Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Microbes, meat and materials: biotech meets climatetech

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Biotech has enormous potential across a wide array of climate solutions. It can be used to create alternative proteins, remove carbon from the atmosphere, clean up fertilizer, or to create renewable fuels. But it also comes with some scaling challenges.  This week, Shayle talks about the intersection of biotech and climatetech with Arye Lipman. Arye is a biologist and a general partner at MarsBio, a bio-focused early-stage fund. He also writes a Substack newsletter on biotech called The Last Great Mystery. Arye and Shayle talk about the dream of synthetic biology: to use biology like a software platform and program cells to make whatever you want. Arye is cautious on this front, and points out the areas where biotech is limited. They also cover lab-grown meat, building materials, microbes to fix nitrogen in the soil, genetically engineering plants to sequester more carbon, and Shayle’s fungal biomass chaise lounge. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world – with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nextracker.com/sustainability to learn more.

from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst. Just to kind of set the stage, I mean, the way I think about it is that we have this almost alien technology all around us, and we're made up of it, too. It's this technology that evolved over the course of billions of years. It's not man-made. We're starting with all this kind of latent alien knowledge around us that we have to figure out and try to use for our purposes. This week, the myriad ways we're using biology, both natural and synthetic, to attack climate problems, and the myriad challenges along the way.

When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts.

Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talked with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Shail Khan. I'm a partner at the venture capital firm, Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. Okay, so I've been saying this for a while, and it's, I'd say, 50% facetious, but I think the greatest battle in climate tech over the next decade is going to be a race between electrochemistry and biology to solve our biggest climate problems. Why? Well, if you really boil it down, probably 80% of the things we need to do in climate tech can be solved either by biologically

or electrochemically converting thing X into thing Y, thing Y being either an exact or a functional equivalent of something we use today. Now, in some cases, there's a clear winner between the two. Passenger transportation, for example, is clearly going to be the domain of electrochemistry, i.e. batteries. And meanwhile, the production of alternative protein is biology's game. But there are plenty of others, think fuels and chemicals and carbon removal, where maybe both have

some role to play. This episode is focused on biology, which, as you'll hear, has enormous promise across a wide array of climate solutions, but also some big challenges, particularly with scaling from a one-liter-type bioreactor to a thousand, 10,000, million-liter bioreactor, which is what has to happen to get to the scale that will matter for climate. So I wanted to take a look at biotech and climate with a broad lens. And in my humble opinion, there's nobody better to do that with than my friend Ari Lipman. Ari is a biologist himself, but currently acts as an investor. He's a general partner at Mars Bio, an entirely bio-focused early-stage fund.

He also writes an awesome substack newsletter that I highly recommend on biotech called The Last great mystery. He also just wrote a piece on biotech plus climate that we're basing a lot of this conversation off of. Before we start the episode, as an aside, on the last episode of Catalyst, Rob Hanson from Monolith said something that's been rattling around in my brain ever since. It was something to the effect of, and this is not a perfect quote, in climate tech, your moat is knowing secrets about nature that others don't. That feels like the best explanation I've heard of what I'm looking to invest in. So if you feel like you've uncovered a secret about nature that will help save it, reach out.

Okay, on to the show. Ari, welcome to Catalyst. Hey, Shail, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Likewise. And very excited to talk all things, biotech plus climate. Let's start with some context. Could you define biotech and then maybe give a little bit of history about its relationship

to the world of climate tech or what we used to call clean tech and this sort of first wave? Yeah, absolutely. So I define biotech or biotech is broadly defined as engineering of biology. And to be super specific, it usually entails some sort of genetic engineering of biological systems. And the modern field of biotech was really created, I would say, about 30 years ago. And its applications were primarily focused on the biopharma industry. So this was large pharmaceutical companies using engineering of cell lines. to produce different types of drugs and diagnostics.

But over the course of the last 30 years or so, the kind of underlying technologies of biotechnology related to genomics and cell engineering has started to be applied in kind of new and diverse ways. And more recently, agriculture and engineering of plant cells has become another focus of biotech. So what's kind of changed

over that course of time is just the price and the cost of doing this sort of research has come down. And there's been new ways to apply it to kind of different types of industries. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like though the field of biotech has diversified somewhat, it's probably still true today that the bulk of the, at least, investment dollars going into the space is directed toward pharma. I'm thinking about things like, you know, Andres and Horowitz and a bunch of others have big bio funds. And if I look at the announcements coming out of those funds, they seem like they're still for the most part intended toward pharma applications? Yes, that's absolutely true.

