Harnessing biologically inspired engineering to drive scalable solutions for people and the planet
By Seth Kroll
The planet’s health directly impacts human health. Plastic pollution, unsustainable manufacturing, and carbon-intensive material production are accelerating a planetary crisis that demands urgent solutions. At the Wyss Institute, our Sustainable Futures Initiative is tackling this Grand Challenge by re-designing the systems we rely on, from farming to materials and manufacturing, to become planet-friendly with high-performance and scalable features.
Our interdisciplinary community of scientists, engineers, and industry collaborators is pioneering a new generation of solutions focused on remediation to correct environmental degradation, resilience to sustain a standard of living on a changing planet, and reinvention to replace harmful materials and processes with eco-alternatives. These efforts are rooted in Nature and powered by biologically inspired engineering – and our unique translational model is built to bring them into the world quickly and effectively.
People power: community and leadership
The Sustainable Futures Initiative is led by a dynamic team bringing deep scientific expertise, entrepreneurial experience, and real-world impact into focus. With Emily Stoler, Ph.D., the Wyss Institute’s Principal Scientist for Sustainable Futures, at the helm, the Initiative is cultivating projects with the potential to reshape how we interact with the planet. With a background that spans both academia and industry, Stoler helps steer high-potential technologies toward application. This past year, she brought the Wyss vision to global audiences at ClimateTech and DeepFest, framing how synthetic biology and sustainability innovation can, and must, intersect so that key challenges in this sector can be met.
She is joined by Pam Silver, Ph.D., a Founding Core Faculty member of the Wyss and a world-renowned synthetic biology pioneer. Silver, who also is a Professor of Systems Biology Professor at Harvard Medical School, has long been a driving force in engineering biological systems to address systemic challenges, including climate resilience and sustainable production.
Marika Ziesack, Ph.D., a Wyss Senior Scientist, brings valuable startup experience to the Initiative. After co-founding the Wyss spinout Circe Bioscience, which forged a viable path toward converting CO₂ into carbon-negative fats, Ziesack returned to the Institute to guide emerging teams along the lab-to-startup journey. She recently hosted a live ask-me-anything session with Kurt Keilhacker, General Partner at Elementum Ventures and lecturer at the University of San Francisco, where Wyss researchers engaged in candid conversations about newco team-building, venture capital, and commercialization strategies.
To further support project teams in the Sustainable Futures Initiative and beyond, the Wyss also welcomed Helen Wang, M.B.A., into the Wyss Mentor Hive. A global expert in artificial intelligence and data science, Helen advises on how AI can reduce the resource burden of R&D through in silico experimentation, while also encouraging deeper thinking about the carbon footprint of digital tools themselves. Drawing on her international perspective, shaped by work across Asia and the Middle East, she reminds us that effective climate solutions must cross borders.
Wyss Retreat and ecosystem building
The 2025 Wyss Retreat showcased our passionate community and broader ecosystem of supporters with a full slate of high-impact presentations and a dedicated breakout panel discussion. Speakers showcased breakthrough technologies across the sustainability spectrum, from biosensors to detect water contaminations with PFAS “forever chemical” at on-site and at low costs to AI-enabled bioproduction and cost-competitive biomanufacturing.
The breakout panel Funding Sustainable Technology in Our Changing Climate, moderated by Stoler featured Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., Wyss Associate Faculty member; Ashika Kalra, Head of Special Projects at Collaborative Fund; Priyanka Bakaya, Climate Commercialization Officer at ARPA-E; and Daniel Goodwin, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Homeworld Collective, a non-profit dedicated to fostering the growth of the climate biotech community. The participants together explored how policy, venture capital, and academia shape the path to climate innovation, recognizing that the current period of upheaval in climate and green tech could be an opportunity to develop new funding models. Together, these conversations underscored the Wyss Institute’s role as a convening force to facilitate the next wave of sustainable biotechnology.
Green innovation: technology advancement
This past year brought exciting momentum for projects in the Sustainable Futures pipeline. These projects rely on diverse funding models, including the Wyss Validation Project program, alliance collaboration with venture capital, and expanded philanthropic support, to reach ambitious project milestones.
REFINE (Redefining Oxygen Transfer for Cost-Effective Biomanufacturing), a newly selected project for the FY26 Wyss Validation Project program, grew out of an earlierAI-optimized bioreactor design effort at the Wyss that was supported by the DARPA Digital Twins program. Before submitting REFINE for Validation Project consideration, the team conducted a rigorous techno-economic analysis (TEA) to assess real-world cost drivers in biomanufacturing. These early analyses allowed the team to identify and focus on key cost “pinch points” in industrial fermentation, particularly the energy-intensive oxygen transfer step required to mobilize oxygen from gas phase into the liquid medium that engineered microbes grow in. This inspired a new approach using Microporous Water (MPW), a tunable fluid that improves gas delivery without the need for complex or expensive reactor systems.
