Water is critical to human life, industry, and progress. Growing populations, increased urbanization, and ever-more thirsty industries have intensified the demands on our water sources. This results in freshwater reserves being depleted and becoming even more polluted. Technologies exist to address these challenges, but can be difficult to implement because they are often energy-intensive, complex and expensive. Our initial focus is on developing a water purification membrane that provides a meaningful performance advantage over conventional reverse osmosis, delivering measurable energy savings in comparison. This energy savings will translate into a more economical and more environmentally friendly solution for the demands of high-purity water applications. With the right configuration of aquaporin protein-based membranes, we envision a process in which pretreatment steps are reduced, chemical consumption is decreased, and processes are simplified to provide fresh and high-quality water wherever it is needed.

Every wastewater stream in the world – industrial effluent, desalination brine, mining waste, etc. – contains a veritable goldmine of critical resources which cannot be effectively extracted. At the same time, we continue to extract the same resources through drilling and mining further damaging the environment. Whoever masters incorporating proteins into industrial applications will be able to solve this challenge. Filtration processes can help address this issue. Beyond aquaporins, there are channel proteins which can be employed for selectivity of a variety of other molecules of interest. We intend to employ those molecules to deliver tailored solutions that enable the separation of valuable molecules from waste streams.