Jonathan Caspi Email & Phone Number

Karmiel, North District, Israel

Ashdod, Southern, Israel

• Key contributor to the company’s strategic plan to penetrate the global food market. Focus on clean fungi-based ingredients to become a key player in the trillion-dollar meat market with the hybrid product concept.
• Led efforts to develop and focus on solid state fermentation as company’s main technology.
• Supervised and pushed forward growth protocol scale up to above 100% yields (product per substrate).
• Coordinated mycelia grow rooms and US pilot plant planning and construction.
• Pivotal contact person for all aspects of science and technology with RA’s, mushroom growers, academia collaborators, oversea employees and service providers.
• In charge of IP strategy planning and execution efforts to complete a conclusive patent application to protect main concepts, technologies and applications.

Nes Ziyyona, Central, Israel

• Bioreactor lab Set up. Efforts included assembly of new equipment, basic parameters calibrations, scale up efforts from 2D microtiter plate to 1 liter suspension cell growth.
• Established a new cell growth lab, full set up and design and new equipment purchase.
• Developed novel methods for cell counting and cell aggregates dissociation to overcome challenges in bioreactor growth and scale up.
• Supervised efforts to convert 2D growing stem cells to suspension growth.
• Integrated micro carrier cell growth methods to overcome challenges in suspension cell growth.

Rehovot, Israel

- Led efforts to develop and optimize food-grade cell growth media. Identified, characterized and tested plant-based alternatives to media compounds.- Coordinated and overseed fibroblast cell growth experiments.- Planned and supervised the assembly of a new biochemistry / molecular biology laboratory. Defined desired capabilities, identified needed.

Nutley, NJ

- As a team leader, drove forward efforts to improve and scale up enzymatic collagen hydroxylation. Supervise a team of molecular biologists, biochemists and analytical scientists.- Mastered and fine-tuned a collagen hydroxylation detection assay. Assay was successfully transferred to team members to be used as an in-house analytical tool.- Developed a.

Palo Alto, CA

• Patent protected a high pH based enzymatic process for cellulose degradation, contributing set up, experimental design and execution.
• Successfully developed, calibrated and scaled up a novel polysaccharide mono-oxygenase (PMO) direct activity assay in 3 months to quickly and directly evaluate enzyme activity for a high throughput screening campaign.
• Led effort to experimentally verify winning mutation to be integrated into next product out of large data set of whole high throughput screening campaign.

Palo Alto, CA

• Developed expertise in molecular biology methods. Designed, cloned, expressed and purified numerous proteins, mutated enzymes and chimeric assemblies. Well experienced in methods such as PCR, cloning, DNA purification.
• Mastered biochemical and enzymology assays to become a go-to guy for carbohydrate active enzymes characterization. Methods include western blot, ELISA, HPLC, protein purification, SEC, ion exchange, MS and numerous.
• Experimentally revealed an unknown substrate preference for β-glucosidase enzyme family. Findings shed new light on overall contribution of β-glucosidase enzymes to synergistic cellulose degradation and opened new.
• Significant dose reduction in next generation product through campaign resulting in a more active and thermostable molecule. Developed, scaled up and set up entire GH61 family high throughput screening campaign based.
• Led and pushed forward several discovery efforts to identify candidate homologue enzymes from fungal and bacterial sources to be tested and implemented into new products. Efforts included multi-sites and.

Ph.D., Biochemistry

Master Of Science (Msc), Molecular Genetics

Bachelor'S Degree, Life Sciences