H2Omic: precise water cleanup

We are reducing hazardous waste in the wastewater that is produced in research, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing. This problem exists in most locales with pharmaceutical manufacturers, life science research organizations including universities and hospital wastewater streams. In a study by EPA where they sampled 50 of the biggest wastewater plants in the US that treat 17% of all wastewater produced, serving 46 million people, they found high concentrations of at least seven metabolites in over 90% of the samples. These include hydrochlorothiazide, metoprolol, atenolol, carbamazepine, valsartan etc. that not only pose risks to healthy humans but also have ecological impacts on aquatic life. Antibiotic resistance due to antibiotics in wastewater is another problem area that has gained people’s awareness in recent times. These pharmaceutical and chemical compounds are often difficult to remove using mechanical methods due to size and stability of molecule, as they are designed for consumption. Our solution uses a biological system that can address this difficulty by acting as an active filter instead of a passive, size or charge based one. 

Evolution has been the most precise and accurate engineer to date, and has evolved organisms to perform amazingly complex functions. For example, evolution has engineered plants to capture light energy and convert it into chemical energy. We are harnessing the engineering that nature has already performed to clean up toxic waste using yeast. Our solution involves engineered yeast, the same Baker's yeast used for baking a brioche, that clean up toxic waste. We have engineered the yeast to capture the waste in the cell, and shuttle it to a separate compartment in the cell, the vacuole. The vacuole functions as a kind of trash can for the cell, where once an object is shuttled into the vacuole, it does not escape. Our engineered yeast shuttle in the waste and then transfer it into their own cellular trash can. 

There are about 1193 facilities manufacturing pharmaceuticals and medical devices spread over 44 states with 37 states having more than five. The hubs are largely concentrated in California and Massachusetts with Texas and Colorado becoming growing centers. Booming biomedical research will continue to grow these numbers over the upcoming years and with that increase the problem of pharmaceutical contaminants in effluent water. Having academic backgrounds in biological and biomedical engineering, we are strongly connected to these top states and this industry. Our co-founder Shalmalee grew up in California, getting her bachelors degree at UC Berkeley and PhD at MIT. Co-founder Nikita got her bachelors at Boston University and PhD at UT Austin. We are using our existing networks in the key states of California, Massachusetts, California and Texas to engage the local communities that live and work in and around these pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. Our motivation comes from our previous volunteering and outreach experience in local hospitals, animal shelters and elementary schools where we saw first-hand the importance of clean, healthy water to the community at large. We will continue to attend community meetings and listening sessions, especially targeted towards underrepresented minorities to understand the specific issues that these communities face in regards to their water availability and quality. Our solution is designed with overall human and environmental health in mind by minimizing toxicity. From future listening sessions, especially involving local area hospitals, we will gain insights on which wastewater contaminants are highest priority to communities. This will help us focus our research and development efforts. 

Shalmalee grew up in both the USA and India. When she was 13 or 14 she traveled to India for the first time alone and was flabbergasted when she wasn’t allowed to drink the water her relatives were drinking (she was only allowed to drink boiled, filtered water). Of course, at that time, she did not understand the implications or the reasons why. That formative experience shaped her and percolated in her mind. Fast forward to 2016 when Shalmalee started graduate school in the year that Trump was elected. Finding hope in her colleagues and the blue bubble that is Boston, Shalmalee set out to contribute in a field she thought would be underserved. She felt that she could best serve the community by working on biological solutions to climate problems. She worked on engineering yeast to cleanup heavy metals from water (remembering the lack of clean water that her relatives have access too), produce biofuels, and sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide. 

Nikita grew up in Saudi Arabia where she saw the systemic degradation of the Red Sea through industrial waste polluting the local environments. Seeing the first-hand effects on coastal life, the local environment, and the local population has been inspiring Nikita to take actionable steps to mitigate the detrimental impacts. In graduate school, she started Project Xylem, with the goal of repurposing abandoned offshore oil platforms for new use cases including hydroponic greenhouses. Project Xylem also intended to conserve and monitor the marine ecosystem that developed under the repurposed platforms. Through this experience, Nikita learned about various solutions to climate problems, and wants to couple that with her strong biological expertise. 

As we both come from research organizations, we have seen what we put down the drain. We have many colleagues who have gone into pharmaceutical, health services, or medical technology work, and we have heard the stories of the sheer amount of waste they dispose of, and the low amount of regulations that surround what they dispose of. 

We are contacting Superfund site managers, community managers, towns and jurisdictions near manufacturing plants/research labs/etc in order to understand their largest pain points. We are also reaching out to the leaders in these districts to listen and learn from the community members. As our technology will directly impact where they live, they have the right to know, understand, and decide on the implementation of various solutions to clean up waste. Through these listening sessions, we are learning what best works for the communities. As women of color, we are frequently ignored and condescended on by colleagues. We are taking active measures to ensure we do not do this to anyone downstream. 

We are not a concept as we have a working prototype in lab. Our prototype is 50 milliliters - 2 L. We are applying to this prize as we have outgrown the lab and we need more space to take our prototype forward into a pilot.

If we win the Prize, here is how we would spend the money:

10K: Customer discovery: conferences, site visits

10K: patent negotiations, IP licensing

5K: engaging a regulatory expert to go through the barriers, hurdles, and form government relationships

30K: wastewater testing component-wise

50K: lab equipment and materials for testing wastewater against our yeast strains

40K: lab bench for a few months

5K: life cycle analysis and technoeconomic analysis

Both team members, including the team lead, comes from the communities they intend to serve. Growing up in water deserts and learning the importance of the water stream on early stage biological development, health outcomes, access to resources, and economical development. Historically, both team members' families are a part of the community we intend to serve and are already engaging with. 

