Summary note on Zuchem Patents for Xylitol.

Xylitol is a sugar alcohol sweetener used as a naturally occurring sugar substitute. Xylitol is used around the world, mainly as a sweetener in chewing gums and pastilles. Other applications include oral hygiene products, such as toothpaste, fluoride tablets and mouthwashes. The pharmaceutical industry uses xylitol as a sweetener in its products. Xylitol is produced by many companies some of them are Futaste pharmaceutical co.ltd (China based), Xylitol Canada Inc (Canada based), Danisco (Europe based) and Zuchem (Chicago based). Xylitol can be produced by waste by-products rich in sugars and Zuchems project is focused on developing a bioprocess to transform these waste sugars into xylitol, a sugar polyol that is in high demand by the food ingredient and confectionary industry. The proprietary process can also be used to make xylitol from waste byproducts of the corn wet-milling and dry-milling industries. According to David Demirjian, president and CEO of Zuchem Inc. Food science polyol are a $1.5 billion market and the market is dominated by sorbitol ($750 million), marinol ($80 million), erythritol and others ($370 million), and xylitol ($125 million), adding that the xylitol share is expected to grow by three-foldbut holding it back is its limited feedstock supply, which is primarily birch wood, and the price fluctuations that go along with it. Its typically produced through chemical hydrogenation [of birch wood], he said, adding that Zuchems approach is through simple fermentation. Zuchems goals are to make xylitol but eliminate or reduce the unwanted production of arabitol, a fermentation inhibitor that dramatically changes properties of xylitol. The process involves conversion of xylose to xylitol, similar to making arabitol from arabinose, but using a xylose-specific reductase that fortuitously produces less than 1 percent arabitol. Zuchem has achieved 115g/l in less than 15 hours, with more than 85 percent overall yields. Moving on to the patents, Zuchems IP assets on Xylitol is pretty vast. Their technology for producing xylitol is through recombinant micro organism fermentation. They have chose common micro organisms like E.Coli in which the gene producing enzyme Xylose reductase is inserted by recombination process to produce xylitol. Our interest with Zuchem surely meets as the substrate used by them is hemicellulose hydrolysate (WO/2005/113774) for xylitol production. With respect to the various ISRs given the ISR report of particular interest is WO/2005/113774: METHODS FOR PRODUCTION OF XYLITOL IN MICROORGANISMS where the documents stated are not of particular relevance to the invention.