Engineering Equitable Technologies with Ariel Furst

well thank you for your patience good morning I'm Jim Roberts I'm a technology licensing officer at the TLO here at MIT and I work very closely with our first golden speaker this morning Ariel first Ariel first received her Bachelor science degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago working on the chemical synthesis of proteins she completed her PhD at the California Institute of Technology developing new cancer Diagnostics based on DNA charged transport she was then a postdoctural fellow at the University of California Berkeley and now Ariel is the Paul M cook Career Development profess assistant Prof professor of chemical engineering at MIT Ariel is passionate about stem Outreach and increasing ort uh increasing par participation of underrepresented groups in engineering she invents technologies that improve human and environmental health by increasing Equitable access to resources her lab develops technologies that solve problems related to health care and sustainability by harnessing the capabilities of biological molecules and cells and based on their understanding of the biological Redux process she is a founder two startups seabo and Helix carbon and you'll hear from her about those today as a t uh I've had the privilege of filing several patent applications with immediate commercial potential for aerial and they include CO2 capture and conversion DNA electrochemistry cost effective point of views biosensing metal phenolic Network Coatings microbial degradation of pesticides electroactive microbes for sustainable Tech Technologies you can see her interests are very wide ranging so Ariel will speak for the better part of the remaining hour and we'll answer any questions afterwards uh we invite you to stay for a short reception afterwards with her and if she's able to stay and uh with other members of the TLO as well um and I also want to let you know that we have another golden speaker next Tuesday at the same time 10:00 in the morning here and that will be uh ctac caraman who is with the astronautics and Aeronautics uh department so I'd like you to welcome or help me welcome our first Goen speaker Ariel first thank you thank you everybody um so today I figured I'd tell you a little bit about my path to being an entrepreneur it wasn't something I thought I was going to do when I uh was getting my PhD and it's really really the ecosystem at MIT that's enabled me to um commercialize Technologies for my group so just to make sure everybody's awake this morning what do we notice about this picture of Earth at night it's lit up it's lit up but only in certain places right so there are some regions where there's a lot of electricity and other regions where there's little to no electricity indicated by the amount of light um generally the global South H is pretty dark compared to develop Nations and this is because about 1 in 10 people globally don't have access to electricity still this means that about 2 and a half billion people rely on dirty fuels to heat their homes and cook their food and so this is really what motivates my group um is the idea of energy equity for sustainability environmental remediation and human health so has anybody heard of the concept of energy Equity before I see a couple nods this is good because there's a row of my group here so they should all be nodding this is basically just the concept that disadvantaged groups have been disproportionately impacted by the negative impacts of things like industrialization and so we see it as our job as researchers to develop technologies that support these groups um when we think about kind of inequitable Technologies one of the examples I like to use as a Tesla it might be great for reducing emissions but if only 0.1% of 0.1% % of 0.1% of the global population can access this technology how big of a difference can it really make and so my group is motivated to make accessible and inexpensive technologies that can be broadly used so I wanted to talk a little bit about my background first um as I mentioned entrepreneurship was not something that was on my radar before coming to MIT so um how do we think about problems and how did I kind of get to where I am well we're going to have another quiz now so basically since humans have been building things um we've been taking inspiration from natural systems this is a suit of armor from 1500s ad inspired by the scales of the Pengalin quiz time does anybody know what this is It's swimsuit material from the 2010 Olympics that has since been banned because it gives swimmers too much of an advantage and it's based on the structure of shark skin how about this one velcro yes nice to yes it's velcro and velcro which we think of as something that's totally human derived right is actually based on the interaction between seed Coatings and animal fur so when we think about the built environment we can really trace a lot of the Innovation there back to Natural systems and so that's what my lab focuses on now but that's not actually where I started so um as anyone who does research in here knows most of the most exciting things in research come out of multiple failures um what got me interested in research was not chemistry class in high school I actually hated science class it wasn't until I had the opportunity to work in a lab where the project was pitched to me as trying to figure out ways we could use proteins to power cell phones with vodka as an input what high schooler doesn't want to figure out how to power a cell phone with vodka right unfortunately this didn't work but it was the start of um what I saw as the excitement in research which is not knowing the answer to the question so then um I moved on after undergraduate to my PhD in postto in California where uh in my PhD we thought about how we could use d as more