The President’s Bioeconomy Executive Order

“We know that the global industry is on the cusp of a revolution powered by biotechnology.?Analyses and facts suggest that before the end of the decade, engineering biology holds the potential to be used in manufacturing industries that account for more than one third of global output.?That’s equivalent to almost $30 trillion in terms of value.” Senior Administration Official

My LinkedIn feed exploded with excitement last month.?Everyone was reposting articles on President Biden’s Executive Order on the Bioeconomy that he released on Monday September 12, 2022.?And we all tuned into the following Summit on Wednesday where three panels of scientists and policy makers convened at the White House.?Many people in my LinkedIn feed posted pictures of themselves standing in front of the White House logo.

On the day of the release of the Bioeconomy Executive Order (September 12, 2022) President Biden gave a speech at the Kennedy Library in Massachusetts on his Cancer Moon-shot.?This speech fell on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s “we will go to the moon” speech in Houston sixty years before.?(He was introduced by JFK’s daughter Caroline, the Ambassador to Australia.)?He pointed out that President Richard Nixon had declared a “war on cancer” in 1972, 50 years earlier.?Despite the high ambitions and optimistic rhetoric at the time, a true “breakthrough” didn’t come – until recently.?President Biden set a goal to cut cancer death rates by at least 50% in the next 25 years.?The Cancer Moon-shot represents only one component of the promotion of a bioeconomy.?

Two days later the Bioeconomy Summit met at the White House.?The Summit assembled three panels of academic and industry leaders, non-profits, and government experts that discussed:?

·?????The Scale of the Enterprise

·?????The Challenge of Providing a Workforce

·?????American Deficiencies to Address – especially manufacturing scale

·?????The Importance of Government Investment

·?????The Places for Government to Invest and the Need for Diversity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcP9zPNuUh4&t=10259s

The government experts lapsed into acronyms at the Summit.?Here is one example:??Dr. Liz Reynolds Special Assistant to the President for Manufacturing and R&D from the National Economic Council said, “As part of the NEC we’re delighted to partner with our friends at OSTP and at the NSC to launch this EO.?And to engage all of you in this exciting moment.”

But, the speakers were excited and exciting, and painted a broad picture of the potential and of the challenges ahead for the United States if it is going to catch up and eventually surpass international rivals.???

The Scale of the Enterprise

I have been using the $30 trillion global bioeconomy by the end of the century number in talks since the Schmidt Futures Bioeconomy Report came out, but that’s a really, really big number.?Every time that I do I think “that’s a really, really big number.?Is it real?”?Yes, I think that it is.??

Brian Deese, the Director of the National Economic Council wondered the same thing:?

“BCG (Boston Consulting Group, one group of consultants – and it isn’t the only one - that generated this huge number) looked into this and said that they project that the economic opportunity in the bioeconomy is on the order of $30 trillion by the end of the decade.??That’s a really large number and it’s hard to get your head around.?In fact it’s so large that I asked the team to go back and make sure that it was actually right.?To put it into perspective, you know, the entire GDP of the country is about $21 trillion.?So we’re talking about over a decade growing in our industry that’s about 150 percent of the entire US economic output today.”??

So that IS the number and we are talking about a fundamental transformation of industry and society – for the better.?That’s the number, and we’re stickin’ to it.?With that increase in economic activity we will need to dramatically increase the workforce focusing on this industrial sector.?

The Challenge of Providing a Workforce

Virtually every speaker mentioned the importance of a trained workforce and virtually every speaker highlighted the important role that community colleges will play in training this workforce.?(Several of my friends and their programs got an explicit shot out.). To build a $30 trillion bioeconomy we will need 1.1 million more people in the life sciences.?This is a “no biology major left behind” moment.?

Rep. Deborah Ross of NC, after giving a well-deserved boost for her region, showed a deep understanding of what it will take:?“North Carolina and the Research Triangle with all the wonderful companies and research institutions is leading on innovation.?But the thing that we’re going to need to do to realize President Biden’s vision and all of our vision is to train up the people who are going to do that manufacturing.?And that is the job of our community colleges.?That is the job of some of our undergraduate programs.?And that is why I am so excited that the science part of the CHIPS and Science Act is devoted to giving NSF the money to give grants to all of these institutions of higher education.?I am an Ivy League grad and I love the Ivy League and the MITs of the world and the Stanfords of the world.?But let me tell you Wake Tech Community College has gotten three NSF grants that I have gone to the – you know with the big check and everything – including first generation community college students from the Latino community who didn’t graduate from high school.?Go getting, you know, apprenticeships and going directly to be able to work in manufacturing.?And I will close with this.?It is doing all that.”