In order to serve communities that we are not a part of, we are actively engaging with stakeholders like Barry Reaves at NECEC, and Kerry Bowie at Browning the Green Space to reach out and listen to additional communities that are affected equally or more than the communities we come from. 

Evolution has been the most precise and accurate engineer to date, and evolution has engineered biology to do what it does today. Photosynthesis, or the process of capturing and converting light energy into chemical energy, has been a feat that no human has been able to come close to reproducing. We have harnessed the innate power of biology and the technique of directed evolution to evolve our yeast to eat up toxic waste. As we are using engineered Baker's yeast, the biological organism does not confer any additional toxicity or harm to the environment, and has been produced by the baking, beer, and alcohol industries at scale sustainably. We have combined these strategies to create a novel, non-toxic, sustainable biological system that cleans up waste. 

A biological solution to clean up waste has not been implemented at scale to date. As it is a solution in a problem space that has not had drastic improvements in innovation in years, we believe this non-toxic solution could catalyze the industry into implementing cleaner and greener technologies to their waste problems. By implementing a biological solution at scale in a space where no biological solution has been implemented, we would set the precedent for opening up new markets in fields we cannot even consider, such as energy capture and generation outside of biofuels and capturing greenhouse gases other than CO2 from the air using biology. 

At H2Omic, we strive to clean water sustainably, empower communities affected by industrial waste and change the perception about water health. We clean water sustainably by using a non-toxic, biological solution to achieve the same level of purity as existing energy-intensive methods. Empowerment of affected communities is demonstrated through our water health metrics that will be more detailed and environmentally friendly than current standards. We will change the perception about water health by providing clear metrics and toxicity evaluations in a chemical and biological context. Compared to current industry practices, we are more sustainable, equitable and comprehensive. We believe that water purity goes beyond simplistic estimates, affecting long-term human and environmental health. 

The specific LACI metrics we will create impact through are:

GHG reduction (lbs) PI5376

Water savings (gal) PD5786

Non-hazardous waste (lbs) PI81771

Female employment OI2444 

 Minority employment OI3236

Our solution uses a non-toxic, biological system to clean wastewater contaminants. We will develop an at scale pilot, which involves high throughput production of our system and sell it to a wastewater treatment facility to fit into their existing plant. By using our system, the plant will save time and energy in performing the cleaning process. This is estimated based on our lab results where we took an unprocessed wastewater sample and achieved EPA standard drinking water within 2 days. In the long term, this will reduce the costs and GHG emissions for the plant as we decrease operation time.

We will also use our established community engagement networks to provide information on the risks of certain types of contaminants in water. In the short term, this information can be used to improve water quality and awareness of adverse effects of types of contaminants on human and environmental health. In the long term, people’s perceptions can drive policy changes to establish better industry standards and practices. 

We have harnessed the innate powers of biology to do what it does best - breaking things - into our solution. The simplicity of our solution using yeast that have been used for generations at scale gives us confidence that our yeast solution can also be scaled. Additionally, as there are no toxic components to our technology, we not only compartmentalize the waste in the yeast cell, but we do not have any environmental toxicity with our solution.

While this technology is not yet published, due to IP concerns, we have published studies on engineering yeast to remediate other forms of toxic waste in the past. Here are two papers: 

Nature Communication: https://www.nature.com/article...

Nature Sustainability: https://www.nature.com/article...

Three people are currently on the team. Two of us are full-time (Shalmalee and Nikita). Shalmalee's PI, Prof. Angela Belcher, works part time on the team.

The research began in 2014 when Shalmalee's predecessor in lab began working on engineering yeast to clean up waste. Shalmalee picked up this research in 2016 and has been working on it ever since. Nikita has been working on this solution for this calendar year. Shalmalee's PI, Prof. Belcher, has been working on various solutions to clean up waste for decades. The research on this specific solution began in 2014. 

As women of color in this field, we will register as a minority owned business in both categories. We will leverage that network to hire the best employees in each field, but being in that community is an advantage. 

We are reaching out to engage in listening sessions with various communities through NECEC to learn about their problems and how/if we can best serve them independent of this solution's deployment. We are looking at small towns near manufacturing plants, superfund sites, and contamination sites, to name a few. 

We are currently taking many customer discovery calls to figure out our beachhead market. Currently, our key customers can span municipal wastewater treatment facilities, large industrial manufacturing sites that treat wastewater in house, the military industrial complex, and superfund/contamination sites. 

We have engineered a drop in solution to fit into the existing wastewater treatment pipeline. Our main value proposition is a combined wastewater treatment with a cheaper, non-toxic, and energy effective solution. 

In terms of impact, as this is a non-toxic and energy efficient solution, our greenhouse gas emissions are low and we are not conferring additional environmental toxicity. 

We intend to become financially sustainable by initially bringing in money from both dilutive and non-dilutive funding sources. We are looking at government grants (SBIRs), among others, and looking at foundations, such as the Gates Foundation, that have programs to fund solutions that better health outcomes. As our technology reduces the waste in the water, we have a direct impact on increasing health outcomes. Our revenue streams involve the wastewater analysis and the wastewater cleanup. The wastewater analysis can be applied to multiple industries, including defense and agriculture (these are the first two we are targeting). 

While we have raised no funding at the moment, we are discussing our solution with a few venture capital firms. We are applying to non-dilutive funding sources.