than just genetic material we could use its physical properties to U give it additional function uh it can act like velcro and it can also act like a wire and then in my postto with Matt Francis at Berkeley he thought about how we could use protein materials specifically the Coatings around virus particles as things like drug delivery vehicles so in both of my experiences um these were fundamental scientists not thinking about engineering necessarily but really taking what biology has given us and applying it in different ways than we normally think about after that came to MIT started my group um this is our most recent group picture uh and what we like to focus on is how we can think about things that are easy to implement and that's really been one of the um most rewarding things about MIT is learning how we can take take what we do in the lab and translate it to something that's actually commercializable so the motivation for our first company SE bio was nothing to do with what the company looks like now so I figured I'd just talk a little bit about the pathway to how seya got to where it is so what we were originally thinking about in my group is how we can study microbial biodiversity so along with climate change loss of biodiversity is one of the major negative um impacts on our globe right now and as we can see uh we've lost a significant percentage of the global number of species these are basically the number of species that have gone extinct since 1970 and importantly microbes really are the basis for all life on Earth they cycle nutrients in soil they help protect both plants and animals and humans from external pathogens and they help us metabolize our food in our guts and so as we lose that biodiversity we become more susceptible to disease our soil becomes less healthy and we are less able to sustain our global population so we wanted to take microbes from the environment and study them in our L the problem is soil is a nice cozy environment for the microbes when we take a sample of microbes from the soil and try to transport them into the harsh environment of a lab we lose about 90% of the species and so our goal was to figure out a way to just take microbes from their n natural habitats and bring them to our lab what we decided to try was a self-assembling material that forms on the outside of individual microbes and kind of acts like a suit of armor you can also think of it like the coating on the outside of the M&M that helps prevent the insid from melting so what are these suits of armor made of well we wanted to think about things that were inexpensive and easy to access and if we were going to be using them on microbial samples that were coming from things like soil we also wanted them to be food grade so we found materials that were derived from polyphenols which are things like green tea extract or tannins from coffee and tea as well as vitamins and minerals that you take every day things like iron and manganese that are found in supplements and when you mix these two things together they self assemble into this very thin coating that forms on the outside of microbes and these are called metal phenolic networks because they're made of polyphenols and metals um and I'll be referring to them as MPN and these are really cool because they form really easily just by mixing these components so if you watch this video here this is just the microbes being coated all we have to do is mix the metal with poly phenols and microbes and that blue color is the coating forming and as we change the components of these Coatings we change the physical properties of those Coatings and that's what gives us these different colors shown here and if we image microbes after they've been coated we can see that these Coatings form homogeneously on the surface and we think that this is really important for actually protecting the microbes so this is just an unco microbe and this is a microb that's been coated with a layer of those metal phenolic networks and by temm imag we can see that the metal ions here are what's giving us the kind of sharp contrast and that microbe is fully coated and because these Coatings are very thin they're about 2 to 10 nanm thick we can actually coat these subcellular structures so this really allows us um to protect the whole microb and what we see is that when we coat these in batch so obviously we're not going to do this one microbe at a time we get uniform Coatings across all of the microbes so this is just a stain that we've put on the coating and you can see here the shell structure that forms and each of the microbes in this Matrix is completely coated and they're all evenly Co and what we found is that these Coatings protect against pretty much every stressor we could think of throwing at them this ranges from things like oxidative stress putting them in hydrogen peroxide UV and radiation exposure temperature fluctuations chemical exposure mechanical stressors and high salinity and so we thought well maybe this could be useful for things Beyond just preserving microbes to bring them back to the lab right maybe we could actually use this to improve human health how many people in here take probiotics regularly awesome about 99.9% of the microbes in that are dead and that's because they few species that we know how to protect really well but the manufacturing process is very harsh on them and the problem is probiotics companies are basically marketing companies and so they don't care how many live microbes they give you they just want you to buy their product and so we know how to manufacture these uh we get about 0.001% viable cells but there are many microbes that we think could be beneficial for treating things like Crohn's disease IBS and other kind of diseases that would require an FDA approved treatment but we can't actually manufacture these because they're