Friday, June 5, 2009

Biotech veteran Una Ryan launches startup to convert wastewater to clean energy

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Video Gallery

MHT's Galen Moore: Two differing web-based news business models

MHT's Marc Songini: Mass. bio firms prep for lifting of stem cell ban

MHT reporter Efrain Viscarolasaga on NECN: Green tech brings jobs back to Mass.

Related News

Zalicus, Hydra team up on pain treatment [February 10, 2012]

Ironwood stock offering aims for $80M [February 10, 2012]

Forsyth gets $750K grant from Gates Foundation [February 9, 2012]

Leonardi named Connecticut Innovations CEO [February 9, 2012]

Hyatt leaves the Farmville for Spark Capital [February 9, 2012]

For the past decade, Una Ryan has been developing vaccines for a variety of diseases afflicting developing countries, many of them stemming from infected water supplies. But after her previous company, Needham-based Avant Immunotherapeutics Inc., merged with a New Jersey company last year, Ryan decided to use her expertise to get to the source of the problem — and to treat the wastewater that spreads disease.

Located in a lab near Boston University, Ryan has launched Waltham Technologies Inc., with the aim of using blue-green algae to treat wastewater. The company is still in its earliest stages, with three employees, a round of friends-and-family funding under its belt and two pilot testers in its first target market, the beverage industry.

Borrowing a page from other clean energy companies using algae as a means to devour carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, Waltham Technologies’ system not only cleans wastewater of contaminants, it creates a revenue stream on the back end by yielding enzymes and waste algal biomass, which can be converted into biodiesel fuel and other products.

But unlike other algae-based technologies, the blue-green algae being used by Waltham Technologies is technically a bacteria, so it requires less light.

“We have a way of cleaning water in which the only input is dirty water and a little bit of light, and what you get out is clean water, enzymes and stock for biofuels,” said Ryan, who is also a former chair of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council.

The final form factor of the system remains to be seen. For testing and experimentation purposes, the current incarnation has the company’s proprietary strain of blue-green algae encased in what Ryan refers to as “a sock,” which hangs in a vat of dirty water. In the future, the organisms will most likely be held in a different container, closer to a small filing cabinet in shape and size, she said.

As a scientist and a philanthropist, Ryan’s ultimate goal is to use the system to help developing countries clean contaminated water. But as an entrepreneur, she realizes her company needs to target more immediate, and profitable, industries first.

“I think what we have is truly revolutionary, but I have enough business sense to know you can’t tackle everything at once, so we have initially targeted the beverage industry,” she said.

The company is testing the product with at least two local breweries, but Ryan declined to name them.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, beer brewers use approximately 1,500 gallons of water to produce one 31-gallon barrel of beer, with the difference being mostly wastewater. If disposed of incorrectly, that waste can incur breweries millions in fines. Given that the world produces 35 billion gallons of beer per year, that equates to a significant market. According to a report from Frost & Sullivan, the U.S. market for water and wastewater treatment equipment is expected to climb to $654.5 million by 2012, from $500 million in 2005.

While officials are still compiling detailed data on the system, Ryan is confident her system eventually can be made to produce potable water, but Waltham Technologies will hold off on that area — and the U.S. Federal Drug Administration regulations that come with it — for the time being.

Biotech to cleantech migration
The formation of Waltham Technologies, which also includes former Critical Therapeutics Inc. and Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc. scientist Theresa O’Keefe and former Critical Therapeutics scientist Peter Luciano, is also indicative of a slow migration of some of the region’s biotechnology talent into the clean technology space.  Ethanol companies such as Boston-based Mascoma Inc. and Marlborough-based Qteros Inc. have led the way in such defections, but as microorganisms gain ground in other fields such as waste treatment and microbial fuel cells, more could be on the way.

Qteros founder and chief scientist Susan Leschine said biotech can play a significant role in the regional and national wave of clean technology innovation.

“Just as biotech has generated new diagnostics, vaccines and therapies to improve human health, clean biotech holds solutions to aid our ailing planet. The technology is the same — it’s all biotech,” she said.

Abigail Barrow, director of the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center, said a massive migration from biotech is not happening yet, but the talent base in New England is expected to help companies like Waltham Technologies.

“When these kinds of companies establish themselves here, they will be able to recruit from the local talent, and that should help them grow quicker,” she said.