About Glycom

Glycom is a privately held company founded in 2005 in Copenhagen, Denmark whose focus is to synthesize and commercialize human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) along with their precursors and intermediates.
 
HMOs have been the object of scientific curiosity for over 40 years. Developed over millions of years of human evolution, HMOs are the 3rd largest component of mother’s milk and are attributed with many of its wonderful health effects.  Until now, study of these natural biopharmaceuticals has been limited and commercialization has been blocked by lack of available material and high costs - with virtually none available from extractive sources and only a few synthesized in extremely low quantities and extremely high costs.

Glycom’s breakthrough synthetic chemistry has changed this equation permanently. We have developed efficient chemical and enzymatic technologies for synthesis of HMOs representing over 50% of total HMO concentration in typical samples of mother’s milk.  The leading HMOs in the Glycom pipeline have established robust scaleup technology in industrial scales and GMP conditions, with glycosylations in multi cubic meter reactors and production in ton scale and in pure form suitable for human consumption. The opportunity for large scale, widespread study and commercialization of HMOs has arrived as a result of our efforts and the support of our partners and investors. 

In order to efficiently develop HMOs, Glycom has also developed breakthrough synthesis of the four mono and  disaccharide precursors/building blocks of HMOs. Two of these precursors – sialic acid and l-fucose – are among the handful of basic natural human sugars.  None of them are currently available in sufficient quantities and costs for high volume commercial applications – including HMO synthesis.   As with the HMOs themselves, the Glycom technology for the first wave precursors has been scaled up to industrial conditions.  As a result, Glycom is already the world’s largest producer of l-fucose and has already achieved cost levels that are a small fraction of its current market price.  Other precursors are in line for similar breakthroughs

For therapeutic and technical adult nutrition applications, Glycom has also developed novel multivalent display technologies that increase activity to micromolar levels and decrease dosage requirements accordingly.

Glycom’s breakthough work has created the groundwork to spawn fresh scientific and commercial investigation into HMOs and precursors.  In order to encourage these investigations, free evaluation/study samples of our first wave scaled up products will be sent to interested parties (see Product samples section).  In addition, large quantities of six HMOs representing approximately 40% of total HMO concentration and all main structural categories, with a purity suitable for human study, will be donated to qualified university based glycobiology research groups around the world (see HMO Biology Donations section).

We encourage all parties interested in the study and commercial introduction of these marvelous natural bio pharmaceuticals to join us at this beginning of a new HMO era.