皇家华人

Javier graduated with an聽MSc in Biochemical Engineering at 皇家华人聽in 2016. on his return to Mexico after his postgraduate studies he co-founded聽a startup that buys agricultural wastes to poor farmers in Mexico and transforms聽them into xylitol, a natural sweetener that aims to taste聽identical聽to sugar and benefit聽human health.

We're very pleased to announce that Javier's enterprise beat an array of global competitors to win聽the Chivas The Venture competition this month, which means an investment of $310,000 to put towards development.

Javier writes:

"Our production process is based on biotechnological methods. We collect the agricultural wastes, employ a pretreatment step to release xylose (an abundant carb in nature) inside of them and then we use a
fermentative process to transform that xylose into xylitol. For creating this process, my studies at 皇家华人聽were crucial. My MSc. degree at 皇家华人 allowed me to understand the fundamentals for designing a production process for transforming agricultural residues into valuable chemicals. I remember learning for the first time the different types of pretreatments commonly used in biorefineries while having a lecture with Frank Baganz. Also, being able to design a bioreactor was fundamental for scaling up our process, which I gladly learned with Gary Lye. Xilinat has been internationally awarded due to its positive social and environmental impact as we:

• Avoid pollution by using agricultural wastes as raw materials.
• Give farmers and extra income by buying their residues.
• Sell a natural product that benefits the health of consumers.

In 2017, the MIT recognized our technology as one of the top 35 innovations in Latin America and today we are representing Mexico on the final of the most important contest for social entrepreneurs, 鈥淭he
Venture鈥�. We are competing against 19 different teams to earn part of a 1M USD price. Moreover, we聽are also competing for 50k USD given to the People鈥檚 Choice Award."

"It's great to see Javier's startup being recognised and making an impact in this field, we encourage everyone to support him by voting for Xilinat in The Venture"
Gary Lye, head of UCL Biochemical Engineering, April 2019