Why We Invested in Dalan Animal Health
Prime Movers Lab is proud to announce that we are leading a $4.5 million financing round in Dalan Animal Health. Dalan is commercializing the first-ever vaccine for an invertebrate — starting with honey bees. The company is developing a vaccine platform with the ability to treat a variety of diseases that impact bees and other animals.
Pollinators play a critical role in our modern food system. Roughly 10% of the calories we eat — about $150B of crops — are pollinated by honey bees [1]. Nearly a hundred agricultural crops, like almonds, are pollinated by and wholly dependent on honey bees [2]. Every spring, just about every commercial beekeeper in the US brings their bees to California for almond pollination. The job puts significant stress on bee colonies; commercial pollination brings millions of bees into close proximity where diseases and pests thrive and offers bees what is effectively an unbalanced diet. Unsurprisingly this leads to bad outcomes in hives. In a bad year, a beekeeper may lose 50% of their hives. Dalan is working to fix that.
The team is led by CEO Annette Kleiser. Annette had years of startup formation experience working with a number of universities spinning out companies based on academic research. She started Dalan when she came across cofounder Dalial Freitak’s work at the University of Helsinki. When Annette saw the opportunity, she knew she needed to devote 100% of her time to the bees and lead Dalan out of the lab and into the (literal) field.
Dalan was recently granted Conditional Approval by the USDA Center for Veterinary Biologics to begin commercializing its initial vaccine for American Foulbrood (“AFB”). AFB is caused by a spore-forming bacteria and is highly contagious. Despite its name, the disease is threatening bee colonies around the world. Once detected in a hive, best practices dictate that the beekeeper incinerate the bees, the hive, and all of the equipment that may have come in contact with the disease. This places an enormous financial burden on beekeepers, to say nothing of the fate of the bees themselves. Beekeepers will often prophylactically treat their hives with antibiotics, a practice that is stressful to the colony and is banned in many jurisdictions. However, the severity of AFB means beekeepers don’t have many good options.
Dalan’s technology is the first-ever vaccine for an invertebrate. One of the key breakthroughs the team developed is the ability to pass the protection from a queen to the rest of the brood. Although we’ve joked about very tiny needles being used to inject bees with the vaccine, the reality is far simpler and more ingenious. The vaccine can be administered to the queen by mixing it with her food. The queen passes the vaccine on to the developing larvae akin to mothers passing protection on to infants. This means that a beekeeper only needs to administer the vaccine to a single bee in order to protect an entire colony of tens of thousands of bees.
Part of what set’s Dalan apart from other biotech businesses is the speed that they can commercialize their R&D. Dalan’s initial sales are in the US, but several other jurisdictions in Europe and North America and around the world recognize the severity of AFB and want to find a solution for their local beekeepers. This financing aims to help Dalan accelerate its go-to-market and regulatory strategies and ensure more bees and beekeepers have access to this new technology. Prime Movers Lab is proud to partner with Dalan to protect this important animal so critical for our food security.
[1] Source: Khalifa et al. Insects 2021
[2] Source: Farmers.gov
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
