Bioenergetic Engineering
Genetic engineering now lets us control life’s information, yet the engineering of life’s energy remains underdeveloped. A powerful set of new tools could bridge the gap, enabling breakthroughs ranging from treatments for neurodegenerative disease to biohybrid solutions for environmental remediation and resilience.
What is an opportunity space?
Opportunity spaces are areas of research that we believe are ripe for breakthroughs. They are defined by our Programme Directors, and must be highly consequential for society, under-explored relative to their potential impact, and ripe for new talent, perspectives, or resources to change what’s possible.
Core beliefs
The core beliefs that underpin this opportunity space:
While information has been the major focus of modern biology, energy and information are both fundamental to life → bioenergetic engineering has the potential to catalyse advances on the scale of the genetic revolution.
Life uses powerful energy building blocks, like ATP, that are unlike any used in engineering → leveraging these primitives will enable a range of bio-hybrid devices and other systems whose performance far exceeds today’s best designs.
The feedback loop between engineering disciplines and fresh insights is accelerating → we’re at an inflection point where scientists and engineers from many disciplines can begin treating life’s energy machinery as a design space.
Read the programme thesis
Precision Mitochondria – A platform for engineering the mitochondrial genome
- Mitochondrial dysfunction is a root cause of many major diseases and the aging process, but genetic engineering—which has revolutionised so much of biology—has mostly left mitochondria behind.
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We propose building a revolutionary toolkit to precisely study and edit mitochondrial DNA. This will bring the full power of modern genetic engineering to the mitochondrion for the first time.
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This will empower scientists to rigorously and robustly investigate the link between mitochondrial health and disease. In the long term, it could lead to groundbreaking therapies that reprogram mitochondria to fight disease and potentially even enhance cellular capabilities.
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We want to bring together a diverse team of experts from fields like synthetic biology, virology, and nanotechnology to tackle this challenge. This collaborative, interdisciplinary approach is key to overcoming the technical hurdles that have stood in the way for so long.
Meet the programme team
Our Programme Directors are supported by a Programme Specialist (P-Spec) and Technical Specialist (T-Spec); this is the nucleus of each programme team. P-Specs co-ordinate and oversee the project management of their respective programmes, whilst T-Specs provide highly specialised and targeted technical expertise to support programmatic rigour.
Nathan Wolfe
Programme Director
Nathan is a renowned virologist, epidemiologist, and entrepreneur. Most recently, he was a Visiting Scholar in Stanford's Bioengineering Department, having previously founded initiatives to quantify epidemic and pandemic risk, and coordinate scientists globally to spot emerging pathogens. He served on DARPA’s Defense Sciences Research Council.
Sarath Murugan
Programme Specialist
Sarath joined ARIA from a business operations and strategy role a defence engineering scale-up, where his team developed a product that brought the capabilities of gen-AI to the disconnected-edge. He holds an LLB from Bristol, and has experience in project and product-facing roles. Sarath supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.
Ryan Olf
External technical advisor
Ryan is a Caltech and Berkeley-trained physicist with a varied and voracious technical appetite. His previous adventures include creating the world’s lowest-entropy quantum gas, designing nanotube-based GLP-1 implants, automating gene therapy manufacturing, and developing software for his family’s village shop.
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