Piedras Pintas: Our Genetic R&D Lab Enters a New Era

Innovation doesn’t begin at the moment of recognition. It begins far earlier- when no one is watching.

While FOAK, our bio-manufacturing facility, brings scale to life, Piedras Pintas BioFoundry is where direction is forged. Located in Ensenada, Mexico, this genetic R&D lab has always been the engine behind our deepest scientific advancements. Now, with a purpose-built, and recently inaugurated space, it enters a new era.

What began 4 years ago in a repurposed space—humble, makeshift, and filled with imagination—has evolved into a fully equipped laboratory designed for BSL-2 genetic engineering and biofabrication. This upgrade marks a pivotal moment in our journey: a strategic investment in the kind of innovation that doesn’t make headlines, but makes everything else possible.

“This lab didn’t just change our workflow, it changed our pace of discovery. Precision became easier. The rhythm picked up. What used to take months, we now do in weeks.” says José Manuel Aguilar, Polybion’s Chief Scientific Officer.

A Different Kind of Growth

While our fashion collaborations and Celium™’s appearances on global stages draw public attention, Piedras Pintas BioFoundry is the core of our scientific evolution. It’s where we run deep experimentation—exploring the biological potential of our strains and designing new behaviors, metabolic pathways, and material possibilities from within.

This isn’t science for spectacle. It’s science that scales. From enhancing growth rates and productivity to modifying internal structures, the work done in Piedras Pintas is steadily reshaping how Celium™ can perform and what it can become.

Some of the research happening here includes:

• Enhancing bacterial metabolism to grow cellulose faster and denser, which will serve as a platform for future strain developments, a new and improved chassis upon which to further develop strains

• Exploring CRISPR-Cas9 tools to edit the genome of our strains to produce bio fabricated colors from within

• Creating the standard operating procedures for vital processes like genetic construction, recombination and transformation of bacterial-cellulose-producing strains 

“Our job is to give bacteria the instructions they need to build smarter,” says José Manuel AKA “Chema”. “We’re not just increasing outputs—we’re evolving the process.”

From Precision to Impact

At Piedras Pintas, failure is part of the method. One early miscalculation—underestimating how slowly a chosen strain grew—forced the team to redesign their entire workflow. The lesson wasn’t about choosing the “right” organism; it was about building processes that adapt, improve, and iterate with resilience.

And that’s part of what makes this lab unique: it blends the methodological discipline of academia with the agility of industry. Weekly whole-team meetings, dynamic decision-making, and rapid prototyping allow the team to move at three times the speed of traditional academic labs. One must never underestimate the power of small teams with strong will.

“Some labs have the funding but don’t move. Others move fast but lack direction,” says Chema. “At Piedras Pintas, we move with intention.”

A Strategic Engine

Piedras Pintas BioFoundry has always played a foundational role in our innovation pipeline, and will be even more important for the next 10 years. Every discovery here informs production at FOAK I and vice versa, an orchestrated cooperation that shrinks iteration times and boosts success rate. Every experiment is a step toward materials that are not just grown, but grown with purpose: already colored, already structured, already tuned to perform.

In this way, the lab represents more than the future of Celium™, it reflects our commitment to a deeper kind of innovation. One that doesn’t just respond to market demands, but reshapes them.

The scientific work done in Ensenada might not always be visible. It rarely appears in a campaign or a press release. But it is the reason we can promise performance, originality, and continuous evolution.

Because at Polybion, we believe that the most meaningful transformations happen in silence, in well-lit labs, under microscopes, inside petri dishes. That’s where our next generation of innovation begins.

What 's Next?