dramatic. In 2007, Izumo met with Isaac Virgin, a world-renowned researcher who was at NASA researching Euglena and the possibility of its long-term effects in space. Needless to say, Virgin was incredibly surprised after he saw the bag full of Euglena powder that Izumo brought with him.
The potential of Euglena as a future source of energy
After successfully mass-producing Euglena outdoors, Izumo expected a high volume of buyers. Unfortunately, he quickly found out there was no interest in Euglena as a food source.
He continued to produce Euglena and sell it as supplements to companies all over Japan, but he couldn’t gain enough traction to make any long-term contracts. No matter how convincing he was about the nutritional value and future potential ofEuglena, companies were reluctant to move forward because there were no previous success stories regarding Euglena.
“Everyone would be impressed by the fact that we had succeeded in mass-producingEuglena outdoors for the first time, but then they would say we couldn’t work together as we had no previous results with Euglena in a business setting. I was completely lost for words.”
Izumo believed that eventually there would be a company they could work out a contract with, so in 2 years he approached more than 500 different companies. It was a difficult challenge, but everything hanged in 2008 when he finally found an investor with the major Itochu Corporation.
Izumo talks jokingly, “Japan has a long history of Euglena research, and we are kind of the like the anchors for the long relay that our predecessors have been running. If we fall down now, we will never be able to show our faces again. That’s why I was so happy when we finally found an investor.”
Around 2009, they began to see that Euglena could be used as more than just a food source. They started creating the framework in which oil taken from Euglena could be used as fuel for a jet engine. The need for jet engine fuel grew, and although bio-fuel was in high demand, the amount of oil gained from traditional botanical sources wasn’t enough. This is when oil companies began look towards using Euglena. After analyzing the oil acquired from Euglena, researchers found that it was very rich in composition, and thus began a joint research venture between Nippon Oil Corporation (currently known as JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corporation) and Hitachi Plant Technologies (currently known as Hitachi, Ltd.).
Although they are called Euglena in general, there are more than 100 different types with various characteristics. At euglena Co., Ltd., they are continuing to cultivate these different types, focusing on their various characteristics and improving their quality. With regards to jet fuel production, genetic modification is being used to get the most out of Euglena.
A bio-venture that is possible only in Japan
For euglena Co., Ltd., it was very difficult to overcome the hurdles that came with starting a company in the very conservative environment of Japan. But Izumo feels that euglena Co., Ltd. came to be what it is now because of Japan.
“The fact that euglena Co., Ltd. has been successful in Japan is no random occurrence. When it comes to miso, soy sauce, sake, and other traditional Japanese condiments, Japanese people have used microorganisms extremely well for a very long time. Through this traditional background, Japan has the best brewing and fermentation techniques in the world.”
Izumo describes that just as America is the best place for IT companies, Japan is the best place to pursue the brewing and fermentation of microorganisms.
“There are 3 Japanese companies that have come from this background that I greatly respect: soy sauce maker Kikkoman, lactic beverage maker Yakult, and glutamic acid condiment maker Ajinomoto. All of these companies have been successful in creating valuable products from microorganisms and have expanded into foreign markets. I want euglena Co., Ltd. to follow their trend and spread Euglena and its positive effects around the world.”
Currently at euglena Co., Ltd., in addition to creating and selling food and cosmetic products that use Euglena, they are continuing to research bio-fuel, carbon-dioxide reduction, and grain from Euglena. In 2013, Izumo returned to Bangladesh, where he began his journey, and has started work to solve the world’s malnutrition problems.
(translation: Nelson Babin-Coy)
Originally published at ignition.co