So I would say the majority of kind of applications and investment in biotech broadly is still related to pharma. And, you know, I mean, that's kind of just been historically the case. And still to this day, in terms of biotech products and lucrative companies, pharma is still sort of the leading edge, I would say. So this new sort of new application space for biotech

is it's still up and coming, I would say. Okay, so but let's talk about the history of biotech plus climate or the application of biotech and climate over the past, I don't know, couple of decades because it was, bio was a core part of the first, the Clean Tech 1.0 wave, though it was not a part that resulted in a ton of success from an investment standpoint. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, to be explicit, that biotech,

or that green revolution 1.0 was focused on biofuels, which is a biotech application. It's using mostly corn biomass to ferment that biomass with microbes and turn into ethanol or other fuels. And that wave was not successful, although today it's kind of experiencing a resurgence. So indeed, there was some interest in biotech and microbial fermentation for fuel production, kind of in the early 2000. You know, you and I both know kind of the sad story about why that didn't work out. It's really hard to go into these commodity markets, obviously, and we'll talk more about that later. If you're making something that's super low value, it's pretty hard to break into a new market. Or at least it was historically.

I mean, there's an interesting question. I'll talk about this more moving forward. There's an interesting question the degree to which demand is arriving for premium-priced zero-carbon stuff in places like aviation fuel. and some of these other areas that are like high volume, low margin commodity products where you couldn't have charged a premium even initially 10 years ago. Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that's something that's changed in the environment is that you don't necessarily have to be at price parity, it seems like, in some of these industries or some of these products to be successful.

So it seems like consumers and certain sectors are willing to pay a little bit of a premium if indeed the product is carbon neutral. Yeah. All right. We'll come back to that because a lot of what we want to spend our time on now is talking through the specific areas that biotech is being applied today to solve climate problems. But first, I want to ask sort of, you know, in most of the cases where you can use biology to do something, there are alternatives. You can use other pathways, electrochemistry, or something else. There's another way to do something.

So biotech is not the solution to every problem. So I guess maybe to give us kind of a guiding set of principles, what are the things that biology or biotech is really good at, and what are the things that maybe it's not so suited to? Yeah, I think this is really important to point out. Biotech, biology is not a solution to every problem. And just to kind of set the stage, I mean, the way I think about it is that we have this almost alien technology all around us,

and we're made up of it, too. It's this technology that evolved over the course of billions of years. It's not man-made. So it's a lot of work to understand it, to re-engineer it, to force it to do the things that we want it to do. This is very different than a computer chip or a factory, which are kind of more traditional engineering problems. So we're starting with all this kind of latent alien knowledge around us that we have to figure out and try to use for our purposes. And traditionally in the biotech industry, more focused on biopharma, what biotech is really good at is making super complicated molecules.

You know, the first wave of biotech drugs were antibodies. And these were very complicated proteins that pretty much could only be made using living systems, using cells. There's no way we could just kind of make them using chemistry. And that's still the case today. So that's been one area where biotech has really shown is making very complicated molecules. and we'll talk more about that when we talk about some of these new applications. But the other thing that biotech is really good at is growing on its own and growing autonomously. So I like to make the distinction between sort of the old wave of biotech, which is growing cells in big steel tanks,

and this potential feature new wave, which is biotech out in the wild growing autonomously. So I think for me that's the most exciting opportunity is that, well, if you create a new organism or a new plant that has some express climate-related purpose, you can release it into the wild and it will do its task without a lot of oversight. Not only without a lot of oversight, but also without a lot of,

or in some cases, any external energy input. It's another distinction between biological approaches to some things and in chemistry or other, which is like a lot, you know, to do the conversion you want to do with chemistry, chemistry, you often need really high temperature heat or electricity or you need something like that. So there's an energy input. Biology, the thing that you're growing does it on its own. I mean, it needs sunlight typically or something, but it's not the same. Right, right. Yeah, it'll take what it needs

