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Paolo Bonini, oloBion founder & CEO (Photo: Barcelona science Park).
 31.05.2022

oloBion, a cutting-edge omics services laboratory, starts at the Barcelona Science Park

oloBion, a science-based company providing multi-omic analysis to private companies, public research centres and universities, opens in the Barcelona Science Park. Initially, its focus is the agro-food sector, but the company also plans to expand and explore the diversity of the lipidome and metabolome for biotechnological applications.

oloBion was founded by the scientific entrepreneur Paolo Bonini to develop new strategies for cost-effective, sustainable, zero-waste enhancement of plant performance and biodiversity as well as food quality and security.

“In our laboratory, we study the smallest organisms on the planet, bacteria and fungi, which represent not only a large reservoir of biodiversity but more importantly an entire new world of chemical diversity and natural product discovery”, explains Bonini, current CEO of the company.

oloBion specializes in metabolomics, lipidomics and ionomics analysis for food science, agricultural, biostimulant, and human health studies. “Metabolomics and the analysis of small molecules enables the understanding the changes in biological processes that affect health, nutrition and phenotypes that is impossible using genomics alone”, he highlights.

In the metabolomic field, as one of the world’s first users of Agilent’s latest generation instrumentation with Ion Mobility Technology, oloBion is leading the global effort in compound identification in collaboration with the West Coast Metabolomics Center at University of California, Davis (UC Davis).

With its analytical method developed in collaboration with Japan’s RIKEN Institute, published in Nature Biotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/s41587-020-0531-2), oloBion is also able to identify and apply relative quantification on the whole lipidome of plants, microbials and humans.

In order to complete its coverage of the biochemistry of life, the company’s team has also developed in-house analysis protocols to quantify carotenoids, flavonoids, and elemental composition in samples (ionomics).

oloBion is currently able to deliver high-quality analysis with deep interpretations to help reveal actionable biological insights. Its 300 m2 laboratory in the Barcelona Science Park serves customers in more than 30 countries, with an average delivery time of 4 weeks.

“We control the entire analysis process from the sample preparation to the report generation using an automated workflow called oloMAP driven by artificial intelligence. We have developed a multiomics platform that allows the generation of comprehensive scientific knowledge to promote resource efficiency, biodiversity and higher productivity that enables a sustainable development for the benefit of humanity”, he reveals.

According to OloBion’s founder, the company’s business model is highly scalable. “We are focusing on further expansion through collaborations with trusted service providers in biotechnology, regulatory consultants and academia. Our long-term goal is to broaden the understanding of genetic and metabolic diversity and to explore this for biotechnological applications”, says the entrepreneur.