#biological engineering

THEY MADE WOOLLY MICE

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Translating MIT research into real-world results

Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the commercial world, where their novel innovations aim to improve productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, creating economic, environmental, and societal benefits along the way.

The J-WAFS Solutions program launched in 2015 with support from Community Jameel, an international organization that advances science and learning for communities to thrive. Since 2015, J-WAFS Solutions has supported 19 projects with one-year grants of up to $150,000, with some projects receiving renewal grants for a second year of support. Solutions projects all address challenges related to water or food. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Center staff, the J-WAFS Solutions program follows a similar approach by supporting projects that have already completed the basic research and proof-of-concept phases. With technologies that are one to three years away from commercialization, grantees work on identifying their potential markets and learn to focus on how their technology can meet the needs of future customers.

“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving inventions that can be translated into real-world applications for widespread adoption, implantation, and use,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “But successful commercialization of MIT technology requires engineers to focus on many challenges beyond making the technology work. MIT’s I&E network offers a variety of programs that help researchers develop technology readiness, investigate markets, conduct customer discovery, and initiate product design and development,” Lienhard adds. “With this strong I&E framework, many J-WAFS Solutions teams have established startup companies by the completion of the grant. J-WAFS-supported technologies have had powerful, positive effects on human welfare. Together, the J-WAFS Solutions program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem demonstrate how academic research can evolve into business innovations that make a better world,” Lienhard says.

Creating I&E collaborations

In addition to support for furthering research, J-WAFS Solutions grants allow faculty, students, postdocs, and research staff to learn the fundamentals of how to transform their work into commercial products and companies. As part of the grant requirements, researchers must interact with mentors through MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with teams of carefully selected professionals who provide free and confidential mentorship, guidance, and other services to help advance ideas into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs across all industries, through a dynamic and accomplished group of nearly 200 mentors who volunteer their time so that others may succeed. The mentors provide impartial and unbiased advice to members of the MIT community, including MIT alumni in the Boston area. J-WAFS Solutions teams have been guided by 21 mentors from numerous companies and nonprofits. Mentors often attend project events and progress meetings throughout the grant period.

“Working with VMS has provided me and my organization with a valuable sounding board for a range of topics, big and small,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former research engineer in MIT’s D-Lab and founder of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Along with professors Leon Glicksman and Daniel Frey, Verploegen received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to help farmers preserve fruits and vegetables in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen started CoolVeg in 2022 to increase access and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling technologies through collaborations with businesses, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit venture, it is always great to have avenues to get feedback on communications approaches, overall strategy, and operational issues that my mentors have experience with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the initial Solutions grant, one of the VMS mentors assigned to the evaporative cooling team still acts as a mentor to Verploegen today.

Another Solutions grant requirement is for teams to participate in the Spark program — a free, three-week course that provides an entry point for researchers to explore the potential value of their innovation. Spark is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is an “immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” In 2018, MIT received an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to deliver I-Corps training to participants across New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who want to engage in a customer discovery process for their technology. Offered regularly throughout the year, the Spark course helps participants identify markets and explore customer needs in order to understand how their technologies can be positioned competitively in their target markets. They learn to assess barriers to adoption, as well as potential regulatory issues or other challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps reports that since its start, over 1,200 researchers from MIT have completed the program and have gone on to launch 175 ventures, raising over $3.3 billion in funding from grants and investors, and creating over 1,800 jobs.

Constantinos Katsimpouras, a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering, went through the NE I-Corps Spark program to better understand the customer base for a technology he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 for their microbial platform that converts food waste from the dairy industry into valuable products. “As a scientist with no prior experience in entrepreneurship, the program introduced me to important concepts and tools for conducting customer interviews and adopting a new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most importantly, it encouraged me to get out of the building and engage in interviews with potential customers and stakeholders, providing me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my industry,” he adds. These interviews also helped connect the team with companies willing to provide resources to test and improve their technology — a critical step to the scale-up of any lab invention.