from the environment and continue to operate and live. And obviously that presents a lot of opportunity, but also may present some challenges in terms of how you control and regulate things like this. Yeah, so that's a good segue. So what is biotech bad at currently? Or put differently, like, what are the types of things that we've not proven the ability to do at scale with biotech? Well, I'll say one big challenge with biotech, in particular in kind of controlled industrial settings, is sterility. Effectively, if you're growing cells in big steel tanks, it takes a lot of work to make sure no other things grow in there. and there's quite a lot of processing and controls

and the environment has to be very well qualified to grow those things at scale. So this is slightly different than maybe a typical factory or typical battery production line or whatever it may be where there isn't a ton of risk of your process kind of going off the rails because you have relatively controlled inputs. you don't have these living things just growing around. So I think there are certain tasks that may be better suited to an engineering-type solution

and not a biological solution just from the perspective of controls and the infrastructure you need to build. You also, when we've talked before, you've talked a little bit about some of the challenges in scaling up these biomanufacturing techniques, so easy to do at one small scale, basically in a lab, hard to do at the scale you would need to be at, to produce a global commodity, for example. What is the challenge in that scale up? Yeah, I mean, right now we're at a place

where there's been a lot of great biotech development at kind of bench scale or lab scale, you know, in particular talking about fermentation and growing microbes. A lot of that has been done at kind of one-liter scale, but in order for these products to basically reach the market and come in at some reasonable price, they've got to be scaled up to 1,000 liter, 10,000,

liter, a million-liter scale. And one challenge that we have now is that a lot of times the sort of recipes and protocols that you're using at 1-liter don't apply to a million liters. So there actually needs to be more development done at larger scale in order to figure out how to grow these things. The other aspect that people don't often focus on is that most of the cost actually comes in the downstream processing.

So after you grow up these cells, in these big steel tanks, the vast majority of costs come after that phase where you have to process this wet biomass and spin it down and treat it and purify it. And much of that is quite different at scale than it would be just at the one-liter scale on the bench. Okay, so one more subset of the question, what is biotech good at and what is a bad at, which is distinguishing amongst there's this enormous upwelling of excitement around synthetic biology these days, and that applies to a number for the sectors we're going to talk about. You define synthetic versus traditional biotech

and just high level, what are the things synthetic biology enables the traditional does not? And vice versa, what is synthetic biology like unnecessary for? Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a nomenclature issue here, I would say. Synthetic biology nominally, the goal or the premise there is turning biology into more of an engineering discipline. Now, I think in a lot of ways, synthetic biology and biotech are kind of synonymous, but synthetic biology has started to become

the label for biotech beyond biopharma. So whether we like it or not, synthetic biology has started to encompass food and agriculture and biomaterials and things that aren't your typical biotech products. So that's how I would define it and how it's starting to be used kind of in the common nomenclature. And so it's less about some differentiated discipline that enables a certain set of things and more about just what we define as synthetic versus what we define as old school. Yeah, I mean, I think the dream of synthetic biology is to turn biotech into more of an engineering discipline where you have these design, build test cycles with new cells and new biotech or new synthetic biology products. So many of the sort of publics and biocompanies are the least,

leading synbio companies will talk about their, you know, cell engineering platform as if it's a software platform. We're really not there yet. It's more marketing than anything else in my opinion at the moment. But indeed, that is the long-term goal is to, you know, continue to iterate and turn biotech into more of an engineering discipline. So you could, quote, unquote, program cells to make whatever you want. You know, we're getting there, but we're not quite at that stage yet. All right. So let's get it. get to the climate application. So we were brainstorming on this ahead of time. We came up with six categories of areas in which biotech is being applied already, basically, in every one of these

areas, though at varying scales to climate problems. So let's run through them. And I think for each one we want to talk about sort of what the promise is, what we view as the prospects or challenges, and then where possible, we can give some examples either of projects and pathways or of companies that are pursuing some of this stuff. So you just mentioned the first one. which is food. And I think this is probably the one where, I would guess, the broadest swath of the world is familiar

because of things like Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers and alternative proteins. But broaden it a bit. So what's the broad biotech application to replace animal products? Yeah. So basically using fermentation, which is growing microbes like bacteria and yeast

that excrete or produce some, useful compound for food applications, so some sort of a food ingredient. So probably, you know, one of the most well-known examples here is impossible foods, which uses yeast to produce a heem protein. This heem protein kind of is then added to their plant-based burger and gives it something of kind of an iron or a bloody taste, which makes it more of a realistic, you know, plant-based burger. But there's lots of additional companies working in this space.