very delicate so what we thought initially for our metal phenolic networks was that we could actually use them to help us uh move beyond the probiotics you buy at the grocery store and so this is when we got involved in the MIT ecosystem we originally submitted a grant on this to the despond center this gave us some seed funding that allowed us to take these metal phenolic networks codings basically from fundamental research to where we could have an MVP where we could have a minimum viable product and this is where I met Leon Sandler who used to be the director and I also met Jim Roberts in person and that is actually one of the best things about the despond grants is you actually get to sit once a quarter with your technology licensing officer and discuss the progess on the project and IP strategy we then decided to do the iore program this is an NSF funded program that basically teaches you how to do customer Discovery so Roman in the Martin trust Center runs a New England version of this so it's a kind of mini version so we did that and then we did the full version which is a very intensive 7we course during summer where we had an Madden who uh badass microbiologist who's worked at a variety of startups including indigoag as our industry Mentor so this program is a full-time program where you have to complete 150 customer interviews in 7 weeks you have an industry Mentor who helps make connections and it's really kind of the best way that we've found to train ourselves as scientists to be entrepreneurs I then got very lucky because the first cohort of the future Founders program um was starting right as I core was ending and so kit hickey from The Martin trust Center and Sangita ran this and along with these amazing women um I got another industry mentor and got to spend a semester digging in on our what we thought was our beach Head Market so our initial Beach Head Market was going to be living Biotherapeutics this is a fancy word for FDA approved microbes so these are different from probiotics because they would actually have to go through clinical testing and part of the reason that this is only a$1 billion market right now is because microbes are really hard to manufacture so we can't actually make them to do clinical testing the original company name for this was Farm more and this is part of the reason why it's really important to uh talk to marketing people and think about your branding we later changed to se which I'll talk about um but basically what we found through customer Discovery was that about 60 microbes had gone to pre-clinical trials um only 25 had made it to phase one and in Phase One you don't have to have a final formulation so here they were basically making patients drink microbes in the stuff that the microbes were grown in it's pretty gross um phase two is when you need a final formulation so you see that pretty big drop off only five have moved to phase three and currently there are zero FDA approved living Biotherapeutics and again this is because these microbes have to be alive in order to be efficacious and there's so much batto batch variability that they can't even get consistent batching for clinical trials so our initial targets for this were two microbes B Theta ioto Micron and bellus B Theta is an Anor and it's found in healthy people's guts and very high amounts and it's significantly depleted in people with IBS or Crohn's disease and so it's been hypothesized that if we deliver this to your gut it could help treat those diseases because it's known to secrete anti-inflammatory compounds the problem is this microbe is what's called a facultative anob which means if it's exposed to oxygen it dies most of our manufacturing plants are full of oxygen right in fact in the US there's only one plant that has end to end manufacturing that's totally anerobic and it costs about 10,000 times as much as standard manufacturing per batch so it's prohibitively expensive additionally bellus is often found as a probiotic uh and this is easy to manufacture because it sporulates so you can formulate it as a Spore it's very Hardy the problem is it is so hardy that it goes through your entire digestive system as a Spore so it has no benefit so we wanted to see if we could actually protect this in its vegetative state so it might implant and actually be useful beus is also important because not only is it prevalent in healthy microbiomes in our guts but it's also prevalent in healthy soil microbiomes and this is something we consistently saw as we learned more and more about the composition of microbiomes what's healthy for our guts a lot of those species are the same ones that are beneficial in the soil so as we learned more and more about living Biotherapeutics we realized that this was really going to be a pretty niche market and it could help people with things like IBS and Crohn's disease but there were bigger issues we wanted to tackle especially when we think about global Equity so by 2050 it's anticipated we're going to need about 50% more food to feed the global population and currently most farming especially in the United States is done with chemical fertilizers these have been fantastic uh for feeding the global population right now it's estimated that uh the addition of chemical fertilizers feeds about half of the global population so it's en it's enabled Earth to sustain a global population above 8 billion people the problem is its production causes a significant amount of greenhouse gases about 2% of global greenhouse gases are just because of the habash process for nitrogen fertilizer production it also damages native ecosystems and a lot of it is wasted as runoff and not only that but where we're concerned for Farmers it's increasingly expensive and so farmers are now having to decide between applying the optimal amount of fertilizer or buying the right