Alejandro Buffo Sempe is the Co-Founder and CEO of Giraffe Bio, a biotechnology startup developing biomolecular reagents to improve metal recovery in mining. He is an engineer with 15 years of experience across commodities trading, technology ventures, and investment, including five years based in New York. Alejandro leads Giraffe Bio’s work at the intersection of biotechnology and mineral processing, developing programmable bio-collectors for flotation and other bio-enabled extraction approaches. The company is currently working with global mining partners to validate these technologies for copper recovery and impurity control in complex orebodies. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandrobuffo
"Programmable Bio-Collectors: A New Approach to Selective Copper Flotation"
This talk introduces a new class of biomolecular flotation reagents designed to selectively bind target minerals such as chalcopyrite while rejecting impurities like arsenic, zinc, and iron. The presentation will cover how synthetic biology and high-throughput screening can be used to design mine-specific bio-collectors that function as drop-in replacements for conventional reagents. Lab-scale results from copper sulfide flotation tests will be discussed, including improvements in recovery across different particle sizes and enhanced concentrate selectivity. The session will also explore how programmable reagents could help miners process increasingly complex orebodies while reducing chemical usage and improving process efficiency.
Case study: https://docsend.com/view/fn2b77zfxjifauhc"