you know, perfect day, for example, is working on milk proteins that are produced using a microbe. So if you think of the sort of, well, what is the climate solution here? It's reducing the reliance on animal agriculture. It's increasing the, you know, increasing plant-based diets. So here you have a whole new suite of potential food ingredients that can be made using fermentation. But beyond that, I think there's also some really other interesting. applications for fermentation, you know, one of which is probiotics, which are sort of healthy microbes that can improve gut health. And the other that I'm pretty bullish on is actually growing up microbes and using the whole microbe instead of just something that they excrete as a new

protein source. And they call this single-celled protein. So you can actually grow up this microbial biomass and use this as a quote-unquote plant-based protein for new products as well. is your view here like this is the future this is going to win like ultimately we replace animal agriculture i mean you know decades away but ultimately do we replace animal agriculture with with biology um you know i think it's this you bring up an interesting point which is worth mentioning because the other sort of uh player in this space is is cellular agriculture or sort of lab grown meat um and right the distinction being one of them is alternatives to meat the other is actually meat or dairy for that matter because it supplies to dairy too, but grown in a lab not with actual animals or not with livestock. Right. Yeah. And the big differentiator is

most of the fermentation products I'm talking about are made in microbes or kind of simple organisms, whereas the lab grown meat is made by a growing actual cow or chicken or pig cells. And you know, I think in my opinion

I think lab grown meat is going to have a lot of trouble reaching price parity or low cost in any near-term time frame. There's a lot of basically to start with mammalian cell culture or culture of more advanced organisms is really difficult and quite expensive. And there's just some fundamental challenges in terms of reaching the right amount of cells, amount of biomass made per bioreactor that will make it very challenging to make this stuff cheaply. So I think for me, the more exciting opportunity is in the plant-based products or micro-based new food products. And I don't think animal agriculture is ever going to go away. I think, you know,

the goal or the dream would be that maybe industrial animal agricultural will become vastly reduced. And we can have a nice balance between, you know, quote-unquote natural meat at maybe small hold farms, but then the vast majority of the protein we need or food we need is made by either microbes or plants. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near real-time forecasting, locational

dispatch and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver? Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energyhub.com. We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it. Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of

Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so category one, fermentation derived food ingredients and cellular agriculture. Let's go to category two, but stay within the world of ag, which is focused more on the fertilizer side, the input side to agriculture, where there's been, I think, growing, excitement around using synthetic biology to solve big problems in fertilizer. The biggest name

in that space, or at least the highest valuation in that space currently being Pivot Bio, which I think has a $3 billion plus valuation at this point. So what's going on in microbial fertilizer? Yeah. I mean, I think the low-hanging fruit in this space that a lot of companies are going after is actually doing nitrogen fixation using these microbes. So there's basically there's certain kinds of crops that are not able to fix nitrogen, so they need nitrogen to be added to their fertilizer. And nitrogen-based fertilizer is something I know you've looked into pretty extensively as well. It's a major environmental concern. And so if we're able to actually engineer the soil microbiome or engineer bacteria to add to the soil that are able to fix that nitrogen, this vastly reduces

is the reliance on nitrogen-based fertilizer. So specifically for corn and soy, which are not able to fix nitrogen themselves, if you're able to add these microbes, you can effectively improve soil health drastically. And so I think that specific microbial additive is really exciting. And as far as I can tell, it's already getting a lot of use out in the field.

But then you can kind of dream beyond that. And there's a lot of different augmentations or modifications or additions you can make to the soil, to increase the health of these plants to make them more drought, drought resilient, or salinity resilient, or even capture more carbon in that soil. And so that's adding microbes into the soil effectively, right? That's how you do that. Correct.

So, yeah, you're basically, you're sourcing native microbes. Then in the lab, you're making some modifications to them, and you're scaling up the production of those and then adding them later on back to the soil. Right. In the context of a fertilizer potentially, right? Like you put them in a fertilizer, use that fertilizer instead of whatever other synthetic fertilizer you were going to use, that fertilizer contains the microbes. It means you need less synthetic nitrogen, which, as you said, is a big problem.

