Q&A with Paul Reginato

Homeworld Collective was established in 2023 to develop the social, intellectual, and funding infrastructure needed for the young field of climate biotech to flourish. Paul Reginato and his fellow founders chose biotech as a focus because its huge potential to mitigate the ongoing, damaging impacts of climate change.

As fledgling scientists themselves, they observed the following:

• A growing number of people want to work in climate biotech, but are hindered by a lack of collaborators and clear direction.
• Initial ideas need support getting off the ground — especially those of people who are talented but new to working in the field of climate biotech.
• As an emerging field, climate biotech needs intellectual infrastructure such as guiding principles, established paths to impact and community knowledge to help us prioritize and solve problems.

So they got organized.

Tell us about yourself– what is your background in and how did you end up in your current position? How is your role at Homeworld Bio different from ones you’ve had before?

I’m a biophile. I got into biology because I love Life. That’s sort of a spiritual thing for me – if anything is sacred, it’s Life.

In 2021 I finished a Biological Engineering PhD at MIT, where I worked with Ed Boyden and George Church to develop tech to measure the spatial configuration of DNA within intact cells and tissues. That work was contextualized by biomedicine – applications were in cancer, embryonic development, and neuroscience.?

In 2019, I had a personal reckoning: I wanted my work to protect Life from biodiversity loss and extinction, so I needed to transition from the medical space. My cofounder Dan Goodwin had his own reckoning around the same time, and we started formed a small group led by our colleague Sarah Sclarsic. I’m grateful to our PhD supervisor Ed Boyden for supporting an oddball climate tech subgroup in his neuroscience lab.

We immediately noticed the contrast between the medical biotech and climate biotech fields: where medical biotech was a hyperproductive field with well-mapped problem spaces, massive funding, dedicated education programs, and playbooks for translating research into industry, climate biotech mostly lacked that infrastructure. Climate biotech has historically received a miniscule fraction of the funding and effort that medical biotech has received.

After my PhD (and after a 5-month stint writing poetry), my big break into climate tech came when the philanthropy organization Additional Ventures supported me to roadmap the use of biotech in atmospheric carbon dioxide removal (CDR). During that time, Dan and I kept talking about the needs of the climate biotech field.?

In January 2022, Dan and I were officially funded to start Homeworld Collective to ignite the growth of climate biotech. Homeworld enables biotech practitioners to apply their talents to climate tech. As Science Director, my role is to draw attention to important problems in the most nascent areas of climate biotech. Homeworld then either funds solutions directly through Garden Grants or helps connect other funders to practitioners.?

"For me, the greatest joy is helping people unlock their agency and act on their own love for Life. Homeworld Collective is about action-oriented optimism: we know things get better when we take action." Dan Reginato, Science Director and Co-Founder of Homeworld Collective        

Homeworld is a collective. How would you define collective, and why did you choose this approach to the work?

The Wikipedia for Artist collective captures the vibe pretty well. A collective is a community that fluidly collaborates and shares various resources toward common goals, through less formal and more project-by-project relationships than say a company. The Homeworld core team is a 501(c)(3) non-profit with 4 full-time employees (and growing), but we facilitate a community of >1000 (and growing).

A staggering amount of work and capital is needed to achieve a sustainable human way of living: we basically need to change the life cycle of every atom we move in every industry. It’s in the collective interest to get this hard work done as fast and efficiently as possible. We’re encouraging a problem-focused, collaborative culture that is transparent about the problems that need to be solved and collaborates on solving them.

The choice of a collective comes back to action-oriented optimism: we know people love this world and will take action for a thriving planet if given the option, and we know actions make a difference. Working as a collective means enabling each other with maximal agency to build the world we all want.

Can you explain what climate biotech is and how the fledgling industry fits into the bigger picture of combating climate change?

Folks have used biotech for sustainability in many years, for example by biomanufacturing fuels and chemicals sustainably. What’s new about climate biotech is the level of ambition and interest in reaching biology’s potential to address a much wider breadth of problems in sustainability, including circular economy, regenerative agriculture, atmospheric greenhouse gas removal, conservation, and lower-impact mining.?

We need exponential growth of the field if climate biotech is going to take on all those applications. That means collectively learning new problem spaces and building an innovation ecosystem to scale ideas to technologies to companies to global-scale industries. That means innovation from foundational research to new funding models.

In the bigger picture, biotech will integrate with many other engineering disciplines to enable a thriving planet. Climate tech is bringing a new era of interdisciplinarity, because the problems are so diverse and connected. Some of the most under-addressed problems exist at those interfaces, for example between biology and geology for mining the minerals needed for electrification with lower environmental impacts. Still, distinct disciplines have communities of practice with common needs. We say Homeworld Collective is inclusively rooted in biotech: it serves climate biotech practitioners while supporting interdisciplinary collaboration.

What are some of the most promising biotech advancements in recent years? What do you hope to see in the future?

