BRAIN Biotech AG announced that it has chosen the University of Leiden as a partner for the development of a high efficiency microbial production strain. Within this joint development project, BRAIN's proprietary genome editing technology, BRAIN Engineered Cas (BEC), will be employed to optimize various production strains. The University of Leiden will focus on applying this technology to further improve particularly the Aspergillus based production technology. On May 6, 2021, BRAIN had announced the development of the BRAIN Engineered Cas (BEC) protein as a novel genome editing nuclease with validated genome editing activity in various microorganisms.