Exactly. Yeah. And I do think some companies are also exploring seed coatings as well. So there's a lot of different ways that you could add them to the environment later on. Yep. Okay. Let's stay then in the world of plants. We're making good segues here, but not necessarily in the world of agriculture.

So this is one that I think is super interesting and maybe a little bit more nascent relative to the first two, where there's been a lot going on for a number of years, which is genetically modifying plants to make them to improve their participation in the global carbon cycle, I guess is the way that I would describe it. but give a little bit more on that. Yeah, this is a really fascinating area. And I do think this is maybe a little bit of a more immature area than some of the others. But the premise here would be, yeah, engineering plants to increase their ability to sequester and capture carbon from the environment. And there's a number of ways that could be done.

Most of this, I would say, is still in the research phase. But it's possible to turn plants that are perennial, meaning they only grow, season to season turn them into annual plants so they just keep growing indefinitely it's possible to increase the size of plants roots which means they effectively sequester more carbon underground than they would normally it's possible to make photosynthesis more efficient and it's also possible to reduce how quickly they or slow down their decomposition which would you know slow down the re-emission of that carbon into the atmosphere of the soil So there's a lot of interesting prospects here.

I will say this is kind of very early on in the research phase for bioengineering a plant, specifically for kind of more climate focused or carbon sequestration traits. And I think actually the biggest question here is, if you did make a plant that was very good at sequestering carbon or very good at any of these particular tasks, how do you scale that? How do you bring that to market? What is the model for planting a billion of these carbon sequestration? sequestering plants, whatever they may be. Right. I mean, we plant a lot of plants every year, right?

So if it's equivalent in every other way but just happens to be better at sequestering carbon and doesn't come in a premium, right? Like, should be easy, relatively speaking. With that said, if it comes with any other tradeoffs, then obviously it's a trickier value proposition. Right. And something to keep in mind here, too, is that biotech plants are very common. I mean, corn.

I think it's like 90 or 95% of the corn grown in the U.S. is genetically modified. So historically, if you talk about other historical applications for biotech, biotech plants are another one. And, you know, in particular with some particular use cases, and obviously there's a lot of baggage there as well when it comes to GMOs and some of the politics around these plants. But it is something that we've become very comfortable with as growing biotech plants in the field.

All right. So animal products, microbial fertilizer solutions, genetically modified plants that can capture more carbon or perhaps be more climate resilient. Let's move away from the agricultural world into industrial world and talk about chemicals. Yeah, I think chemicals is a really interesting one. And I think one thing to just mention before we even start on this path

is that the biggest challenge in the chemical space I see is that most of these are commodity relatively low-value products. So we really have to focus on bringing the cost down to do biotech in order to kind of apply to these new industries. Like how do we avoid the issue that we ran into with biofuels, for example? And so, but within chemicals, there's things like bioplastics, polymers, textiles. And, you know, the broad premise here is that if we're kind of moving away from petrochemical feedstocks, let's try to use some of these, find new ways to transfer. carbon into useful products.

And, you know, one of the leading companies here is salugin, which a lot of people talk about. They're basically using enzymes, which is kind of a biological process outside of a cell, to transform a carbon source into some useful, sellable product in the chemical space. Yeah. Talk a little bit more about what types of products they're producing. Because one of the things that's interesting about chemicals world is it's, it's, especially if you add fuels into it, it's very diverse. There's some extraordinarily high volume commodities,

then there's a ton of more specialized chemicals as well. And even those markets, though not as big, are still pretty big. And so one of the things that cellulgen has done that's been interesting is they haven't gone after like the biggest chemicals markets, at least not yet. They've picked where they think they can price competitively in what are nitchier, but still fairly large volume specialty chemicals. Yeah, I mean, that strategy does make sense to me. You always want to try to own a larger portion of a small market

than try to own a small portion of a large market, at least at the outset. So I think, and that has been the tradition across the biotech industry and across synthetic biology, is go for the highest value products possible first or maybe some of the smaller, more niche markets, where your go-to-market strategy is a little bit easier. And I think, you know, still it's going to be challenging to bring those costs down because even in an enzymatic process, which is, you know, closer to a chemistry process than a biology process, you're still using high value proteins in that process. And you do have some biological components. So in theory, the infrastructure needed is probably more expensive than your typical chemistry-based process. So going after some of the more niche markets where potentially your customers,

