Slashdot Mirror
Spider Silk Finally Ready For Commercialization
An anonymous reader writes: We've been hearing about little bits of progress for decades, but spider silk fibers are finally ready to be delivered at commercial scale, thanks to three scientist-founders and large investments ($40M) from SF and SV venture capitalists. Who'll be the first to build a web slinger?
These folks have come up with an idea to market a threat with some (but not all) the properties of spider silk. Using yeast. While I am more than willing to admit that this material sounds interesting, it is most certainly not spider silk.
But it's not the first time we've seen an utterly misleading headline in both the article and in the Slashdot post.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
To my knowledge this has already been achieved. Specifically, a Japanese company called Spiber spin synthetic spider silk manufactured by this kind of process. They've made enough to weave a dress out of it as a demonstration and have some kind of project to build a factory, which should produce some hundred kilograms per year of it sometime during 2015. However, their website isn't full of updates and much of the material is in Japanese.
There's also a Swedish biomedicine company called Spiber Technologies that makes this kind of stuff to grow cells on. Reading wikipedia also gives a couple of examples
Still, if they achieve really large scale production that may be nice even if they aren't first. The focus on textile applications might also be indicative of being able to make large amounts of fiber.