I thought it would be valuable to list what I see as some interesting current applications for protein-based nanotechnology across medicine, synthetic biology, materials, chemistry, environmental remediation, food, and mineral extraction.
As we work towards molecular nanotechnology I expect this non-exhaustive list to greatly expand.
I acknowledge some inspiration from “the solar industrial revolution.”
Enjoy!
Medicine:
Diagnostics and Bio-sensing: These are essentially the same problem, where we would like to design a specific protein to be very sensitive to some biomarker of importance.
Organic Synthesis: Organic synthesis is the backbone of the medical industry, from making Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) to therapeutics. I suspect that this will be where many of the initial order-of-magnitude improvements in medicine will come from. Organic synthesis (and really, just “synthesis”) could be much, much better.
AAV Vectors for Gene Therapy Delivery: Dyno Therapeutics is the leader here, and Elliot Hershberg has written a great piece about them.
Genetic Editing (DNA, RNA, Epigenetics, etc.): Better proteins could dramatically improve our techniques for modifying biology. The financial case for developing these methods could be through licensing for therapeutics development or using them to develop therapeutics.
Enzymatic Replacement Therapy: Many diseases are caused by a lack of some type of enzyme. We can just put the enzyme back in them! (Whether or not this is the best way to treat a given disease in the long-term is very debatable, but this was a cool application that I had come across when doing my research.)
Synthetic Biology:
DNA synthesis: There’s been arguments about what the use cases of significantly cheaper DNA synthesis would be, but considering that we would personally benefit from it I think that this could be worth going into. A concern though is that sequencing businesses like Illumina make their money off of high margin consumables, and it might be that DNA synthesis becomes this commoditized thing. I still think that this is an exciting area though.
Materials:
It seems that enzymes are especially good at making Weird Polymers™. Some standouts of weird polymers include:
Membranes: A membrane is just a bunch of fancy polymers. You can use membranes to do chemical, gas, wastewater, and seawater separations. These are used by the petrochemical, paper production, semiconductor, carbon capture, and other industries. You have folks like Osmoses and Via Separations (both MIT spinouts) as examples to look to in this space.
Additives: You make some polymer and then you add it to another thing to make it better in some capacity. This is an important capability with a large market potential, but the challenges I see here is that it would require a lot of testing and characterization work to ensure that your additive (at whatever blend percentage you have) works. I think that OCSiAl (Carbon Nanotube additives) is a good startup to look for as an example in this sort of space.
Hydrogels: They’re a bunch of sparse polymers in an aqueous medium. Eric Appel’s lab at Stanford works with these and they’re super cool, but I’m concerned how ready they are for commercial versus laboratory use cases.
Chemicals:
You could do high-margin niche stuff such as natural ingredients, fragrances, fine chemicals, and so on.
But the path for achieving true “giga-scale” value creation in chemicals seems to be what Solugen is doing: create a differentiated product instead of selling raw commodity chemicals at scale.
The key challenge here will be to ensure that your unit economics, distributional supply chains, and product iteration times are all very high-quality.
Otherwise, the opportunity here is in the trillions of dollars.
Environmental Remediation:
You need to get rid of some harmful “thing”. This thing could be
Plastics
Forever Chemicals (PFAS)
Soil Pollution
Water Pollution
Air Pollution
Due to how specific proteins binding can be, you can simply have them degrade or bind with a substance to remove it.
I am unsure of whether it would be financially sound to do this, especially since there has been a lot of hype over “plastic-eating enzymes” but few results.
However, cleaning up the environment is something that I would like to see a lot more of.
It will, however, require massive scale to do anything meaningful, and thus a focus on unit economics and manufacturing scale-up would be an instrumental goal for any protein nanotechnology company.
Food:
This could technically be included under “chemicals”, I suppose, since the mass production of many proteins, fats, and carbohydrates are going to be a fundamentally chemical process in the end.
I see protein nanotechnology playing a role in this sector as a catalyst to enable these chemical transformations.
Mining:
We are going to need a lot more critical minerals, from lithium to uranium to rare earth metals, in order to build an abundant, sustainable future. You could get these minerals from brines, seawater, electronic waste, and ores. I believe that protein nanotechnology is going to have a big role here in three possible ways:
Combine traditional leaching agents with enzymes in order to create significantly better leaching agents.
Selective recovery of relevant materials by proteins.
Use a membrane of novel polymers synthesized from our proteins that enables a more traditional seawater or brine recovery of critical materials. (No citations here, this is an approach being taken by a lot of startups and academic groups. The novelty would be that proteins would enable significantly better materials to enable higher performance than what could be achieved through alternative means.)