24/7 Market News- Kraig Labs Breakthrough Science is Pivoting to Scalable Business

How Decades of Innovation Are Converging for Commercial Spider Silk Success

DENVER, Dec. 10, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 247marketnews.com, a pioneer in digital media dedicated to the swift distribution of financial market news and information, reports that Kraig Biocraft Laboratories (OTCQB: KBLB)(“the Company”, “Kraig”, “Kraig Labs”), the undisputed global leader in the development and commercialization of spider silk, is entering a defining phase in its corporate and scientific evolution.

What began as a bold idea by Kim Thompson, Kraig’s founder and CEO, more than a decade ago, is now maturing into a viable business model blending genetic engineering, biotechnology, and commercial textile manufacturing. Kraig Labs’ journey, from acquiring key patent rights abandoned by a failed predecessor to developing proprietary gene-insertion protocols and delivering advanced materials for the U.S. Army, highlights how persistence and innovation can transform a visionary concept into a tangible, scalable technology.

From Nexia’s Collapse to Kraig’s Breakthrough

In the early 2000s, Nexia Biotechnologies spent more than $110 million attempting to mass-produce spider silk proteins using goats and bacterial systems. The idea was compelling, but the results were not. When Nexia’s model collapsed, Thompson strategically acquired the license to key patents from the University of Wyoming after Nexia Biotechnologies, the Canadian firm burned through its funding without achieving commercial viability. This acquisition provided KBLB with foundational spider silk gene sequences, but the real breakthrough came through Thompson's vision to combine them with cutting-edge genetic engineering, establishing the Company as the world's first to viable solution to produce recombinant spider silk at industrial scale in a $200 billion technical textiles market (5.2% CAGR to 2030, Grand View Research).

Rather than using mammals or fermentation vats, Thompson envisioned leveraging one of nature’s most efficient silk producers: the silkworm. His insight was simple but revolutionary, insert spider silk DNA into silkworms so that they could spin the protein naturally, at industrial scale.

Collaboration with the University of Notre Dame: PiggyBac Technology and the Birth of a Platform

To execute that vision, Kraig Labs entered into a pivotal collaboration with the University of Notre Dame, where scientists utilized PiggyBac transposon gene-insertion technology, a tool that allows integration of foreign genes into host organisms. Using PiggyBac, Kraig and Notre Dame successfully created the world’s first transgenic silkworms capable of spinning recombinant spider silk in 2010.