Later, the CEO of the Manufacturing USA Institute BioMADE, Dr. Doug Friedman, reinforced the point:?“I want to thank Representative Ross for bringing up community colleges very early in the day.?My main focus is on technology and innovation but we have a very strong workforce development push led by Dr. Tom Tubon, our head of workforce development who really is a master of working with the community college infrastructure in this country.?If you look at how biology and biotechnology has evolved over time, it has largely involved four year universities.?And that’s not necessarily surprising as you watch technology go from early stage to getting closer and closer to commercialization.?But, as we really start to think about what does manufacturing look like, if we are at the scale and having the impact that we’re talking about, the community college infrastructure in this country is a national treasure, and we should be leaning heavily into that, and leveraging it, and building on it, to represent the diversity that we can.”

???????????All college faculty who teach biotechnology a technical and community colleges are networked into a National Science Foundation funded called InnovATEBio.?For decades we have gotten together, at least once a year, to exchange curriculum ideas and support each other’s efforts.?We serve on each others advisory committees, teach each other new techniques in formal and informal settings, give each other advice on equipment purchases, and write support letters for each other.?In California the faculty meet once a week via Zoom.?I have many colleagues on speed dial.?The infrastructure is there, the faculty are well prepared, and the programs are well funded, as the speakers said.?

???????????What is missing (and wasn't discussed) is a knowledge of this field and of the career opportunities that it provides.?Although most programs place every graduate, programs remain small.?Everyone knows about the medical field, the legal field, the education field, but few know about biotechnology.?This is a key deficiency that did not come up at the White House but it also must be solved.?

American Deficiencies to Address – especially manufacturing scale up.?

This discussion has been brewing within the industry for a long time, and I was happy to see it take center stage at the summit.?This has been a discussion at the synthetic biology non-profit SynBioBeta (now Built with Biology), in a white paper written by the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit in Emeryville, and in the Manufacturing USA Institute BioMADE.?Companies are very good at producing a product at a laboratory scale, but when it comes to producing a significant amount of the product for a proof of concept, they typically must go overseas for that capacity.?

The two notorious examples that are cited most often come from Impossible Foods and Genomatica.?These are two California companies, founded in the state, the regions that invented the field of biotechnology, and they could not find the facilities to produce their product in California – or in the United States.?It’s a bit of a scandal.???????

Dr. Christophe Schilling, CEO of Genomatica

“Let me share the story of BDO [their product 1,4 butanediol, is usually produced from petrochemicals and is an important raw material in manufacturing plastics, elastic fibers, and films - think spandex] and give a little bit more detail to give you a feel for that.?We today face this scale up challenge in terms of the US and where the opportunity sets in.?In that, I think we have five scale up programs that are underway today.?They’re all being scaled up in Europe.?Originally when the first commercial facility for BDO was built, it’s in Northern Italy -?30,000 tons. It was about a $150 million capital investment to go build that facility.”?

???????????So the technology is developed here in the United States, the organism that produces this product in a sustainable way is genetically engineered in the United States, but to produce enough of the product companies have to go to Europe.?That’s…. unfortunate.?

???????????Then at the end of the last session, Dr. Doug Friedman, the Director of BioMADE, put it into perspective:?

“I’ll tell a very brief story that I think clearly articulates what is going on here.?[Several years ago] the Engineering Biology Research Consortium pulled together as many companies as would show up in a room to talk about ‘what does the industry need to be successful as an industry?’?Do exactly what we’re talking about??It was a listening session.?The number one thing that came up – literally every company who showed up in one way or another brought up - scale up infrastructure.?It turned out at the time that was the only thing off the table.?So we’re really grateful to the DoD for stepping up in a serious way right now to throw that on the table.?But that’s what we heard.?We heard story after story about how companies were getting to the point where they’ve developed a set of underlying technology, they have products that they sort of know how to make, but they need to scale them to the point where they’re making a relevant amount of materials so that customers can test them.?And virtually all of them were going outside of the US.?And so this idea of how do we think about scale up, scale-up infrastructure in a networked and cohesive manner that’s able to capture the most relevant parts of the chemicals market.?And so the other aspect of this to bring up, and I really appreciate Christophe commenting on, the scale that Geno is talking about is still small compared to the industrial chemicals market.”

Dr. Friedman continued: ?“I urge you to think of the petroleum industry – the whole thing – that’s what we’re talking about.?That is the scale of carbon that we are talking about.?And in order for that to have a meaningful impact, in order for all of these technologies to have a meaningful impact – as quickly as possible companies need to spin out a kilogram, a few kilograms, a tonne of product, so that customers like the DoD, for example, can go test that.?How does that work in a system that is relevant??How do we get that in the hands of customers quickly??How do companies fail in product development – quickly.?We have to wait a long time and go oversees??That’s a lot of money.?It’s burning money.?A product fails.?Now all of a sudden you don’t have any money and your company goes out of business.?That is a pretty bad place for the industry to be – if companies are going out of business if their first or second product fails.?You’ve got to be able to iterate quickly.?And so the idea of how to scale up manufacturing and what role CDMO goes into the bioindustrial space, work is a real opportunity now, and I think this initiative provides a really strong foundation that now many federal agencies and I really hope Congress take some ownership over and say, ‘if we’re going to do it, we have to do it right now.’?We are already behind, but we have an opportunity to catch up.?And we have an opportunity to catch up in a way that the companies build their manufacturing capacity here.”

