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.
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.
Observations
Some signposts as to why we see this area as important, underserved, and ripe.
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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.
Our other opportunity spaces
Our opportunity spaces are designed as an open invitation for researchers from across disciplines and institutions to learn with us and contribute – a variety of perspectives are just what we need to change what’s possible.