How biotech startup Loopworm plans to use silkworm cocoon proteins in therapeutics

Bengaluru-based biotech startup Loopworm Private Ltd has developed a technology platform that produces protein from silkworm pupae. The product may soon be used as a diagnostic reagent and in biotech research and human and animal therapeutics, says co-founder & CEO Ankit Alok Bagaria.

“These are all imported at the moment. We can indigenise it using our proprietary technology platform LoopBac. We are two years away from it,” he says.

In an interaction with Fortune India, Bagaria explained that Loopworm value-adds silkworm cocoon, a byproduct of silk manufacturing, by extracting protein from it, and that goes as an ingredient in poultry, pet and aquafeed. “We process them into protein powder and oil. Both are branded. It is an additive. Fish feed manufacturers and pet food manufacturers use it for productivity and health benefits for the animals consuming the feed,” says Bagaria.

The fact that silkworms are rich in proteins is well-known and farmers have been using the waste material they receive from silk weavers as fish and aquafeed in its raw form for a long time. However, it was only after Loopworm developed its platform technology that silkworm cocoon began to be processed to extract the protein.

“India produces almost 40,000 tonnes of silk every year. Whenever you process 50 kg of cocoon, you get 7 kg of silk. So we are looking at almost 280,000 tonnes of cocoons being processed. In this process, 43 kg out of 50 kg of cocoon used to make silk remain underutilised. This becomes our raw material,” says Bagaria.

Loopworm operates LoopFactory, a 6,000 MTA (metric tonne per annum) insect-processing facility spanning 4,000 sq. m in Bengaluru. The company also has an in-house research facility called LoopLab, adjacent to its manufacturing facility.

Stating that the company has just turned profitable, Bagaria said a major Series A fundraise is happening to expand its operations further. Loopworm exports its products to nearly a dozen countries, though India remains its biggest market. The company’s immediate plan is to produce viral antigens and VLPs for diagnostic reagents (IVD/RUO) and specialty enzymes using this platform as it has low regulatory barrier and high near-term demand.

Its next aim is to develop kinases and membrane proteins for pharmaceutical R&D and custom research-use-only work. In the long term, the company wants to manufacture veterinary and human vaccine antigens, and higher-complexity therapeutic proteins.

Loopworm established proof of concept in 2025 by producing a green fluorescent protein which is unique to jellyfish inside silkworm pupae and has since validated the process with more than five proteins at its pilot recombinant facility, with scalable methods.

Bagaria and Loopworm co-founder Abhi Gawri came across a United Nations report which stated, “Insects are the Future of Food & Feed” in 2019. They zeroed in on the silkworm, the world’s most studied insect, with over 4,000 years of domestication, 150+ years of documented research and 20+ years of bioinformatics data. Silkworms already produce nature’s most structurally complex proteins; what the world lacked was the infrastructure to harness that capability. Bagaria and Gawri looked at this as an engineering problem and set out to build a protein-manufacturing platform that holds at scale, under pressure, for the long run. And that gave birth to Loopworm.