Cacao, Pharmaceuticals and Gene Punks: An Interview With Daniel Preston

Daniel Preston is an inventor and entrepreneur who holds over 100 patents, has done contract work for both American and foreign military agencies, and, according to one company bio, is an avid skydiver. Currently he’s immersed himself in cacao, (yeah, what chocolate comes from) something his family has been farming in the Dominican Republic for over a century. Along with other cacao-based ventures, including what he said is the only licensed commercial distillery in New York City since prohibition, he’s the CEO of Cacao Biotechnologies, a firm focusing on discovering and isolating cacao compounds, many of which are extremely valuable to the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and nutrition industries.

I sat down with Preston at Cacao Prieto, his Brooklyn distillery, to discuss cacao biodiversity, treatments for HPV and being a "gene punk".

What types of work are you guys doing right now?

Myself and some of the other cofounders have been doing a lot of work on the genetic side of things to preserve the biodiversity of cacao. Cacao is kind of unique in that you can’t preserve the seeds. They germinate wet, so straight on the fruit. If you dry the seeds, they’re dead. If you freeze the seeds, they’re dead. 100 years ago you had huge biodiversity, I mean thousands of varieties, and now you go to countries and they’re probably only growing six varieties. Because of the lack of vertical integration in the industry, no one has an alignment of interests to preserve these sort of unusual plants.

Our original philosophy was not to waste anything, so all of the byproducts we tried to find value in. The value that we found was sort of high dollar value chemicals to be used in pharmaceuticals; in cosmeceuticals, nutriceuticals and functional foods and medicines. Once we identified those compounds, it became a mission for us to find plants that had higher yields or better efficacy or quality of compound in them. That led us to all of these unusual varieties that were basically becoming extinct.

How do you make a business case to try to preserve cacao diversity?

Basically, the primary antioxidant compound that we’re deriving [has a] street value of about a quarter million dollars per kilo. We’re talking extremely high dollar value chemicals. It’s a very specialized process in how you ferment the cacao in order to get this compound, and the yields are incredibly low, and the extraction is very expensive. As you can improve the genetics through a classical breeding program, or in the laboratory in Pennsylvania we’re involved in a genetic breeding program, [which is] only in the laboratory under quarantine, not in the fields, and only for pharmaceuticals, not for food. As you can take these various methods to increase yield and increase purity, there’s a very strong business case to be made for it. When we started purifying this one compound it cost us $80,000 a kilo. Now with the new hybrids that we’re producing it costs $4,000 a kilo to isolate.

Can you describe the processes you use for hybridization?

There are two paths that we’ve taken. One is a classical breeding program, but we’re using all of the DNA analysis tools to try and shortcut the trial and error phase. We choose the mother plants that have the highest chance of giving us the desired properties we want in offspring, and then we do a classic hybridization between the two, no genetic modifications, and we wait it out. On the other side of the spectrum, in the laboratory, we have the option of creating genetically modified variants, and we’re the only company in the world that’s actually made transgenic cacao. We’re sort of being labeled as being gene punks, or bio punks, for the work that we’re doing.

How do you find those varieties?

The team leader on the cacao genome sequencing is within our company. So what we’re doing different that what has been done in the past is that we’re doing DNA fingerprinting on all plants in our germplasm repository and then cross-referencing it with metabolomics, proteomics and then certain chemical spectrum analysis. We can data mine the genome for high dollar value compononents. Those compononents range from superantioxidants to compounds called MMP inhibitors or matrix metalloproteinase inhibitors, which are cancer treatment drugs and are very valuable for cosmetics in [offsetting] destruction of collagen to sunscreen compounds to antivirals.

I first learned about your company after hearing about people creating HPV antivirals from cacao. Could you elaborate on that?

One of the compounds that we found is an absolutely brilliant burn treatment. Based on the size and the shape of the molecule, we had it tested for antiviral properties [because] we theorized it should be a good antiviral. It came back as an extremely strong antiviral against human papillomavirus.

Antiviral compounds are extremely rare, right?

We spoke to the Center for Disease Control and confirmed that more than 20 million Americans are infected with HPV. Unconfirmed it could be as much as half the population, and there are currently no antivirals for HPV.

What is the status of that project?

Because the compound we derived is from natural products, the only secondary synthesis is done with compounds off the FDA GRAS [Generally Recognized As Safe] list. For topical applications, we don’t require FDA approval. We can start a phase one clinical trial, which is relatively inexpensive, and we hope to actually get into trials before the end of this year.

How effective is this? Is it a complete cure, or does it help people manage their symptoms?

You never want to say something is a cure, because there is a range of effects depending on people. This has the potential to be a very effective treatment, which in some people could be a cure.

What’s next?

We’re protecting a lot of the IP right now. There are 41 patents, and we’re in the processing of filing. A lot of them have already been filed, but there are a few remaining to get taken care of. We’re expanding the germplasm repository in the Dominican Republic. We currently have the largest collection of porcelanas. Porcelanas, you can think of them as a rare, albino cacao, where the beans themselves are ripe. We’ve identified some that have unique traits in them that help us purify some chemicals.