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Â鶹´«Ã½ Engineering Graduates Aim For Game-Changing Green Chemistry

Christophe Schilling, Genomatica CEO and Â鶹´«Ã½ bioengineering alumnus.

San Diego, CA, July 29, 2014 -- Pull on a wetsuit, and you’re wearing an engineered marvel created mostly from petroleum-based chemicals. But San Diego-based company Genomatica—co-founded by Â鶹´«Ã½ bioengineering alumnus Christophe Schilling—sees a different future. At Genomatica, the snap of your surfing spandex and a host of other products start with chemicals that have been produced more sustainably, by bacteria that consume something other than crude oil.

In late 2012, Genomatica produced 5 million pounds of BDO (1,4-butanediol), a widely-used chemical essential in the manufacture of thousands of products from fabrics to plastics. Their manufacturing process, now licensed to chemical giant BASF and bioplastics leader Novamont, uses in-house computational modeling and genetic engineering capabilities to design E. coli bacteria that produce BDO out of renewable feedstocks such as sugar. The end product is cleaner, more cost-effective to manufacture and performs exactly the same as BDO made from fossil fuels.

It’s also a boon to chemical companies facing growing demands from their customers to provide more sustainable products, said Schilling, who received his Ph.D. in bioengineering in 2000. “The big companies in the mainstream chemical industry know the end applications of these products and they know the market. Being able to offer them the ability to sell their customers a renewable version of the same chemical, that’s very attractive to them.”

Genomatica’s success earned it the2013 Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award, which recognizes the most noteworthy chemical engineering technology commercialized globally in the prior two years. In 2011, the company won the EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award. The two prizes underscore the broad ambitions of Schilling and his team.

“Our model is to be the biotechnology partner to the chemical industry,” he explained. “We’re an enabler of change, to empower chemical companies with new technology and to make the same exact products they make today, but with better economics and greater sustainability.”

Schilling launched Genomatica in 1998 with bioengineering professor Bernhard Palsson, and the company’s platform technology stems from some of the research Schilling did in Palsson’s lab.

Early in Schilling’s graduate career, Palsson asked him what he wanted to get out of graduate school. “he thought about it for two days,” Palsson recalled, “and came back to me and said that number one, ‘I want to do fundamentally important research , and number two, I want to start a company with you.”

Their original focus was a business that would pioneer the use of computational modeling for single-cell organisms in life science applications. But the company saw an opportunity in 2007 “where our technology could enable and unlock a very large opportunity in the chemical industry,” Schilling said, “and that was compelling for us to pursue.”

The $3 trillion chemical industry “operates almost entirely based on petrochemical feedstocks today. About 8 to 10 percent of the world’s oil goes into chemical production,” Palsson said. “The more of that we can eliminate, and make chemicals in a green fashion, the more it will really help us with sustainable lifestyles.”

With the success of Genomatica’s “cell factory” approach, he added, manufacturers “are now seriously looking at switching to bio-based feedstocks. That is a huge change in industry.”

Harish Nagarajan, a 2012 bioinformatics and systems biology Ph.D. graduate from Palsson’s lab who now works as a research scientist at Genomatica, said this shift toward sustainable chemicals was part of what drew him to the company. Nagarajan is one of 18 Â鶹´«Ã½ graduates, including six from the Jacobs School, who have joined the company.

Genomatica won The Scientist’s “Best Place to Work in Industry” award in 2012 and 2013, and Nagarajan and others say the collaborative and innovative atmosphere is one of the best they’ve experienced. Ishmael Sonico, a 1991 Â鶹´«Ã½ chemical engineering graduate, especially admires the company’s core values, including his two favorites: “We are relentless” and “We are united.” From his first days on the job, he said, “I noticed that when someone had an issue, everyone attacked it, as a group...and within hours, not days or weeks, the problem was solved.”

The next big challenge for Genomatica is to develop a commercially viable production process for butadiene, a key component of tires and latex. But Schilling is looking beyond specific products to having a lasting impact on the chemical industry. “We want to say we helped plant the seeds of change,” he said, “so in 10 or 15 years we’ll see an already-innovative industry deliver products made in a better way, helping make the products all around us be more sustainable.”

Media Contacts

Daniel Kane
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-534-3262
dbkane@ucsd.edu

Ioana Patringenaru
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-822-0899
ipatrin@ucsd.edu