AquaNab raises funding to fight salmon’s $4bn sea lice problem with alpaca nanoantibodies

Hamburg biotech is taking an unusual shot at salmon farming’s most expensive pest, and it starts with an alpaca. AquaNab is developing tiny antibodies, derived from the animals and delivered through fish feed, to treat and prevent sea lice.

The parasite it is chasing is a genuine scourge. Sea lice cost the aquaculture industry billions of dollars a year in treatment, lost production and fish deaths, a toll AquaNab puts at around $4bn, and they have proven stubbornly hard to keep down.

The trouble is that the cures can be almost as bad as the disease. Farmers currently reach for chemical baths and mechanical delousing, both of which are costly, stressful for the fish, and increasingly scrutinised by regulators worried about chemical runoff and animal welfare.

AquaNab’s answer leans on a well-established quirk of biology. Camelids like alpacas produce unusually small, sturdy antibodies, known as nanoantibodies or nanobodies, and the company says it is the first in the world to deliver them to fish orally, mixed into feed.

That delivery route is the clever part. The company’s research shows the antibodies, which it brands AquaNabs, can survive the journey through the gut, cross the fish’s intestinal barrier and reach the bloodstream, all without the handling and stress that conventional treatments inflict.

The science has a serious pedigree behind it. Chief scientific officer Dr Alejandro Rojas was among the first researchers anywhere to develop neutralising nanobodies against SARS-CoV-2, and chief executive Dr Ruth Tamara Montero is a fish immunologist trained at Germany’s Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut.

“Right now, producers are stuck choosing between costly, stressful treatments and losses from the parasite itself,” she said, adding that AquaNab wants to offer “a way out of that cycle.”

The company is careful to cast sea lice as only the beginning. Its first product targets Atlantic salmon, but the founders describe the underlying approach as a platform that could be adapted to bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases across many farmed species.

Investors are buying the platform story. AquaNab has taken an undisclosed investment from Finland’s Nordic Foodtech VC, notable because it is the firm’s first bet outside the Nordic region, a small vote of confidence in a company still proving its science.

Its partner Mika Kukkurainen argued the idea could stretch well beyond one parasite, describing feed-based nanoantibody science as a way to rethink health and resilience across food production, with the promise of lower losses and healthier animals.

The pitch sits inside a broader shift from chemicals to biology in food production. Startups are increasingly offering natural alternatives to harsh inputs, from fungal-based crop protection that aims to replace synthetic pesticides, and AquaNab is applying the same instinct underwater.

Aquaculture in particular has become a hotbed of experimentation. The industry has tried everything from putting salmon on the blockchain to rethinking feed with insect protein, all in the name of making a fast-growing source of food more sustainable.

The wider promise, as ever, is feeding more people with less harm. Biotech is steadily reshaping what ends up on the plate, whether that is gene-edited bananas or precision therapeutics for farmed fish, and AquaNab is betting salmon health is part of that story.

A dose of caution is warranted, though. AquaNab is still working toward proof of concept, the investment sum was not disclosed, and delivering a novel biologic through feed at commercial scale raises real questions about efficacy, cost and the regulatory path for treating food fish.

It will not have the field to itself either. Sea lice is a multibillion-dollar prize, and the big animal-health companies are chasing it hard, so a small Hamburg startup will have to prove its elegant idea works in the water, not just in the lab.