???????????The government officials expressed a willingness to work to solve this problem.?This might be the key challenge to tackle to move the industry forward.? ?

?The Importance of Government Investment

The purpose of President Biden’s Executive Order was explicitly to direct government funds to solving the above problems.?The billions of dollars of committed funding would come from the recently passed CHIPS and Science Act.?The Secretaries and Undersecretaries of Energy, Defense, and Health and Human Services attended and committed to work together to move America forward in this field.?

Several speakers explicitly made the point that many of the companies in the room were able to build multi-billion dollar companies with thousands of employees specifically because of government investment in them early in their histories.?Thousands or millions of dollars of investment built into billions of dollars of value.?

Research funding by the National Science Foundation led to many of the scientific innovations that were discussed.?The three Manufacturing USA Institutes that were represented help with the gap between early discovery science and late commercialization by companies.

And the agencies committed to devote monies from the legislation passed in the last two years to this quest: American Rescue Plan, Infrastructure bill, Inflation Reduction Act, and especially the CHIPS and Science Act

I’ve been taking one of the Great Courses that focuses on American History.?An overarching theme that recurs again and again has been that, despite the American self-image of rugged individualism, the true history of the United States has been one of government investment.?From the beginning, the government made investments in infrastructure to promote commercial activity and economic prosperity.?The Erie Canal had public funding.?The telegraph system.?The railroads.?Land grant universities.?The Eisenhower highway system.?Community Colleges.?Public schools.?The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.?All government funded.?And these investments paid back multi-fold.?

That message came through at the summit.?And it’s an important, and underappreciated, message.????????

The Need for Diversity – Including Geographic

???????????One of the speakers remarked that the panel and that the audience in the White House Summit was much more diverse than it might have been twenty five years earlier.?This field IS becoming more inclusive, but must still work hard to close gaps in the personnel at every level.?

“Among other things, the initiative will expand training and education opportunities in community colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and other minority-serving institutions.”

???????????Again, I was gratified to see the degree of recognition of the role of community colleges in this effort.?And they will continue to play a role in other regions.?

???????????Pharmaceutical biotechnology has largely benefitted the coasts and urban areas.?Bioindustrial manufacturing is likely to be more geographically spread out, with companies locating in the middle of the country, near the feedstock supply.?

Again, from Christophe Schilling of Genomatica:

Fortunately there’s a great example today on BDO where that’s being scaled up in the US.?So there’s a 65 thousand ton per year facility that’s being built by an entity called QORE – it’s a joint venture between Cargill and Helm, which is the largest bulk distributor of chemicals globally.?And it’s in Eddyville Iowa.

Why is it in Eddyville Iowa??I’ll highlight a couple of things that are really important when we think about commercial scale.?At the volumes that we are talking about, which, to be honest are small relatively compared to what you are competing against.?You really need to think about low cost feedstock, You need to think about infrastructure.?And you need to think about renewable energy.?And why renewable energy.?Because the existing petrochemical industry, what they will do, is that they will switch to renewable energy and claim a lot of positives from that.?And that’s a good shift, we need to see that.?That also means for biobased products, if we’re not using renewable energy, we’re exposed, right??Iowa’s great because of wind power.?Huge investments were made in wind power.?

Why Eddyville Iowa??Cargill has a very large biorefinery that sits in Eddyville Iowa that provides low cost feedstocks.?And ultimately this plant will provide value added outlets for farmers in Iowa.?It will create probably 50 skills jobs to operate that type of facility.?So it’s a great example, but it gives you a feel of the scope of that.?And that’s a $300 million capital project, right??Again, that’s just a start in a very large market opportunity.?

???????????The new bioeconomy will involve communities that are not thinking biotechnology at the moment.?The bioeconomy will breathe new life into communities that tech and the loss of traditional manufacturing jobs has left behind:?the Central Valley of California, Appalachia, the rural Southeast, Hawaii, and the Midwest.?

???????????If we all put our shoulders to this particular wheel, it’s a bright future.?

Summary

???????????President Biden’s Executive Order has energized an already hot field.?At the White House Summit, you could feel the excitement.?It intends to:?

·?????Leverage biotechnology for strengthened supply chains

·?????Expand domestic biomanufacturing

·?????Foster innovation across the United States

·?????Bring bio-products to market

·?????Train the next-generation of biotechnologists

·?????Drive regulatory innovation to increase access to products of biotechnology

·?????Advancing?measurements and standards for the bioeconomy

·?????Reduce risk through investing in biosecurity innovations

·?????Facilitate data sharing to advance the bioeconomy

The scale of this challenge is enormous. ?We must invent whole new industries and whole new ways to manufacture virtually everything.?We must reinvent education and training to provide the workforce.???And the White House Summit captured that excitement.?Everyone showed a can-do American optimism.?It’s a very exciting time and we must make everyone part of the effort.?