In the case of Professor Cem Tasan’s research group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Solutions grant, instead of the other way around. Tasan is currently working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Solutions project to manufacture formable sheet metal by consolidating steel scrap without melting, thereby reducing water use compared to traditional steel processing. Before applying for the Solutions grant, Guvenc took part in NE I-Corps. Like Katsimpouras, Guvenc benefited from the interaction with industry. “This program required me to step out of the lab and engage with potential customers, allowing me to learn about their immediate challenges and test my initial assumptions about the market,” Guvenc recalls. “My interviews with industry professionals also made me aware of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which ultimately led to the J-WAFS 2023 Solutions Grant,” says Guvenc.

After completing the Spark program, participants may be eligible to apply for the Fusion program, which provides microgrants of up to $1,500 to conduct further customer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring teams to conduct 12 additional customer interviews and craft a final presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Solutions team completed the Spark and Fusion programs at MIT. Most recently, their team was accepted to join the NSF I-Corps National program with a $50,000 award. The intensive program requires teams to complete an additional 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Located in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is working on a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to rapidly remove micropollutants from water. The team’s focus has expanded to higher value purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 worked with Doyle on much of the underlying science.

“Our platform technology could potentially be used for selective separations in very diverse market segments, ranging from individual consumers to large industries and government bodies with varied use-cases,” Gokhale explains. He goes on to say, “The I-Corps Spark program added significant value by providing me with an effective framework to approach this problem … I was assigned a mentor who provided critical feedback, teaching me how to formulate effective questions and identify promising opportunities.” Gokhale says that by the end of Spark, the team was able to identify the best target markets for their products. He also says that the program provided valuable seminars on topics like intellectual property, which was helpful in subsequent discussions the team had with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.

Another member of Doyle’s team, Arjav Shah, a recent PhD from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a current MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is spearheading the team’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion last fall and hopes to lead efforts to incorporate a startup company called hydroGel.  “I admire the hypothesis-driven approach of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to identify our customers’ biggest pain points, which will hopefully lead us to finding a product-market fit.” He adds “based on our learnings from the program, we have been able to pivot to impact-driven, higher-value applications in the food processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical team at hydroGel alongside Shah.

In a different project, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Solutions project that aims to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of major algal species and provide early detection of harmful algal blooms. After completing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to participate in the Fusion program, and potentially the National I-Corps program, to further explore market opportunities and minimize risks in our future product development.”

Economic and societal benefits

Commercializing technologies developed at MIT is one of the ways J-WAFS helps ensure that MIT research advances will have real-world impacts in water and food systems. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions program has awarded 28 grants (including renewals), which have supported 19 projects that address a wide range of global water and food challenges. The program has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 research staff, 15 postdocs, and 30 students across MIT. Nearly half of all J-WAFS Solutions projects have resulted in spinout companies or commercialized products, including eight companies to date plus two open-source technologies.

Nona Technologies is an example of a J-WAFS spinout that is helping the world by developing new approaches to produce freshwater for drinking. Desalination — the process of removing salts from seawater — typically requires a large-scale technology called reverse osmosis. But Nona created a desalination device that can work in remote off-grid locations. By separating salt and bacteria from water using electric current through a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), their technology also reduces overall energy consumption. The novel method was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and research scientist Junghyo Yoon. Along with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Technologies to bring their lightweight, energy-efficient desalination technology to the market.

“My feeling early on was that once you have technology, commercialization will take care of itself,” admits Crawford. The team completed both the Spark and Fusion programs and quickly realized that much more work would be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we learned that the two first markets we envisioned would not be viable in the near term, and we also got our first hints at the beachhead we ultimately selected,” says Crawford. Nona Technologies has since won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, received media attention from outlets like Newsweek and Fortune, and hired a team that continues to further the technology for deployment in resource-limited areas where clean drinking water may be scarce. 

Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria in order to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security.

“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually.

J-WAFS Solutions companies have raised nearly $66 million in venture capital and other funding. Just this past June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration announced that it raised an $11.8 million seed round. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was another early J-WAFS Solutions grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The project enabled the development of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout companies, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was a part of the original J-WAFS team. Smith is CEO of the company and has overseen the advancement of the membrane technology, which has gone on to reduce cost and resource consumption in industrial wastewater treatment, advanced manufacturing, and resource extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries. The company also recently announced that it is working with the mining company Rio Tinto to handle harmful wastewater generated at mines.