number of seeds or watering efficiently because their margins are so slim well in nature microbes do everything that chemical fertilizers do so they can balance soil nutrients they can improve crop stress tolerance they can even secrete pesticides So in theory if we can formulate the right microbes we can pretty much completely negate the need for agrochemicals in general that's everything from fertilizers to pesticides not only that but when people have added these mic microbial products to their Farmland even when they're still using chemical fertilizers they see improved crop growth and yield the problem as you've probably gathered at this point is that the microbes have to be alive and just like our guts much of the soil is not exposed to oxygen and so these microbes Don't Like Oxygen they're very delicate and when they're not in their native niche in their native home they're very hard to grow and uh manufacture so when we thought about moving beyond human health one of the microbes we wanted to Target was ponos chlorus this is a really heat sensitive microbe so if you heat it above room temperature about 25° C it dies that's a problem right for any sort of distribution because you either then need cold chain which is expensive and energy intensive or you significantly reduce your yields but but this microbe is really cool because it can pull nitrogen gas out of the atmosphere and turn it into ammonia so it can produce chemical fertilizers on site without any excess energy without high temperatures and pressures and it can also secrete antifungal compounds so it can act as both a natural pesticide and a natural nitrogen fertilizer and so this is when we pivoted and moved our focus of our company from what it was at pharmore which was human health to sustainable agriculture seya is the goddess of Bountiful Harvest so we moved towards a more kind of holistic approach to the company and um this is our initial team uh Timothy Mo who is a 2024 EMA here uh is the CEO and co-founder and we recently hired a third co-founder Heidi Ares who's also the head of our R&D and the focus of seio is to broadly enable the use of microbes so we've talked a little bit about human health we can do things like living Biotherapeutics we can also make vaccines more accessible so if we don't need cold chain more people can access vaccines we can also do things like replace fertilizers or do enhanced weaing which is basically a fancy word for doing direct air capture of CO2 and sequestering it in soil we can develop new building materials using microbes and we can move Beyond chemical synthesis so if we replace chemicals with microbes for synthetic processes we can decrease the amount of solvents we need decrease the amount of waste we produce and overall kind of improve the sustainability of our chemical ecosystem and so as I mentioned we can protect against the variet of stressors so B Theta is that gut microb that doesn't like oxygen right so what we were able to do is to take this guy coat it in our metal phenolic networks and leave it on a benchtop when we then tried to grow it you can see that our coated cells grew while as you would expect all of our uncoded ones died so we've now enabled the production of a microbe that couldn't be produced before similarly BCG is the tuberculosis vaccine it's a microb it's basically the cow version of tuberculosis the problem is it needs cold chain storage right now and the majority of where this vaccine is distributed is in places like India where it's very high heat and humidity and as you can see here we can store this guy at 50° C that's about 130° Fahrenheit at high humidity for a couple weeks and so what this allows is places that don't have constant access to things like electricity or cold storage to now maintain a supply of this vaccine as I mentioned we're also interested in aop chapus that's a guy that can both basically fix nitrogen in the soil and make pesticides on site we also stuck this guy in an oven at 50° C and 48% humidity these are conditions that are prevalent in storage in places like India in Brazil where they can't currently store chemical fertilizers because of the explosion risk that that high heat makes so as you can see when we stick these guys in an oven we have multiple different formulations that all protect with one that protects even better and as you would expect the unco ones are all dead what was really surprising to us though is the impact that these stress microbes had on germination so if we look at germination of all of these different crops which is what the students who were doing this study wanted to take home at the end of the study we can add either just water this is our control fresh microbes so this is the standard for regenerative agriculture right now these have to be grown on site so it's limited to very wealthy Farms we can also take freeze-dried microbes that have been stressed and so we would expect most of these to be dead or are coated and stress microbes and as you can see across the board we have about 150% higher germination at 10 days with our Co stress microbes even than with fresh microbes So This truly is an enabling technology for the broad use of microbes as I mentioned we can also use this for the built environment so this is work by yukyung my postto who's looking very embarrassed right now um microbes can basically take CO2 from the atmosphere combine it with the Magnesium or uh calcium ion and make limestone and so this allows you to do direct air capture while also making tough materials the problem with these right now is that if we try to incorporate microbes into things like cement in order to protect those microbes we have to use squishy materials usually think about like a gummy vitamin that's effectively what people are using so that destabilizes the cement right so now we can only use this for