will look favorably upon your products being carbon neutral or carbon negative is probably a good strategy. Also worth mentioning here is that the feedstocks for these processes can be quite diverse. So maybe instead of using petroleum as a carbon source, you could use biomass or corn. But there's also obviously companies investigating using atmospheric CO2 or waste gas as some of the feedstocks in these processes, which I think is also very complicated but also very interesting. Lanzatech being an example of that that's been around since the first wave that's using industrial byproduct, chemicals, gases rather, as their input. Exactly.

Talk a little bit about bioplastics. It's a world that's gotten some attention. There's been a couple of SPACs in bioplastic world. But my sense is that cost competitiveness is like a real challenge around bioplastics. It is. I mean, there's a huge opportunity here. You know, biological systems are actually pretty good at making polymers, certain kinds of polymers. But the problem is we've gotten so used to just extremely cheap polymers and plastics over the last, you know, 50 years that, you know, entering into these commodity markets is particularly difficult. And, you know, only, you know, what subset of consumers are willing to pay a premium for their Nike's pay potentially double the price because they, you know, they're made out of some bioplastic. So I just think the economics aren't quite there yet for bioplastics. But from a biology standpoint, there are a ton of great solutions out there.

Okay, so that's chemicals. Let's talk about materials or, you know, I guess engineered materials to be more specific. Yeah, so this is kind of, this kind of blurs together with chemicals a little bit. but when I'm talking about biomaterials or materials, I'm really interested in the space of new building materials, packaging materials, textiles, and things of this nature. So a lot of people are quite excited about the potential for using trees and lumber as one of these key biomaterials.

And there's a number of interesting companies that are doing engineering of trees to make them more efficient, better at capture. carbon to make, you know, wood products that are harder, have some, you know, improved material property, which I think is quite exciting. One challenge in that space is, well, it's very hard to engineer trees. They have very complicated genomes, as do many plants. Also, the cycle time is long because trees take a while to grow. So, but I think this is a very interesting space and, you know, building materials is obviously another key climate area to think about, you know, I'm sure you've looked at concrete quite a bit and, you know, it's another huge emitter.

So if we were to able to engineer better wood, for example, that could prove useful in taller buildings, for example, I think that'd be really compelling. The other one... And the reason for that, by the way, part of the reason for that is using wood as a building material is better than using cement or concrete or steel like other heavy emitting things, right? It's a displacement value.

Exactly. And you are locking that carbon up in the wood for quite a long time until that would decompose or deteriorate. So it's a great way to sequester carbon. And beyond that, I think fungal biomass is also very interesting. Fungus grows very quickly. It can live off of waste material

that would be almost useless otherwise. And there have been a number of companies that have used fungus to make styrofoam replacements and packaging and even furniture. You can grow it into any shape that you want if you mold it correctly. So I think exploring fungal biomass is also really interesting and there's a lot of,

there's a lot more to do there in terms of the actual synthetic biology around fungal biomass. Yeah, I have a sweet fungus chaise lounge in my living room right now. Nice. Or no, I will before too long. Okay, so that's materials. Last one is, I guess, less on the climate change mitigation side

and perhaps more environmental and adaptation-oriented. But let's talk about using biology to improve environmental remediation. Yeah, so we already use microbes to help with things like oil spills. So there's already a field called bioremediation today, which is fairly robust. But for the most part, these microbes we're using today to kind of break down contaminants are wild microbes, not engineered. So there's a lot of opportunity to begin exploring, putting new traits into these microbes

that may improve their ability to break down environmental contaminants. And I think on the one side, you have using microbes to break down contaminants or pollution. But on the other side, you actually have the ability of microbes to potentially aggregate different elements or compounds, which would be kind of more of a bio-mining task where you could release these microbes, for example, into a waste dump or onto electronics waste. And they might have the ability to sequester high-value metals or something like that and be more efficient at recycling them than sort of manually sorting. All right, so we've run through six different categories of applications of biotech to climate.