But it’s not just J-WAFS spinout companies that are producing real-world results. Products like the ECC Vial — a portable, low-cost method for E. coli detection in water — have been brought to the market and helped thousands of people. The test kit was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT History Section. The duo received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2018 to promote safely managed drinking water and improved public health in Nepal, where it is difficult to identify which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the end of their grant period, the team had manufactured approximately 3,200 units, of which 2,350 were distributed — enough to help 12,000 people in Nepal. The researchers also trained local Nepalese on best manufacturing practices.

“It’s very important, in my life experience, to follow your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Economic success is important to the health of any venture, whether it’s a company or a product, but equally important is the social impact — a philosophy that J-WAFS research strives to uphold. “Do something because it’s worth doing and because it changes people’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott adds.

As J-WAFS prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, we look forward to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E programs to advance knowledge and develop solutions that will have tangible effects on the world’s water and food systems.

Upon the deck of a great bioship, a portly shipherder stood firm. Facing him was a tall and skinny young man, with perfectly styled hair and a loose, tailored suit.

“Now, Mr. Sawyer, I must insist. We cannot sail faster than light in this ship. Anne isn’t capable of safe FTL.”

“Oh, get it through your thick skull already!” Patrick Sawyer, woefully under-prepared captain of the newly commissioned Queen Anne’s Lace, rolled his eyes. “It’s not your choice. I can get another first mate, you know.”

The shipherder gaped at him. “You wouldn’t. I’ve raised Anne up from her infancy!”

“I don’t care for sentimentality. Give the order, or I’ll find someone who will.” Patrick gave him a sick smile. “I want to see how fast this ship will go. Show me.”

“But- really, you can’t! She’s not made for FTL, she’ll burn up!”

“So? I can always buy another ship.”

“And if you burn up all the new ships this side of Gacrux IV?”

“Then I’ll buy one from farther away. Obviously.” Patrick laughed. “Didn’t I pay you already, Gibbs?”

Gibbs watched him quietly, saying nothing as he contemplated the most recent phrase from Sawyer’s lips. While not originally a star sailer, Christopher Gibbs had been recruited as Sawyer’s mate at the commissioning of their new ship. Queen Anne’s Lace was the finest bioship from the new generation, raised up on the finest mutton and octane until her maturity. If care was proper, she would be able to serve for decades as a premiere ship, with space for a crew of a hundred and a herd of a thousand cattle for her sustenance. If wasted on faster-than-light travel, her lifespan would not last longer than a few short jumps. The voyage Patrick intended to take was very long; she would barely survive.

“Fine. If you waste this beauty, it’s not my problem.” Gibbs shook his head as he signaled to the crew. “More money for me and my folks, raising up the next generation.”

Patrick gave him a wide grin, exposing bright white teeth– another privilege of wealth. “Wonderful. Let’s be off. To the forests of Trevail III!”

Despite all of Gibbs’ best judgement, the crew cheered.

—

Time passed quickly in the lightstream. Gibbs wasn’t used to it– Patrick even less so. Faster-than-light travel wasn’t for the faint of heart or coddled children, and as Patrick retched, Gibbs felt a sick twist of satisfaction in his gut.

As the ship sailed, a faint shriek could be heard. Above the crew, the steel roof of the bridge groaned. A deep shudder rocked the ship, and all those without space legs found their bodies unbalanced. The ship was shaking, and she could only take so much strain. 

“Shut it down!” A pilot called across the bridge. “Stop the travel! The ship is failing!”

“No!” Patrick shouted, his face pink and veins standing out against his skin. “Keep going until we reach the Trevail system.”

“Anne is burning!” The pilot shook his head. “Sir, she’ll die if we keep this up much longer! We’re still light-years away.”

“Can she make it?”

“Yes, but–”

“Keep going!” There was a wild light in Patrick’s eyes. “Don’t stop.”

“I… as you wish,” the pilot responded, disturbed. The ship was making sounds now. Instead of her usual creaking, there was a deep groaning, increasing in volume. A sound of pain, of fear.

Queen Anne’s Lace was screaming, the sound lost to all but those within her.