decorative purposes but we know that with our Coatings we can dry microbes we can pretty much do whatever we want to them and they'll survive so now we can put these microbes into a cement mix this is a 10 cm x 10 cm slab of cement and after 26 days we get 40% crack healing so we've been able to actually heal macr scale Cracks by just incorporating 0.1 we% of these microbes and so basically what seya has now is a portfolio based on this platform technology that allows us to use microbes across all these different Industries for everything ranging from Human Health applications to agriculture to CO2 capture and utilization and so that was when I realized that I very much enjoyed entrepr entrepreneurship in general and got exposed to some additional resources on campus so 15360 is Bill's class disciplined entrepreneurship and 15366 is climate and energy Ventures which is a team-based class where uh groups of MBA students basically work on projects pitched by faculty so it's a fantastic resource if you have a technology but are not sure how it would fit in a commercialization strategy and this is where Helix carbon was derived from teams from 15360 in 15366 ended up merging and co-founding this company and the fundamental basis of Helix carbon is thinking about CO2 uh from a chemical engineering perspective so if you shove enough electrons into it maybe it could be something profitable and useful and we can see that here so CO2 per ton market price is obviously not very profitable but if we can basically reduce it enough to generate things like carbon monoxide which is a component of sin gas formic acid or ethylene that price per ton makes it a valuable asset and the way we want to do this is using electrochemistry so electrochemistry basically allows you to take clean energy inputs things like solar or wind mix them with CO2 and water and make things like ethylene which are starting materials for polymers and Aviation fuels which are going to be tough to decarbonize Industries so why isn't everyone who's an electrochemist on campus doing this right now well the problem is because we do this in water the amount of energy we're putting in to turn CO2 into things like carbon monoxide is pretty similar to The amount of energy it takes to split water and generate hydrogen so a lot of our energy in these processes is not going where we want it to it's generating hydrogen rather than reducing CO2 so going back all the way to the beginning if we remember thinking about bioinspired materials we thought well maybe if we look to Natural systems where we have things like enzymes that function very specifically and selectively with very high efficiency in water we can improve the ratio of CO2 reduction to water splitting and so we looked to small molecules basically and based on my previous work using DNA we thought well maybe we could harness these unique physical properties of this molecule to improve that ratio after catalysis so if we think of DNA not just as genetic code but as these two individual strands that can come together it's basically like a velcro right if we attach one thing to one sequence and something else to the complement they will naturally come together without any additional uh energy and so what we found is that if we just scaffold known catalysts with DNA we decrease our over potentials by more than 30% so our overall system energy consumption is about 30% lower this translates to about a 25% lower system cost this is also because we no longer need precious metal catalysts we get about 90% product period so we're generating about 90% carbon monoxide and only 10% hydrogen which for carbon monoxide is fine because the other component of sin gas is hydrogen and when we take all this together at the current electricity prices we can make S gas for $350 a ton current pricing for fossil fuel drive S gas is about $700 a ton so what this means is that people who would use this technology to capture CO2 and convert it to Sid gas would not only be doing it for sustainability but also for profitability which really seems to be the only way to move forward with sustainable Technologies and so what we see this is just the data from that are higher stability so we don't need to change out our catalyst's frequency we decrease our over potential while also increasing basically the number of molecules we get out for the energy we put in and we speed up this reaction by about a thousandfold so we're generating significantly more product that's more pure with way less energy input and so I just wanted to introduce the car the Helix carbon team Evan is a 2024 MIT MBA David is a 2025 MIT MBA uh we have an amazing Mentor from dashb funding from this um and these have been our funing sources so far for Helix carbon and that is what I had to tell you about today this is the story of the first two technologies from my lab that have spun out um I hope you've seen the connection in how we approach challenges in sustainability which is to think about how we can generate technologies that are affordable and accessible and I also obviously need to thank my lab I started in 2019 so many of my first graduate students uh join the lab without having met me in person we've had an amazing team many of whom are here and who you can talk to about their experience during the networking session we've also had an amazing group of undergrads currently our lab has graduated 60 year Ops so we've had an amazing experience with them and they've significantly contributed to a lot of the work I've talked about today we also have had amazing high school students and amazing interactions with people on campus like the T office as well as groups like jws that were some of the first to give us funding so thank you and I am happy to take questions [Applause] [Music]

2025-01-23 14:00

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