One of my favorite organizations is Cultivarium, a focused research organization developing methods to work with a huge diversity of organisms outside the standard model organisms bioscientists are used to. That’s going to unlock major potential for leveraging more exotic biological processes like methane oxidation for mitigating methane pollution, biologically stimulating geologic hydrogen, and a huge range of metabolisms for manufacturing.

The newest revolution in fundamental biotech capabilities is in protein engineering over the past few years, enabled by AI for predicting and designing proteins and cryo-electron microscopy for measuring them. Proteins are macromolecules that catalyze chemical reactions and recognize other biological structures (e.g. enzymes are proteins). Protein engineering is widely enabling by giving us precise control over chemical reactions in novel contexts, for example by using immobilized proteins to catalyze a series of reactions in a manufacturing process or binding specific metals in a mining process. A wild goal for protein engineering that is becoming more realistic is to engineer complex biological processes from scratch, like engineering plants to fix nitrogen (i.e. make their own fertilizer), which naturally only happens in specialized microbes. We wrote up a problem statement on that based on ideas from ARPA-E Program Director Steve Singer.

In the future – big dreams. I hope we can cultivate food with very high productivity per unit land in a way that supports healthy soils and ecosystems. That means replacing fertilizers and pesticides with more precise technologies that don’t pollute and bringing ecology into our tech development and agronomics.?

I hope our mining practices become far more efficient. Electrification and continued development of global society means more mining will be necessary, and mining is very destructive. We’ll also need mining of lanthanides, or so-called rare Earth elements, that are hard to separate from each other. Currently, we only use the most concentrated ore, which means a lot of valuable metals are wasted and a lot more digging happens because the metals are locked up in lower-grade ore that can’t be processed efficiently. And mining creates a lot of nasty metals pollution. Organisms are known to isolate metals and dissolve minerals efficiently – think about all the metals that are needed in your diet – so it may be possible to use biology to isolate these minerals. Currently, about 20% of the world’s copper is mined using bacteria, and biotech will have a larger role in the future of mining for other metals too. How big that role will be remains to be seen.

It’s also really important that we develop better ways to help ecosystems adapt and regenerate, and protect them from invasive species. Those are really difficult problems that are intrinsically biological. On top of things like land management, can we help organisms pass on helpful traits faster– a concept called assisted evolution? Can we suppress invasive species?

Can you tell us a little bit about how the Garden Grants program works, and what you’re most excited about for the 2024 cohort?

The goal of Garden Grants is to support “big, if true” research while growing community knowledge and collaboration around impactful problems. We tried a radically open structure to accomplish that, which was experimental. Every proposal to Garden Grants is composed of a public problem statement and a confidential solution statement. Reviews were non-anonymous by default, and we shared the reviews with applicants. The goal of putting problem statements public was to generate visibility to important problems and the people working on them. We wanted reviews to be as transparent as possible to encourage people to be constructive, and to allow applicants to benefit from critiques of their ideas.?

The public problem statement format synergizes well with our Problem Statement Repository, where we share impactful problems in climate biotech that are vetted through conversation with community members. The problem statements can plug right into proposals to Garden Grants!

We wrote up some of our learnings from the Garden Grants experiment here. The takeaway is that it seemed to work well! We had a lot of positive interaction between reviewers and applications, and new collaborations have formed as a result of the public problem statements. We received 65 quality submissions – you can see their public problem statements here. We supported 16 teams with about $1.35M in funding, with nearly $500k supporting ideas from the Problem Statement Repository. These are small grants, but they’re issued quickly to help people initiate projects. We selected awardees within ~1 month of the application window close date.

There are a bunch of really exciting projects in the 2024 cohort. Personally I think I’m most excited to see the development of the group of projects working on applying engineered biocatalysts for applications in direct air capture and point-source capture of CO2, because it connects our knowledge and funding platforms. We did some roadmapping and shared problem statements on that topic in our Problem Statement Repository. Some excellent researchers responded to that call, and we funded a small group of them: Mijndert van der Spek at Heriot Watt University is constructing techno-economic analysis to quantify how well the catalysts would need to perform to achieve cost improvements; Sonja Salmon at NCSU and Jenny Malloy at Oxford are developing different ways to immobilize the catalysts;? and Debora Marks’ and Neil Gershenfeld’s groups at Harvard and MIT are working on engineering the catalysts themselves.?

What types of projects are the Homeworld Bio team taking on?

My co-founder Dan is leading an exciting project to develop AI-driven techno-economic analyses (TEAs). TEA models a scaled technology to describe its cost factors and overall cost. For technologies that produce commodities, TEA is a crucial tool for predicting whether a given implementation will be cost-competitive at scale, and can be a deciding factor in whether a technology is pursued or not. For new technologies that have never been scaled, quality TEA can identify opportunities and prevent bad investments. The idea behind AI-driven TEA is to identify opportunities, for example in biomanufacturing: out of the huge variety of chemicals that could be produced biologically, which chemicals and which manufacturing processes are likely to be competitive? We’ll be sharing details of that work soon.