—

Trevail III came into view right as Queen Anne fell out of the lightstream. Sitting just above orbit, she cried out in agony. Rivulets of fluid ran down the sides of her inner cavities, staining her pure-white flesh a pale pink. The floor creaked and groaned, setting a few souls off-kilter as they lost their balance. 

Again she screamed, and all the sailors clapped their palms over their ears.

Patrick knelt on the deck of the bridge, staring out the bay windows at the planet below. He raised his voice, but no one heard his voice above the ship until her scream subsided.

“Is that it? Trevail III?!”

No answer came; in the silence, some were wary to uncover their ears. Patrick scrambled to his feet, rushing to the front of the ship, staring out the window with wide eyes. Only inches in front of him, the hardened corneal windows pulsed with red vessels, glowing hot from the friction of FTL in only near-vacuum. He didn’t touch the window.

Below them, a yellow planet swirled, its clouds ever-shifting. A ring surrounded it, composed of dust and hematite. The iron red of the mountains peeked through brown clouds, and within them, black specks of magnetite aloft from updraft currents. Silver rivers ran down the slopes, painting the valleys in reflective glory.

Patrick smiled, the expression stretching wide from cheek to cheek. “We’re here.”

Gibbs looked up, hazarding a glance at Queen Anne. Through the steel mesh, he spied the red flesh above him pulsing. Soft and wet, its vessels strained against the heavy pressure of its circulation. The muscles of his prized ship were atrophied, her skin no doubt forever scarred. Her screams still echoed in his ears. Her death had already been chosen for her, only weeks after she finished maturing.

“You’re done sailing,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, Anne.”

—

Deep in the ports of Trevail III, the scrapyards were abuzz with activity. Fresh ship meat was rare in the Trevail system: even rarer was her complete herd of prize cattle. 

The yard owners gossiped, whispering among themselves. Longhorn cattle, they murmured, was the kind Mr. Sawyer kept. Hard to maintain, best for ships aside from mutton, and vicious if they wanted to be. He’d bring them on his next ship, when he received it, but for a price, a bull and a few cows wouldn’t go amiss… not that anyone had the guts to proposition buying them off such a well-respected banker’s heir.

As for Queen Anne’s Lace, she rested in the finest meatyard, abandoned as she heaved her last oxygen-rich breaths and let her blood flow freely. She would die in time, as street rats and gargantuan insects slowly took their share of her flesh. Eventually her organs would be harvested, her muscle sliced apart for hauling and use; sinew would be chopped into the lowest-grade feed. Anesthetic was hard to come by in the meatyards, and none would be given, even to such a fine ship– Mr. Sawyer wasn’t keen on wasting his money that way. Even a killing blow to the brain was unnecessary.

Patton: LOOK AT THAT COW!!! She has a heart in her forehead!!!! Can I pet her?? She’s beautiful and perfect I love her so much.

Logan: *wearing a labcoat and putting on gloves* I feel like a science person :) *pours water into a graduated cylinder* (tearing up) This is my dream.

Virgil: yeah, this week has been fun, but it could have been better if I hadn’t failed at every social interaction I had... This baby cow is my only friend.

Roman: Hey this plant looks sad, should I sing to you, dear? Would that make you feel better?

[Virgil: Please don’t, we want the plants to stay alive, Roman.]

Also~

MIT engineers have devised a 3-D printing technique that uses a new kind of ink made from genetically programmed living cells.

The cells are engineered to light up in response to a variety of stimuli. When mixed with a slurry of hydrogel and nutrients, the cells can be printed, layer by layer, to form three-dimensional, interactive structures and devices.

The team has then demonstrated its technique by printing a “living tattoo” — a thin, transparent patch patterned with live bacteria cells in the shape of a tree. Each branch of the tree is lined with cells sensitive to a different chemical or molecular compound. When the patch is adhered to skin that has been exposed to the same compounds, corresponding regions of the tree light up in response.

The researchers, led by Xuanhe Zhao, the Noyce Career Development Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Timothy Lu, associate professor of biological engineering and of electrical engineering and computer science, say that their technique can be used to fabricate “active” materials for wearable sensors and interactive displays. Such materials can be patterned with live cells engineered to sense environmental chemicals and pollutants as well as changes in pH and temperature.