PFASense is a synthetic biology-powered biosensor platform designed to enable rapid, low-cost, in-field detection of PFAS. PFAS increase the risk of many health conditions, including cancer and birth defects even in small amounts, but they are hard to detect because they are colorless and odorless. The project, led by Silver and Postdoctoral Fellow Simon D’Oelsnitz, Ph.D., was selected for a second year of Validation Project support based on its fast scientific and translational progress. Now, they’ve expanded the team to include Nandhinee Radha Shanmugam, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Fellow from the lab of Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who is developing a portable device to convert the signals produced by their sensors into a digital readout.
Last fall, the Sustainable Futures Initiative hosted a hackathon, which brought together scientists and engineers to explore how Wyss technologies could help address PFAS-related health and environmental threats. These conversations helped the PFASense team refine their approach for field readiness.
The event also helped inform another FY25 Validation Project developed in Aizenberg’s lab: Nixe, a plant-inspired engineered material that mimics the lotus leaf’s water-repellent surface to provide a sustainable, PFAS-free alternative for water-resistant coatings. The hackathon enabled both teams to view their work through new technical, societal, and commercial lenses, underscoring how early-stage ideation and community engagement can accelerate innovation and impact.
Another major milestone this past year was the launch of Project Air, the first initiative funded through our alliance with the Collaborative Fund, a climate tech-focused venture firm. The project aims to commercialize SNIFFIA, an air-monitoring system that detects and quantifies specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in real time inspired by how dogs sniff. SNIFFIA was developed by Wyss Faculty member Aizenberg and collaborators at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the University of North Carolina. SNIFFIA is now being piloted at the Harvard House Zero to validate its real-world performance with additional help from the Wyss Institute and the generous support of the Collaborative Fund.
Another project, SPEEDR (Solvent & PETase Enhanced Degradation and Recycling), is addressing the dual challenge of plastic waste by engineering microbes that can degrade commonly used PET plastic and convert it into PHB, a fully compostable bioplastic. Led by Wyss Staff Scientist Peter Nguyen, Ph.D., the SPEEDR team has devleoped microbes that produce PET-degrading enzymes, originally discovered in a bacterium found in a Japanese recycling facility, and secrete them into their environment using Wyss-developed secretion systems. Integrated with green solvents, and machine-learning-guided protein engineering, SPEEDR technology enables efficient plastic breakdown and reuse of waste as feedstock for the microbes. This vision attracted the support of Gerstner Philanthropies, exemplifying how targeted philanthropic investment can catalyze innovative, scalable approaches to sustainability. The project is conducted within the lab of Jim Collins, Ph.D., a Wyss Core Faculty member and the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science at MIT.
Gerstner Philanthropies is proud to support the Wyss Institute’s efforts to tackle plastic waste through science and innovation. This work aligns with our goal of advancing scalable solutions to reduce plastic waste.
Impact: our sustainability startups
Like proud parents watching fledglings take flight, we continue to celebrate the global impact of sustainability startups launched from the Wyss.
- Colossal Biosciences, named to TIME’s 2025 list of the world’s most influential companies, raised $200 million in a Series C round that valued the company at $10.2 billion. Colossal is advancing biodiversity goals by leveraging synthetic biology, as in the recent example of the successful development of genetically engineered “dire wolves.”
- Kula Bio is deploying modern biofertilizers (Kula‑N) made with engineered microbes developed at the Wyss. Backed by a $50 million Series A round, Kula, with use of its microbes that capture nitrogen directly from the atmosphere and provide it to plants, is helping agriculture transition away from environmentally damaging synthetic nitrogen.
- Circe Bioscience, co-founded by Silver and co-developed by Ziesack in its early days, uses engineered microbes to convert CO₂ into fats, fuels, and other essential molecules. Circe’s scalable, carbon-negative platform is now producing food-grade fats and industrial inputs, bringing synthetic biology to climate-positive food systems.
These companies reflect the cascading power of the Wyss Effect, turning bold and risky scientific ideas into real-world ventures poised for global impact.
Help us advance our sustainable solutions
We are collaborators by nature, and partnerships with equally passionate people bring us closer to market-ready solutions. Get in touch with Emily Stoler, co-lead of the Wyss Sustainable Futures Initiative, to learn more about our emerging technologies and collaboration opportunities.