A solitary tree growing from a crack in volcanic rock — the image that started Shimanishi's fifteen-year inquiry.
Wakayama, Japan  ·  The observation that started everything

About Primora Bio

A tree growing out of bare rock.

That observation, made by a Japanese pharmacist in the 1950s, is where this mineral chemistry begins. Primora Bio exists because of the question it raised: if water can carry what a tree needs out of solid stone, what else is it capable of carrying?

Our mission

Restore the water. The soil already knows what to do.

We think the next step in agriculture is the medium everything else moves through, and the mineral character that medium has quietly lost. Another chemical or another seed will not reach it.

We are straight about what this does and does not do, and we do not claim what we cannot back up.

Our story

It began with the habit of looking underneath.

Dr. Pierre Kory spent his career in intensive care, much of it as an ICU director. The discipline teaches one habit above all others: when a patient is failing in a dozen ways at once, resist the urge to chase each falling number and hunt instead for the single insult beneath the whole collapse. Reverse that, and the systems that looked like a dozen separate failures begin to re-coordinate on their own.

Years later, studying chronic illnesses that resist simple explanations, he kept following that instinct downward — past the symptom, past the organ, toward whatever sat underneath. In 2024 it led somewhere he did not expect: to the work of a Japanese pharmacist who had asked a similar question about a tree.

A tree growing out of bare rock. No soil, no one tending it. So where was it getting what it needed?

In the 1950s, sitting by the water in post-war Japan, Asao Shimanishi noticed a tree rising directly out of what looked like naked stone — just a crack in a granite boulder, and a trunk emerging from it. He reasoned that rainwater pooling in that crack had dissolved a little of the rock, and that the tree was living on what the water had taken from the stone.

He could not let the question go. Trained as a pharmacist, he turned away from synthetic chemistry and toward the materials that had drawn him since childhood — rocks, and the hidden processes by which the living world sustains itself. It took fifteen years. In 1977 he arrived at a method for liberating a broad spectrum of minerals out of weathered volcanic biotite and into an aqueous solution, something that had been considered impossible.

What he found next was the part that mattered. Added to water, that solution changed how the water behaved — and what changed downstream of it was not one thing but many, across systems that had nothing in common except the water running through them.

That record, largely untranslated and almost unknown outside Japan, is what Dr. Kory spent the following year reading. It produced three books, and it produced two companies — because the same chemistry turns out to serve two different mediums.

The lineage

Fifty years, mostly in one country.

The chemistry is not new. What is new is that anyone outside Japan is paying attention to it.

  1. 1950s

    A tree on a rock

    Sitting by the water in Wakayama, Asao Shimanishi notices a tree growing from a crack in a granite boulder, with no soil beneath it. He concludes that rainwater in the crack has dissolved part of the stone.

  2. 1962–1977

    Fifteen years of work

    He sets out to do deliberately what the rain did slowly: liberate a broad spectrum of minerals from rock into water. It takes fifteen years and an unusual amount of failure.

  3. 1977

    The process

    Shimanishi arrives at an acid extraction that frees the minerals from weathered volcanic biotite and leaves them in soluble sulfate form.

  4. 1985

    Production begins

    He founds Shimanishi Kaken and begins producing the extract — a gold-colored solution carrying a broad, electrically active spectrum of minerals.

  5. 1988

    U.S. patent

    Patent 4,776,963 is granted to Shimanishi and co-inventors for a method of purifying water. It records that the method was novel. It is not evidence that anything performs, and we do not present it as such.

  6. 1990s

    The record widens

    Field reports accumulate across crops, soil, ponds and wastewater — in Japan, and later under a UNDP and Seoul National University project in Korea. Almost none of it is translated.

  7. 2024

    A physician finds it

    Dr. Kory encounters the work while researching chronic illness. What holds his attention is not any single result but that independent observers, decades and disciplines apart, kept reporting movement in the same direction.

  8. 2025

    Two companies

    Aurmina for the water people drink. Primora Bio for the water that grows things. One chemistry, two mediums.

Two products

One mineral chemistry, two mediums.

The same extract, from the same rock, diluted for two very different jobs. Neither is a version of the other.

  • For the water you drink

    Aurmina

    A mineral treatment for drinking water, and a direct alternative to reverse osmosis. It binds contaminants so they can be filtered out, and leaves the minerals in rather than stripping the water bare.

    • Over 245 tested contaminants reduced
    • Minerals left in, not stripped out
    • Add, wait, filter
    Visit aurmina.com (opens in a new tab)
  • Same chemistry

  • For the water that grows things

    Primora Bio

    A conditioner for irrigation and foliar water. It returns mineral character to water that softening, filtration and desalination have stripped, and mobilizes the nutrients a soil already holds.

    • Twenty-nine measured elements in soluble sulfate form
    • Applied at catalytic dose, not fertilizer dose
    • Foliar or soil irrigation

Both are drawn from weathered volcanic biotite sourced in the mountains of Fukushima, Japan.

The team

The people behind it.

  • Dr. Pierre Kory

    Dr. Pierre Kory

    Co-founder

    A critical-care physician of more than twenty years, much of it as an ICU director. He found this work while looking for the thing underneath, which is the only way he knows how to look.

  • Lisa Kory

    Lisa Kory

    CEO & co-founder

    Leads the company. A long-standing health advocate who has spent years on the practical side of getting difficult ideas into people’s hands.

  • Scott Marsland

    Scott Marsland

    Chief Commercial & Product Development Officer

    Clinical practice partner turned operator. Runs product development and the commercial side of both brands.

Standards

How we back it up.

  • Independent elemental analysis

    ICP-MS analysis of the finished product. Every quantified value is published, and the values still outstanding are marked as outstanding.

  • The record, with its limits

    The field record is largely historical, single-operator and untranslated. We publish it with that limitation attached, because you should weigh it yourself.

  • Volcanic mineral origin

    Drawn from weathered volcanic biotite sourced in the mountains of Fukushima, Japan.

  • Reports on request

    Laboratory analyses are sent to anyone who asks. No form, no gate.

Boundaries

What we do not claim.

Start with the water.

One bottle, folded into the watering you already do.

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