What’s more, the team developed a model to predict the interactions between cells within a given 3-D-printed structure, under a variety of conditions. The team says researchers can use the model as a guide in designing responsive living materials.

Zhao, Lu, and their colleagues have published their results today in the journal Advanced Materials. The paper’s co-authors are graduate students Xinyue Liu, Hyunwoo Yuk, Shaoting Lin, German Alberto Parada, Tzu-Chieh Tang, Eléonore Tham, and postdoc Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez.

A hardy alternative

In recent years, scientists have explored a variety of responsive materials as the basis for 3D-printed inks. For instance, scientists have used inks made from temperature-sensitive polymers to print heat-responsive shape-shifting objects. Others have printed photoactivated structures from polymers that shrink and stretch in response to light.  

Zhao’s team, working with bioengineers in Lu’s lab, realized that live cells might also serve as responsive materials for 3D-printed inks, particularly as they can be genetically engineered to respond to a variety of stimuli. The researchers are not the first to consider 3-D printing genetically engineered cells; others have attempted to do so using live mammalian cells, but with little success.

“It turns out those cells were dying during the printing process, because mammalian cells are basically lipid bilayer balloons,” Yuk says. “They are too weak, and they easily rupture.”

Instead, the team identified a hardier cell type in bacteria. Bacterial cells have tough cell walls that are able to survive relatively harsh conditions, such as the forces applied to ink as it is pushed through a printer’s nozzle. Furthermore, bacteria, unlike mammalian cells, are compatible with most hydrogels — gel-like materials that are made from a mix of mostly water and a bit of polymer. The group found that hydrogels can provide an aqueous environment that can support living bacteria.

The researchers carried out a screening test to identify the type of hydrogel that would best host bacterial cells. After an extensive search, a hydrogel with pluronic acid was found to be the most compatible material. The hydrogel also exhibited an ideal consistency for 3-D printing.

“This hydrogel has ideal flow characteristics for printing through a nozzle,” Zhao says. “It’s like squeezing out toothpaste. You need [the ink] to flow out of a nozzle like toothpaste, and it can maintain its shape after it’s printed.”

From tattoos to living computers

Lu provided the team with bacterial cells engineered to light up in response to a variety of chemical stimuli. The researchers then came up with a recipe for their 3-D ink, using a combination of bacteria, hydrogel, and nutrients to sustain the cells and maintain their functionality.

“We found this new ink formula works very well and can print at a high resolution of about 30 micrometers per feature,” Zhao says. “That means each line we print contains only a few cells. We can also print relatively large-scale structures, measuring several centimeters.”

They printed the ink using a custom 3-D printer that they built using standard elements combined with fixtures they machined themselves. To demonstrate the technique, the team printed a pattern of hydrogel with cells in the shape of a tree on an elastomer layer. After printing, they solidified, or cured, the patch by exposing it to ultraviolet radiation. They then adhere the transparent elastomer layer with the living patterns on it, to skin.

To test the patch, the researchers smeared several chemical compounds onto the back of a test subject’s hand, then pressed the hydrogel patch over the exposed skin. Over several hours, branches of the patch’s tree lit up when bacteria sensed their corresponding chemical stimuli.

The researchers also engineered bacteria to communicate with each other; for instance they programmed some cells to light up only when they receive a certain signal from another cell. To test this type of communication in a 3-D structure, they printed a thin sheet of hydrogel filaments with “input,” or signal-producing bacteria and chemicals, overlaid with another layer of filaments of an “output,” or signal-receiving bacteria. They found the output filaments lit up only when they overlapped and received input signals from corresponding bacteria .

Yuk says in the future, researchers may use the team’s technique to print “living computers” — structures with multiple types of cells that communicate with each other, passing signals back and forth, much like transistors on a microchip.

“This is very future work, but we expect to be able to print living computational platforms that could be wearable,” Yuk says.

For more near-term applications, the researchers are aiming to fabricate customized sensors, in the form of flexible patches and stickers that could be engineered to detect a variety of chemical and molecular compounds. They also envision their technique may be used to manufacture drug capsules and surgical implants, containing cells engineered produce compounds such as glucose, to be released therapeutically over time.

