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Bioengineering to Save the Planet
“If we could plant our seeds in Chernobyl or Fukushima, I believe we could make that land usable again over a couple of years and eventually grow food there”.
If you love bold missions, this is going to be fun reading. Franklin Keck and Ion Ioannou are two Imperial PhDs with backgrounds in chemical and biomolecular engineering who are on a journey to cure land polluted by industrial activities, making it newly usable for agriculture and human life using bioengineered plants.
Let’s get to it.
Ion and Franklin, it’s wild how much Europe and Greece, in particular, have land with high concentrations of toxic elements. I was recently looking into the stats. Large parts of Greece are affected by heavy metals like cadmium, cobalt, chromium, and nickel, raising health and environmental concerns. Is that fair to say?
II: Indeed, soil is contaminated in many parts of our globe due to heavy metals. Heavy metals are a group of metals and metalloids with relatively high density and are toxic even in small quantities, such as zinc, nickel, cobalt, copper, and iron. Some of you have probably not heard these terms since the Chemistry class in high school, but these are released into the environment by natural and anthropogenic sources such as industrial discharge, automobile exhaust, and mining. When these waste streams are not properly disposed of and managed, heavy metals leak into the environment, contaminating air, water, soil, and food, causing several health and safety concerns.
Similarly, prolonged application of large amounts of fertilisers, pesticides, and other chemicals has resulted in heavy metal accumulation in regions with high agricultural activity. Central Greece and Thessaly, where I come from, is one of them. In the West, the extent of polluted land is best known, with many countries having a legal framework to identify and deal with this environmental problem. Developing countries tend to be less tightly regulated despite some of them having undergone significant industrialisation. In Europe, an estimated 6.24% or 137,000 sq km of agricultural land needs local assessment and eventual remediation action. This is 3x the country of Switzerland.
What are the different ways to approach this? You mentioned “remediation action”.
II: It’s a massive issue for many reasons. Suppose our bodies are continuously exposed to toxic levels of heavy metals through the food and water we consume. In that case, heavy metals can cause serious health hazards. There are also thousands of acres of land that are contaminated and are like ghost towns today. An example is sites previously used for mining geological materials and minerals—metals, coal, gemstones, chalk, potash, clay, etc. We have plenty of them in the US, UK, Australia, and worldwide.
The good news is that the damage can be reversed through soil remediation, a process used to clean up polluted soil from toxic elements. However, most industries do nothing about this, which is why there are abandoned and underdeveloped polluted land sites. Soil washing is one approach, but it is expensive, inefficient and non-environmentally friendly: Heavy machinery removes the soil from the site, transfers it to another facility where water or other solvents are used to clear toxic elements (often not to a great extent), and then transfers it back to the original site. The alternative, which is to clean the soil on site, pollutes the surrounding environments, such as agricultural canals, neighbouring fields, and groundwater.
We founded RemePhy a year ago to bring a sustainable and technologically advanced approach into the space. Genetically modified, metal hyper-accumulating plants!
Sounds sci-fi :) How would you explain this to someone who’s not a molecular biologist?
FK: It all started two years into my PhD at Imperial College London. I had planted lab-grown brassica plants in soil contaminated with zinc. A month later, I measured the quantity of metal in the plants and noticed they had accumulated 3 to 5 times the amount typically absorbed by the wild type.
Fast forward a couple of years, we have genetically modified a species of bacteria commonly found in plants in the cabbage and mustard family. These bacteria produce a molecule that goes out into the interstitial space of the plant (the space between the plant cells) and absorbs the heavy metals (specifically zinc, nickel, strontium) without letting them enter the cells. At the same time, the new genes upregulate the plant's ability to grow biomass despite being stressed by the presence of heavy metals in its tissues.
Naturally, as the roots of the plants grow, they accumulate the metals in the nearby soil. As the elements enter the plant cells, they eventually kill the plants. But in our case, we have succeeded in enhancing the plants’ growth and metal binding capability.
