A Spoonful of Bioink Costs $500,000. This 1998-Born Founder Is Making It From Seaweed

A spoonful of bioink can cost 500,000 won, but a South Korean startup is looking to make the material from seaweed. Plantner, based in Seoul’s Mapo district, is taking on the challenge of mass-producing alginate, a natural polysaccharide found in brown algae such as wakame, kelp and gulfweed.

Alginate already appears in an unexpectedly wide range of products. It helps release the active ingredients in swallowed painkillers gradually over time. It also stabilizes ice cream and drinks, thickens sauces and dressings, and goes into facial masks, pain patches, advanced wound coverings, 3D bioink for printing artificial tissue and space food.

Plantner Chief Executive Shin Jung-woo, 28, said the company wants to become “Korea’s first company to mass-produce alginate domestically.” The startup says it has a technology that can extract alginate more safely and quickly than existing foreign companies, while maintaining uniform quality.

The company is also challenging the conventional extraction process. Traditional methods use formaldehyde, classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, along with sulfuric acid, a strong acid. Plantner says its process can shorten a procedure that previously took seven days to one day. The company’s approach is aimed at securing a domestic source for a material used across food, medicine, cosmetics and biotechnology.

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We will be Korea’s first company to mass-produce alginate domestically.