“We can use bacterial cells like workers in a 3-D factory,” Liu says. “They can be engineered to produce drugs within a 3-D scaffold, and applications should not be confined to epidermal devices. As long as the fabrication method and approach are viable, applications such as implants and ingestibles should be possible.”

Meet James Banal, biological engineer

1) What do you do?

I combine chemistry and structural DNA nanotechnology to mimic the robust, coherently-coupled exciton states that inhabit light-harvesting complexes typically found in natural photosynthesis. These synthetic light-harvesting systems may provide new opportunties to control nanoscale energy transport that leverages quantum coherence.

My deep dive is mainly focused on developing new paradigms to control nanoscale energy transport. I design, synthesize, and characterize excitonic circuits (excitons are quasiparticles in semiconductors) to understand the role of quantum coherence in energy transfer and create devices that leverages these coherent effects. My vision is to supersede traditional semiconductor technologies that are used in a plethora of applications, such as photovoltaics and quantum computing.

2) Where do you work?

I am a postdoctoral research associate of the Energy Frontier Research Center for Excitonics of MIT and Harvard University. I work in the Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE) and the Laboratory for Computational Biology and Biophysics (LCBB) of MIT.

3) Tell us about the photos!

[Top:] I work in a biological engineering lab where we do gene editing, therapeutic payload delivery, materials design, nanoscale informatics, and quantum biology, among many others.

[Bottom:]  When I'm not in the lab or in the gym chasing the proverbial gainz, I usually stroll around New England searching for picturesque autumn pantone colors or enjoying the occasional blizzards.

4) Tell us about your academic career path so far. 

Elementary: Siena College Q.C. (2003)

HS: University of Santo Tomas (2007)

BS: University of Santo Tomas (2011), University of Melbourne (2012)

PhD: University of Melbourne (2016)

Postdoc: MIT and Harvard​ (current)

5) Anything else you’d like to share?

I don't know anyone who doesn't live with either physical or psychological health issues or both.

Wouldn't it be liberating, wouldn't it put humanity on the path to something closer to an ecstatic form of existence if virtually any ailment could be rapidly cured?

It's alarming how relatively little control we have over things that can degrade our health and kill us. Every generation that's come before us suffered and died of things that are in principle eliminable with enough research (and changing social conditions). Synthetic biology is one of the paths bringing us closer to bodies and minds freed from nature's indifferent malevolence.

3D bioprinting of tissue, cells and organs has been on the drawing boards for a long time, but it now looks like we're in the earliest stages of bringing this technological advance to the clinic:

Possibly from old soccer injuries I have an arthritic knee. Now, it looks like anyone suffering from arthritis can look forward to a cure at some point:

In the global effort to decarbonize the food supply chain, the Europe Organic Pesticides Market has emerged as the definitive trendsetter. European regulations regarding maximum residue limits (MRLs) are the strictest in the world, effectively forcing exporters from other regions to adopt organic practices to maintain access to the EU market. The Organic Pesticides industry in Europe is therefore not just a local provider but a global architect of safety standards, influencing the R&D priorities of major agrochemical companies worldwide.

Data from a recent Organic Pesticides Market analysis shows that the market recorded a sale of 128,190 tons in 2024 and is projected to reach a volume of 423,587 tons by 2033. With a projected CAGR of 14.5% from 2027 to 2033, the Organic Pesticides Market forecast remains highly positive as investment pours into bio-fermentation facilities across Germany, France, and Italy. This growth is a lucrative Organic Pesticides Market opportunity for startups specializing in pheromone-based mating disruption and beneficial predatory insects, which are becoming staples of modern organic pest control.

A key Organic Pesticides Market driver is the increasing consumer demand for "residue-free" baby food and fresh produce. Retailers are now setting their own private standards that go beyond government regulations, creating a powerful market-led incentive for farmers to utilize organic pesticides. This expansion is driving the Organic Pesticides Market size upward as the diversity of available organic products increases to cover almost every major pest and disease found in European climates. However, a detailed Organic Pesticides Market study warns that the reliance on copper-based organic fungicides remains a point of regulatory scrutiny, leading to a surge in Organic Pesticides industry trends focused on finding bio-based alternatives.