But close your eyes for a moment and dream. What if we could grow cost-effective and sustainable solutions to many of these crises using the same technology we’ve used to brew beer for millennia… with a modern twist? Renewable energy, carbon dioxide as feedstock and a few subtle tweaks to the cellular cocktail of life.
It might sound utopian, but unlike flying cars, the technology is already bringing products to market. It’s called synthetic biology and if it is not on your radar yet, then it should be.
What is synthetic biology?
Synthetic biology reimagines how we manufacture everything: from food and medicines to textiles, biofuels and even building materials.
It starts with life’s common denominator — the cell — and reprogrammes it by fine-tuning the basic building blocks written in DNA.
Say you’re looking for a new medicine, such as an antibody. In nature, we can find the DNA blueprint to make an antibody, then reshuffle the building blocks in new ways to hit the disease targets we aim to overcome. We can do the same for enzymes to make better ingredients and materials.
It’s “biology by design,” as WEF technology pioneer Ginkgo Bioworks aptly puts it. But they ask, “What if we could grow everything?”
That vision is seemingly crystallising when you look at various examples, such as technology that can read the DNA of almost any organism quickly and cheaply, powerful computational and automation capabilities, renewable energy-powered fermentation and an ecosystem of innovative companies driving a switch to sustainable biomanufacturing.
Investors agree. Ginkgo’s platform to design, build, test and iterate biological solutions at scale is now valued at $2.4 billion. SynBioBeta last week reported over $10 billion in investment in 2022 and other reports show the global bio-economy growing at more than 13% year-on-year, accounting for almost $1 trillion of the US GDP. In 2020, a McKinsey report showed that 60% of global manufacturing inputs could be made with biology and predictions for the future global annual market range from $4 trillion to $30 trillion.
SynBioBeta, an innovation network for biological engineers, innovators, entrepreneurs and investors, looks to address many of these issues each year at its annual conference. In addition, conference attendees often tackle thought-provoking ideas about what the limitations of the field truly are.
So, what can we build with synthetic biology?
What can’t we build with synthetic biology might be the more apropos question.
Our supply chains are in dire need of more efficient and cost-effective energy and materials and life has long held the secret. Plants, fungi and bacteria require only air, water and scavenged minerals to build a catalogue of hundreds of thousands of molecules. Food, fuel, antibiotics, wood, textiles — the list goes on — all come from nature.
Since Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, we’ve come a long way in understanding how it all works. A quarter of a century ago, we finally cracked the human genome. The technology to read and edit DNA has advanced so much that the $1.3 billion-valued Twist Bioscience can offer “the DNA you want, the way you want it.” At scale, delivered via mail order.
Now that we can programme cells to make innovative products based on this new way of operating nature’s code and brew them up in fermenters (we’ll get to that), the solutions to our manufacturing problems are rolling in thick and fast.
Want sustainable alternatives to petrochemical-guzzling food additives, cosmetics and fragrances? Conagen brews up specialised microbes to produce flavoured fats, oils and amino acids. How about nitrogen-based fertilizers unbeholden to the perils of geopolitical instability? Pivot Bio has the microbes for that.
Yearning for textiles that don’t wreak havoc on the environment? AmSilk, whose vision is to make smart biotech materials a part of everyday life, has a bio-fabricated alternative to silk. Meanwhile, Colorifix is taking us back to natural dyes — designing microbes that can replace industrial chemicals and processes that churn through and pollute five trillion litres of fresh water, our most precious resource, each year.
Imagine if we could even replace concrete, “the most destructive material on Earth?” Perhaps surprisingly, synthetic biology also has a solution for that in Biomason’s biological bricks.
The sustainable solution to the supply chain crisis
Along with the almost limitless number of potential new molecules we can generate, the circular approach of the synthetic biology industry is another step towards the sustainable future our supply chains need.
If the cell is the denominator of all life, then the ecosystem brings us together and synthetic biology recognizes that key fact. Innovative renewable energy, such as green hydrogen, is growing hand-in-hand with synthetic biology, while companies look to upcycle industrial waste as feedstock.
Solar Foods use hydropower and wind energy to make Solein, a sustainable fermented protein. Air Protein, meanwhile, which uses similar technology to grow meat from renewable energy and carbon dioxide captured from factories, is looking to apply direct carbon capture to its process eventually.
The best bit of all this, as far as supply chains are concerned, is that the technology could be applied anywhere it’s needed. Food, drugs, fuel and building materials could be brewed in the desert or tundra.
If that sounds fanciful, Orbital Farms is already pioneering a project in Spaceport America to bring industrial-scale circular manufacture in the desert to life. The aim is to one-day support colonies in space, but first, it can sure-up steady supply chains of food and materials down here on Earth.
Scaling up synthetic biology
The question now may be, can synthetic biology scale up? The answer is an overwhelming yes. The more investment, innovation and ingenuity that goes into the process, the greater the returns will be. Along with renewable energy, computational tools to accelerate the discovery process constantly improve.
Perhaps, Solugen may offer a vision for the future of sustainable biomanufacturing, here and now, with a new kind of factory.
Its Bioforge goes beyond fermentation, using designed enzymes and simple feedstocks, such as sugar and wind power, to scale up synthetic biology to 40,000 litres of production. Manufacturing occurs at room temperature, leaving behind no waste water or air emissions.
Solugen produces biological solutions for water treatment, including preventing copper-induced steel corrosion. By 2030, it aims to have the capacity to make 90% of chemicals and to replace 5 billion plastic bottles’ worth of non-degradable plastic with its own bio-plastics.
In a world crying out for more resilient supply chains in the face of multiple crises, that’s a vision we should all get on board with.
This article, written by John Cumbers, Founder of SynBioBeta, has been shared in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and the World Economic Forum’s Terms of Use. The original text was published here on the World Economic Forum website.
Photo by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash