Stephanie Michelsen from Jellatech, One the Come Up

For the nineteenth episode of “One the Come UP,” I was joined by Ms Stephanie Michelsen – the CEO and Founder of Jellatech, a biotechnology company based out of Raleigh, North Carolina that seeks to create highly valuable proteins in a scalable, efficient, and sustainable way. Her career began in Denmark, where she attended the University of Copenhagen, and then the University of Denmark. It was also during this time that she partook in a scholarship where she interned at biotech startups in the Bay Area for 6 months. After realizing most biotech companies were focused on recreating animal agriculture, she decided to flip the script – what would happen if animal agriculture disappeared? Like the collagen and gelatin they seek to produce, Jellatech is pioneering the biotechnology industry. Starting in 2020, it was only two years later that they created their first full length, triple helical, and functional collagen. Building on that success, earlier this year they were able to produce a second supply of Type 1 human collagen. Their process involves the extraction of a single cell from a tissue, which they immortalize to create billions of cells and generations. They take this cell bank to the collagen production phase, where they extract and purify a small sample of collagen. It sounds like science fiction, but in a few weeks as of February 28, 2025, it will be a commercially scalable technology.