We have genetically modified the bacteria living inside the plant rather than the plant itself, and this is important for three reasons: First, it allows us to follow the same process to harvest a wide range of heavy metals. Second, we can apply this to different plant species that might thrive better in various environmental conditions and soil compositions. And third, we avoid any potential side effects in the broader ecosystem caused by genetically modified tissue (e.g. a leaf) falling off the plant.
I wonder what timelines we are discussing here, from seedling to mature plant, and if that is practical for use in the real world.
FK: The plant species we are working on now are naturally found in the northern hemisphere, and the time to maturation is 3-4 months. Then, we harvest them and plant new seeds. So, the cycle can be repeated three or four times per year. We think depending on the level of pollution, it can take multiple cycles to clean up land—anywhere from 6 to 18 months.
We also rely on a technology one of my PhD supervisors developed to separate metals from plant tissue once harvested for recycling or adequate disposal. The plant biomass can be recycled to make textiles or bioethanol, while the mined nickel can be reused to power electric vehicle batteries, zinc could make alloys for construction, and strontium, a byproduct of nuclear fission, can be permanently removed from radioactive soil.
Which use cases and target markets is your technology better suited for and going after first?
II: We are going after the mining industry first. Mining is vital to our societies' economic and technological development, and it’s particularly critical as the demand surges for metals that will support battery technology and electrification. However, at least 23 million people around the world live on floodplains contaminated by potentially harmful concentrations of toxic waste from metal-mining activity. Chemicals can leach from mining operations into soil and waterways, affecting crops grown on contaminated soils or irrigated by water contaminated by mine waste. Animals grazing on floodplains may also eat contaminated plant material and sediment. What's further alarming is the pollution from abandoned mines, as even in some developed countries, there aren't any standard procedures for shutting down a site or remediating it.
Eventually, we aim to cure land polluted by coal power plants, mining sites, nuclear fission operations, and other industrial activities, making it newly usable for agriculture and human life.
What are the limitations here? What are the main blockers that you believe this technology could not be applied in every polluted land globally?
FK: I think regulation is a bottleneck. Europe is hesitant to allow genetically modified products into its environments, so the US, Australia, and Asia are more accessible markets nowadays.
II: I also want to stress that our products are applied in polluted lands. Hence, the current regulatory framework is certainly shortsighted, but we already see that even in the UK, things are becoming a bit looser for specific applications.
What are some of the sites globally you’d be most excited to plant your seeds?
FK: Longshot goal of mine is to plant our seeds in sites like Chernobyl and Fukushima. I believe we could make that land usable again over a couple of years and eventually grow food there. This is why I decided to modify bacteria to absorb strontium specifically. Strontium is a byproduct of nuclear power, and the areas around those two disaster sites are heavily contaminated with it.
Big thanks to both of you.
II: Appreciate it, Alex.
Jobs
Check out job openings here from startups hiring in Greece.
News
Marathon-backed Connectly (AI conversational commerce) raised $20m Series B led by Alibaba.
Reflection AI (AI agents) raised by Sequoia.
Darefore (sports performance) raised €300k.
New golden visa for startup investments in Greece.
Orange Grove incubation accepting applications until September 29.
Resources
Small nuclear fission reactors and the case of Greece by Georgios Laskaris, Nuclear Physicist.
The state of Greek salaries in 2024 from The Greek Analyst.
Hardware acceleration of LLMs by Nikoletta Koilia, graduate of the University of West Attica and Christoforos Kachris, co-founder of InAccel.
How to beat tracking blockers and get more conversions by Jason Spanomanolis, founder of jslytics.
A platform for insights from local Greek councils by Christos Porios, co-founder of Touvlo.
Unlocking medtech innovation with Thanasi Tsiodras, Angel Investor.
All about software testing with Kyriaki Vadeska, Senior Software Engineer in Test at Light & Wonder.
Events
“Startup Funding in Greece” on Sep 17
“Data & AI conference” by Boussias Events on Sep 19
“AI and Beers Larissa #2” on Sep 26
“Researchers’ Night” on Sep 27
“2nd Hellenic Impact Investing Conference” by Hellenic Impact Investing Network on Sep 27
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Thank you so much for reading,
Alex