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Dr. Paul Reginato
Dr. Paul Reginato is the co-founder and Science Director of Homeworld Collective, a non-profit founded in 2022 that provides community, knowledge, and funding support for researchers in climate biotechnology. Paul will be joining Connecting Genetics to Climate on Wednesday October 16 at 1 PM ET for a webinar discussing the landscape of climate biotechnology. We talked to Paul to learn more about what led him to start Homeworld, how the initiative is helping to advance the field of climate biotech, and why he’s so focused on combating climate change.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Connecting Genetics to Climate
Why did you decide to focus your work on climate change?
Paul Reginato
I got into biology because I love living things. I’m a biophile. I want my work to benefit life on this planet. That’s what’s most meaningful to me, and that’s my North Star.
Connecting Genetics to Climate
Tell us how Homeworld Collective came into existence.
Paul Reginato
My co-founder Dan Goodwin and I were working on our Ph.D.’s; I was in both Ed Boyden’s lab at MIT and George Church’s lab at Harvard, while Dan was in Ed’s lab. We both started our graduate work focused on problems rooted in medicine, but we wanted to change our focus to climate and sustainability.
Within the field of biotechnology, we saw a stark difference between the opportunities that were available for people to work on medical problems compared to the opportunities for people to work on climate and sustainability. We met a lot of people, found out that this problem was general, and realized that there was an opportunity for a non-profit to really support that community.
Connecting Genetics to Climate
Can you tell us what Homeworld Collective is trying to do?
Paul Reginato
We think of Homeworld as a field-building organization that exists on behalf of the climate biotech field to try to help it grow by enabling practitioners. Our goal is to enable biotech to be applied to its full potential for climate and sustainability by enabling biotech practitioners to identify important problems to work on and get started working on them.
Our work consists of community building, identifying open problems through collaboration with the practitioner community to help people learn about what those open problems are and where they can get involved, and then to fund early-stage research. We provide funding for the first stage of projects. We want to help people de-risk their ideas and get their projects off the ground, so they can generate that first bit of momentum that would then allow them to access less risk-tolerant forms of funding.
Connecting Genetics to Climate
What are some examples of climate biotechnologies that are being utilized as we speak?
Paul Reginato
I think we’re all familiar with the idea of biotech being helpful for, say, agriculture, where we could help crops to be more resilient to climate stresses. There’s also some familiarity with applications in chemicals manufacturing, where you’d be using organisms to produce commodity chemicals from simple feedstocks.
One great example of biotechnologies being deployed currently that people might not know about is manufacturing of chemicals from carbon dioxide (CO2). A really important part of a circular carbon economy is capturing CO2 from the emissions streams of industrial processes, and then feeding that CO2 back into new manufacturing processes that produce chemicals using CO2 and clean energy in the form of electrochemically-produced hydrogen. For example, a company called LanzaTech is using microbes to fix CO2 and output chemicals like ethylene at scale, which is a really important precursor for many industrial chemicals and plastics.
Connecting Genetics to Climate
Which climate biotechnologies that are still in development do you see as having the greatest potential?
Paul Reginato
One would be biomining, which is the collective name for a group of technologies that would provide biological mechanisms for dissolving minerals and isolating specific metal ions to meet the critical metals needs for the energy transition. Some of these biomining methods can improve the efficiency of mining so we can extract metals from lower grade ores, while also minimizing environmental impact. Biomining also has potential to support national security by allowing more sustainable mining, which allows that mining to happen in the United States and reduces our dependence on foreign supply chains of critical metals.
Another technology that people might be surprised to learn about is biologic pesticides. We will see coming in the next five years technologies that use very targeted biologics, like small molecules, peptides or synthetic RNAs, that specifically target certain species of insects to prevent crop destruction without having a widespread environmental impact. That’s really important for reducing the number of different stresses that we put on the environment. While ecosystems deal with the insults of climate change, we don’t want to also have them be dealing with pesticide pollution.
Connecting Genetics to Climate
How does climate biotech intersect with other climate fields?
Paul Reginato
This is a really important question. In climate biotech, we’re intersecting with fields like mining, carbon dioxide removal, chemical engineering, agriculture, and soil science. Understanding the context and finding the opportunities where biotech has to be the best solution means that we need an understanding of these adjacent areas. We don’t want to just assume that biotech is going to be the solution to every problem. There might be non-biological solutions that are much better and more efficient. That will be the case for many problems.
Connecting Genetics to Climate
Looking at the whole field of climate technology, what are the most exciting trends that you are seeing?
Paul Reginato
A promising trend is that people are getting more serious about the need for quality technoeconomic analyses to be done in the early stages of a project. There is a need to really ask the question of whether a particular technological pursuit is actually scalable before getting too deep into the project.
For example, if you’re trying to produce a chemical, you need to compete on a commodity market with a chemical that’s produced from petroleum or from other methods that might be nonbiological, like electrochemical methods. Incorporating those cost analysis early on and getting that into the culture is super-important. We are seeing that trend starting.
There’s also a really exciting trend of geobiotechnology, which is technology based on geobiology. The field of geobiology, which is the study of how microbes interact with minerals, historically has mostly been a pure science. Now, researchers in this field have the opportunity to find real-world applications. Examples ranging from biomining to carbon mineralization to enhanced weathering of minerals for carbon drawdown are all now being taken more seriously. That’s a pretty cool trend, seeing the geological sciences overlapping with biotech.
Connecting Genetics to Climate
What are some of the biggest challenges confronting the field of climate biotech?
Paul Reginato
The problems that we face in climate biotech are hard from a scientific standpoint, but they’re also hard from a business standpoint. There have been waves of companies that weren’t able to be competitive on the market and crashed.
As a community, we have to really make it clear what the problems are. Not just at a foundational level, but what are the challenges to scaling. When we’re scaling technologies, there isn’t really a great playbook for scaling a new technology for sustainability and climate biotech.
We have to work with people across the ecosystem, in companies, in investing, to really make sure that the scientists and the industry are aware of what the constraints are on each other’s end so that we can build technologies that actually scale and that researchers are solving the problems that industry is actually facing.
Hear more from Paul during our webinar conversation on Wednesday October 16 at 1 PM ET. Click here to register!
