Dear Shareholders,
In the coming month we will be moving our corporate office, from our location for the last nine years, at 120N Washington Sq., Lansing, Michigan, as the building is being repurposed. We are taking this opportunity to find a location that better matches our growth plans for Kraig Labs.
Over and above notifying you of our pending move, we would also like to take a moment to provide some additional information on the status of our research and material development efforts.
Big Red
Big Red continues as one of our primary recombinant spider silk gene lines. Similar to our recently announced Dragon SilkTM line, Big Red is specifically designed to have a tensile strength significantly higher than conventional silk. Designed specifically for increased strength with lower elasticity, the Big Red silk line we’ve created remains the ideal material for applications where excessive elasticity would decrease overall performance. As we expand our research and rearing operation we expect that Big Red will be a significant element of that effort.
Laboratory lease
In 2011, we began renting additional laboratory space, at the Innovation Park in South Bend, Indiana. This space was initially intended to provide a secondary location and overflow capacity for the work conducted in the laboratory at Notre Dame, our research center. The decision to end the long running lease for this second lab was made after review and determining that we could expand our core research by focusing more of our attention into the Notre Dame lab. By redirecting those resources we are increasing the number of microinjection and incorporate additional gene splicing technologies to further advance our market leading recombinant silk technology. The increased scope and funding level for our collaborative research project signed in March, of this year, points to that refocus. This initiative helped to promote our research efforts in developing new plasmids, new rounds of microinjections, and incorporating new gene splicing techniques.
Warwick Mill
Through our partnership with Warwick Mills we continue to make progress in developing new woven and knitted materials using our recombinant fiber technologies. Over the last several months we have engaged with Warwick Mill on an initiative to produce a new material, we believe we will be able to announce the exciting details of that project in the fourth quarter of this year. Warwick Mills remains an important element of our transition from a technology development company into a product delivery company.
We are proud of the technical team’s developments and partners’ progress. We are excited about our results in the lab and pleased with how our business model is evolving.