I'm curious where you feel like, so in your mind, where are you the most bullish? Where are you the most excited, perhaps beyond the sort of obvious things that are already starting to take hold like Impossible Burgers? And where do you think you hold the most skepticism? Yeah, I mean, I'm very bullish on engineering new plants. I think, you know, to come back to some of the stuff we talked about earlier, I think the real value of biology is that it does grow autonomously. And it can, it's a solution that can be deployed without a lot of human oversight, a lot of engineering infrastructure out in the wild. So if we're really able to begin engineering plants that have, you know, significant improvements in terms of their ability to capture carbon, that's a solution that's as simple as, um, sending seeds around the world potentially.

So that part of biology is very appealing, that it's imminently scalable if we find kind of the right model to do so. So I'm very excited about that. You know, we talk a little bit about my skepticism around lab-grown meat. I think a lot of the hype or the interest there is being propelled by kind of cheap venture dollars. And right now, most of those projects are at very small scale. So I'm anticipating that the vast majority will not be able to reach commercial scale and not be able to reach the market.

So we'll either see a bunch of consolidation or a bunch of dead companies in the wake of whatever reckoning may be coming. Is that because they will be unsuccessful in being able to scale up and actually produce their lab-grown meat at scale? Or is it going to be a cost problem? It's just too expensive. I think it's going to be a cost problem primarily. Yeah. So I think that technically they may be able to, but I don't think that it will come out. at any affordable price at the end of that scaling process. And then I'm also just skeptical about the market

and the consumer demand for the product because like it or not, you can still label cow beef as quote-unquote natural. And I think labroom meat is going to really struggle to get consumers on board, especially not coastal consumers, not the ones on the blue coasts. Yeah, there's also sort of a weird, like,

it's interesting to think about where the consumer demand will, will end up. But if you have an alternative protein that is not real cow cells but is perfectly tasty and serves all the same purposes, and then you have one that is lab grown, but is real cow cells, is the consumer side going to lean

toward one or the other, like assuming, you know, the taste ultimately ends up to be pretty equivalent. Yeah, I do feel like the pitch is usually, oh, well, we're going to sort of supplant the normal meat supply chain and just kind of slip in this lab-grown meat and it's going to sort of take over so the meat eaters will be happy to be eating that. But I personally, I would emphasize plant and fungus-based diets.

It's inherently more sustainable even than lab-grown meat and inherently more scalable as well. In particular, there's some great techniques around growing fungal biomass that doesn't require as much sterility. We talked about sterility as being one of those gating factors where, well, you can grow this fungus on waste biomass and it effectively transforms 90 plus percent of it into this protein and you can grow it in buckets.

You don't have to grow it in a sterile steel tank. So there's some techniques, some other types of protein or plant-based foods that I think will ultimately be much more scalable and low cost. And I think that's really the path is to emphasize the plant-based diet with a little bit of meat, you know, if you want. Ari, thanks so much for joining. Yeah, you're welcome. Shale.

is great being here, and thanks for having me. Ari Lipman is a partner at Mars Bio. Catalyst is hosted by me, Shail Khan. The show is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. Find me, Canary, and PostScript on Twitter. Tag us if you want to provide feedback on this episode or suggest future topics. Seriously, send us topic ideas. We do appreciate them.

We get a lot of great feedback on Twitter. Many of you have asked questions about a topic that came up in the closing credits of the initial episode of this podcast, which was my bet with my wife, about whether we will hit 100,000 downloads of this podcast in its very first month of existence. As a reminder, if we did hit 100,000 downloads, then we had agreed to give our child, who is due to be born in about a month, the middle name net zero. That was me winning the wager, obviously. And if not, then she would get to choose. She would have cart blanche to choose the middle name of our child.

We intentionally set a pretty ambitious target, which we did not hit. So I'm sorry to say that the middle name of my firstborn will not be net zero. So I will say that NZ, as short for net zero, is still in contention. If you want to recommend other bets for me to make with my wife or otherwise, my DMs are always open. Also, don't forget to listen to our companion podcast, the Carbon Copy. It's a narrative news show that explains the forces shaping the energy transition and the changing planet. You can get it at Canary Media or anywhere you listen to podcasts. You can find links for this episode's topic and guest in the show notes or go to Canarymedia.com.

Our producers are Daniel Waldorf and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand composed our theme song. Mixing and scoring by Eber Pinheiro. I'm Shail Khan and this is Catalyst.