Why the Pentagon wants germs to be part of the factories of the future

An emerging need for the future of manufacturing is application of biology. As a result, the Defense Department has issued a strategy for bio manufacturing. To take a deeper look as to what bio manufacturing is and why it matters to national security, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke   with Kate Sixt, principal director for Biotechnology in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And let’s start with the beginning. Bio manufacturing. It doesn’t mean like germs making new germs, does it?

Kate Sixt No, it doesn’t. But the germs are reproducing. So those bacteria are reproducing in there.

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Tom Temin Well, what is it?

Kate Sixt Biomanufacturing. That’s kind of a new term where we’re putting together some words, which happens a lot in biology. We like to make up new terms. And I think this is a great one here. So Bio manufacturing is really just using biological mechanisms so it doesn’t have to be germs, it doesn’t have to be microbes. But these biological mechanisms are being used in manufacturing. And it’s a rapidly maturing technology. It’s actually been around for years now.

Tom Temin I’ve seen Bio manufacturing used in the application of biomedical products, such as tissue regeneration that can be grown in a lab, eye corneas and that kind of thing. Does it extend beyond that at this point?

Kate Sixt Absolutely. Actually, it was around before that when we were making beer and wine. Biomanufacturing was a fermentation to make that. And also before the primary way that we made antibiotics was by fermentation, so that was also a type of biomanufacturing. But today, what we’re really looking at for Bio manufacturing, especially looking at the bio economy and the growing needs of the United States are things like making paints, fuels and a variety of other chemicals and compounds that can change our whole approach to how we do industrial manufacturing.

Tom Temin And what is the purpose of it? Why do we need it? Because paint and fuel have been great for a couple of hundred years until now.

Kate Sixt Yeah, and they still are. But as we’ve seen coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have real supply chain challenges. And this allows us another source of these materials that doesn’t use traditional synthesis mechanisms. And also, while we’re standing at biomanufacturing in the United States, that allows us to make those compounds here, as opposed to overseas where they’ve been made for many decades now.

Tom Temin And just to help us picture this, tell us how biology would be used to make something like a paint. And we know that paint has lots of military applications.

Kate Sixt Yes, it’s actually pretty cool the mechanisms that we use for this. So in essence, at its basics, either the microbe itself or things made by a microbe, and a microbe would be a bacterium, a fungus, algae, a variety of different hosts. And these are engineered in a way that we put in new enzymes and new pathways into them so that they actually work as a little miniature factory. And then we grow lots of them and give them lots of sugar. And then on the back end they produce compounds that are like xylene and ethanol’s and a variety of different chemicals that then we can piece together and make into compounds we need.

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Tom Temin And is the bioengineering strategy, and we’ll get into the elements of the strategy itself. But is the strategy a way of addressing supply chain potential interruptions? Is that the primary purpose here?

Kate Sixt It’s one of the primary purposes, yes. So, what we’re really looking to do in the strategy is actually support a broader domestic biomanufacturing ecosystem. And we want that to be self-sustaining so that once that gets up and running, it can run on its own. And we want to mitigate the risk of losing new found capabilities that [Department of Defense (DoD)] adopts over time and prevent new supply chain vulnerabilities. Supply chain falls into it, so do logistics, so do just novel materials. Things we’ve never seen before.

Tom Temin And how would you characterize the maturity of the industry? For example, a paint factory, just like a cheese factory, can turn out tremendous volumes and you see the cans being filled and assembly lines and hundreds of gallons pouring out every second. Where does bioengineering and biomanufacturing stand in relation to the ability to scale to the kinds of volumes needed at the industrial level?

Kate Sixt You actually bring up a really good point that we’ve got paints and cheeses, and it varies over what you’re making and how mature the industry is. But we actually can make synthetic cheese also with biology, so that’s another means. But also paint, so each of those industries are different in their maturity. But what we find primarily that we’re lacking worldwide is a capacity to be able to take those things that we’re making in the lab and scale them up to see, how do they work for cheese? How good does it taste for paint? How well does it spread? We need to scale that up. And then once we know that we’ve got a good product at a prototype size, then we need to make a lot of it. And that capacity worldwide just doesn’t exist.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Dr. Kate Sixt. She is principal director for biotechnology in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. And let’s get into the DoD’s Bio manufacturing strategy. What does it aim to do? And what are the principal elements of it?

Kate Sixt What we’re looking to do with the DoD Biomanufacturing strategy is really to support a self-sustaining domestic biomanufacturing ecosystem. And we have three principles that are guiding us in this strategy. First, we’re looking to establish transition partners for early stage innovations. And that means taking those lab discoveries and moving them forward into a prototype so that we can see how they actually function and will actually enable the military. Second, we’re also looking to develop biomanufacturing through innovations in practice and applications. And what that entails is both developing new things that we make by biomanufacturing, but also the actual science, the research, the technology that goes into biomanufacturing. This is a nascent industry and so there’s a lot of work that has to be done on just how we make things through biology and how we scale them. And lastly, what we need to do is we need to map the domestic biomanufacturing ecosystem. And what that entails is getting metrics and measurements and methodologies in place to be able to understand what this biomanufacturing ecosystem looks like and how it’s changing over time. And that’s really going to help us as we invest to identify and track our implementation of the strategy and refine it as we go in time.

Tom Temin Do you envision then, say, grants for development of these types of technologies from maybe [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)] or other parts of DoD?

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Kate Sixt DoD has been supporting Biomanufacturing actually for many years in smaller scale. And at this point, what we have is a much larger investment that we’re making of $1.2 billion over the next five years in Biomanufacturing. And that’s really going to support us as we foray into this world of this ecosystem of building things by biology.

Tom Temin Is there any tie in between biomanufacturing and nanotechnology? Because doesn’t that use molecular level structures to develop more molecular size things?

Kate Sixt Absolutely. I think that Biomanufacturing has great potential for making things that would overlap with nanotechnology. And when we talk about the types of innovations that we can do and that we’d like to see is, we’d like to make new things by biology that you’ve never seen made any other way that didn’t exist before that.

Tom Temin It seems like Biomanufacturing has a basic lane in the process industries where the output is continuously processed, that is to say, not in discrete manufacturing like parts. Fair to say?

Kate Sixt It could be in both. It could also be in parts as well, because biomanufacturing can make pieces that go into an entire system or an entire hole just in the example we used of paints. What we’re looking at is different chemicals that go into making up paints. So maybe not the final paint itself.

Tom Temin Right. So you could almost envision maybe, well, if it could make the paint itself, there could be a paint factory, so to speak, aboard a ship. And then, it would be easy to do that constant painting maintenance that’s required.

Kate Sixt Absolutely. That’s one of the principles of our strategy, is actually that far forward logistics. Moving things further forward so that we can use them at point of need. We can make them and use them there. That’s it.

Tom Temin And the strategy is distributed how and when? And whose hands is it in now?

Kate Sixt It’s in the hands of the public. So the strategy was released on March 22. And so, it’s publicly available and people can read it and understand where DoD is looking to invest in Biomanufacturing and what we’re interested in doing.

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