International Research & an iGEM Hydrogen Energy Startup
iGEM has long been known as the Birthplace of Innovation in synthetic biology. From the founding of Ginkgo Bioworks, the first synthetic biology company to spin out of iGEM, to the present day, iGEMers have been turning their ideas into innovative products that support sustainable agriculture, affordable and accessible healthcare, and preservation of the environment.
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In this episode of the iGEMers of the World Podcast series, I talk with Kerstin Petroll, an entrepreneur and postdoctoral researcher in synthetic biology at Macquarie University, Australia. The iGEM startup that Kerstin works with – HydGene Renewables – has engineered designer microbes that can produce hydrogen and renewable energy.
Below are some highlights from my interview with Kerstin:
After you finished your PhD, were you looking for projects that had business potential?
I did look for industry jobs, but it never crossed my mind that my idea would be commercialized. When I took on my current project, I wasn’t thinking about the option of getting into the market at all. It was my supervisor that pushed us to do the CSIRO program to understand what it would mean to commercialize the tech – I was oblivious to this world and it really opened my mind.
As “Australia's national science agency and innovation catalyst”, CSIRO is like an accelerator or entrepreneurship program. What was your experience with CSIRO?
They really try to push you out of your comfort zone. For example, they ask you to do 100 customer interviews. You have to call up 100 people out of the blue and it’s a very uncomfortable situation to be in, but you learn and become more confident. One of the biggest parts of forming a company is that you’ve got to be very good at communicating and building a network.
When you have a commercialization idea, you realize that a lot of your thinking process is based upon assumptions – assumptions about your customers, your supply chain, your financials. They try to make you understand your assumptions – what type of interviews do you need to validate your assumptions? You also learn how to build a financial model, how to build a market entry strategy, how to pitch, how to communicate. It’s very different from what you learn in academia.
What are the next steps for HydGene Renewables?
We are currently starting the negotiation process with the University. To be able to raise capital, your investor has a certain interest in your company. If there is a large part of equity taken by a big institution that is very bureaucratic and very slow, then it’s very negative for an investor. They often tell us the conditions they require to invest in us depends on what the University stake would be.
The Macquarie iGEM team won Best Energy Project in 2017 for H2ydroGEM, an engineered bacteria that can produce hydrogen. Image from: https://2017.igem.org/Team:Macquarie_Australia
Can you tell us about the technology behind HydGene Renewables?
We have engineered bacteria to increase the efficiency of hydrogen production. The idea comes from an iGEM project in 2017 – H2ydroGEM – that won Best Energy Project. Now we are doing certain gene deletions and gene insertions to direct the flux of the feedstock to eliminate competing pathways in the bacteria that takes away the sugar from producing hydrogen.
The bacteria act as an on/off switch – the moment you add sugar is the moment they produce hydrogen. By adding more or less sugar, we can control how much hydrogen is produced. This technology eliminates the need to transport and store hydrogen, which is the largest cost factor for hydrogen production. Instead of producing, storing, and transporting hydrogen, we can use the bacteria to produce the hydrogen onsite.
Are any members of the 2017 iGEM team currently associated with this project?
Our current Masters student Ari Edmonds and our current PhD student Jocelyn Johns were part of the 2017 iGEM team and are both integrated into this project, as well as both supervisors: Louise Brown and Robert Willows. Yes, it’s really amazing to think that undergraduates who worked on an iGEM project and, with the help of others, could potentially become Australia’s number one source of hydrogen energy.
What is the future for HydGene Renewables?
Particularly with the energy market, technologies are extremely cost competitive. We had assumed if there was a renewable energy source, then customers would buy it no matter the cost. But we were wrong and understood very quickly that we have to beat the price of fossil fuel hydrogen in order to be competitive. There’s a target price of $2 per kilogram of hydrogen, which seems very unrealistic at the moment. If you reach this target price you win, if you don’t, you lose.
Elon Musk has said that hydrogen would never be on the market, and we are going to prove him wrong. Especially for Australia, hydrogen energy makes so much more sense. There is no train system and everything must be transported long distances by truck. With long distances and heavy vehicles, electricity battery systems are not enough.
Any final words of advice?
You’ve got to be very adjustable, very resilient to failure. There’s a lot of doubts coming along the way. Biotechnology just hasn’t had the same success rate as high tech, so we have to prove over and over again that we have done our financial modeling. Investors and different stakeholders are very critical of our ideas, our scalability, and the robustness of our system. You have to convince yourself as well. We’ve crunched so many numbers just to build up our confidence to talk with stakeholders. You learn to withstand this kind of criticisms and to demonstrate there is evidence to back you up.
Many thanks to Kerstin Petroll for sharing her experience in translating an iGEM project into a startup company with tremendous potential for changing the future of energy production. I invite you to listen to my interview with Kerstin to hear her story and learn more about how her early research experiences have influenced her career choices and prepared her for the challenges of a synthetic biology startup.
