However, Vensky says that the company is looking to scale up the production overseas, in Australia or US for example, where the regulatory frameworks for larger GMO production are well known. “Andritz has expertise in industrial insulin purification and insulin is Helico’s first target,” Vensky says. Helico has strong backing from the New Zealand Government’s Callaghan Innovation, which has bought into the deep-tech startup’s vision to “replace large, expensive pharmaceutical factories with growing high-value therapeutic compounds via low-tech agriculture”. Vensky says Helico is developing a proprietary computational platform for synthetic biology research using the latest modelling tools and AI-based prediction algorithms.