Konrad completed his PhD in chemical engineering—which normally takes around five to six years—in 23 months, publishing 10 papers along the way. After spending the beginning of his career at Amyris, learning from the former industry giant about how and how not to scale biology, Konrad is now VP of Manufacturing Science and Technology at Solugen, leading R&D and scale-up efforts and pushing the company to move fast (but not so fast that things break).
You were on track to becoming a full time professor. How and why did you pivot from academia to a start-up?
I was gearing up to start my own lab when Covid hit and put everything on pause. One day my childhood friend—who happened to be the second employee here at Solugen—called me up and told me that the company he worked for was looking for someone to lead process development. Digging into Solugen, I was struck by how many cool things were happening at the same time. Typically start-ups are one trick ponies. Solugen isn’t like that. We’re doing enzyme reactions, heterogeneous metal catalysis, strain engineering, fermentation, synthetic chemistry…all under one roof. It was rare to see so broad a technology stack on so small a company. I simply couldn’t pass up the option to lead that. So I packed up my car and moved to Texas.
I get to have my cake and eat it too by being an Adjunct Professor at UC Davis, where I teach food engineering, specifically winemaking. A lot of the same technologies are seen whether you are making Cab Franc or Glucaric Acid—everything from fermentation optimization to pump sizing to techno-economics, so it’s a fun application of the same skills. The main difference is our safety department frowns on tasting from our product totes!
You completed your doctorate in an unprecedentedly short timeline. What did you do differently?
I treated it like a project management problem. I had already been working in industry for over five years when I decided to get a doctorate to boost my career. So I walked in on my first day with a Gantt chart, in which I planned out every experiment and paper based on an already-completed literature review. I also intentionally chose a professor who was amenable to an output versus time-based PhD. It was just a matter of execution towards my goal, which was to get a PhD that was beyond reproach as quickly as possible. And that’s what I optimized for.
Do you approach your work at Solugen in an equally pragmatic way?
Yes. Discovery for its own sake is rewarding and fun, but it doesn’t pay the bills. A big part of how I try and run research at Solugen is to ask: what do we know we can get done in the next 6 to 12 months? And then I make a plan to grind towards it as fast and effectively as possible. Most people who lead R&D groups have a hard time shaking that academic mindset, which skews toward exploration. But when you have to get a technology off the ground fast, meandering is usually the wrong approach.
What is Solugen’s approach to scale-up? How do you manage speed and risk?
If you’re working for a legacy company, you can and often do have a 15+ year technology development timeline. That’s very accurate and also very, very slow. But if you swing too far in the opposite direction—trying to take a cool idea from pen and paper to the plant immediately—the odds of it working are basically zero.
At Solugen, we figure out what the minimum level of work we can do at any stage is to make going to the next stage even conceivably worth it. And then we do that. So if we have a brand new technology, we’ll show that we can reproduce it reliably at the bench before throwing it in the pilot plant. And then at the pilot plant, we show that we can hit sensible techno-economic markers in reality before trying to scale it up.
There’s a saying in competitive shooting that if you’re getting all A-Zones you’re going too slow. If every single molecule we take to scale works right the first time, then we’re going too slow. Most of them do, but not all of them, and that’s the sweet spot. That to me suggests that we are moving at the right pace.
You used to work for Amyris, which recently filed for bankruptcy in a moment that many interpreted as a reckoning for biotech at large. How do you see Solugen as iterating upon and departing from its “forefathers” in the industry?
Working at Amyris was incredibly fun. We were phenomenal at fermentation. But when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, right? So at Amyris, we were using fermentation to make everything, when I don’t think it was always the right tool. At Solugen, we have multiple world experts in various technologies all co-located together. So if the answer is fermentation, we’re happy to do that. If the answer is enzymatic reaction, cool. If the answer is heterogeneous metal catalysis, we love doing that, and if it’s traditional synthetic homogeneous chemistry, thumbs up there too. Being able to pick and choose from a big toolbox is really helpful. And for a small company, I can’t stress how unique that is.
Not to be ghoulish, but we can learn from a lot of these “failed” companies. It’s not like we as people are smarter than the people who ran Amyris or Zymergen. But we have the benefit of their experience and we can see that trying to bet everything on one technology or one molecule is a bad bet. So we don’t do that.
How does R&D integrate with the scale-up team? What’s the speed of that feedback loop?
We work very hard to break down silos. As we approach piloting, we’ll bring process and production engineers into the lab to run the laboratory process with the scientists. And vice versa. So as we go to piloting, we’ll have scientists out there in the pilot plant running things along with the engineers. And then during our first scale-up campaigns, we have scientists either in the plant or on standby for troubleshooting. I find that by integrating teams, as opposed to just writing reports and throwing them over the fence, we’re able to bring these complex technologies to scale efficiently.
Solugen has achieved over 90 percent yield for its reactions (versus anywhere from 40 to 60 percent with conventional processes). What is the Bioforge doing differently?
The incumbent production technologies, very broadly, are petrochemicals and fermentation.
Petrochemicals do “classic chemistry.” Nothing’s alive, there’s just molecules bouncing around and shiny rocks doing chemistry. It’s super efficient and very high throughput, but it’s sloppy. By which I mean the reactions are non-specific. So let’s say you want to go from A to D. To do that, you have to go through B and C, which involves making byproducts. For every pound of A that you start with, you get maybe .5 pounds of D.
If you’re going a fermentative route, you feed A into a cell, which functions as a sack that has a bunch of enzymes in it which convert A to D without making all of those byproducts involved in petrochemicals. But the cell has to grow and survive and live and breathe—and make more cells. So when the cell is eating the feedstock to make more of itself, we lose a lot of feedstock, and at the end we have to separate the product from the cell.
One thing that’s nice with your chemoenzymatic technology is that the chemistry is extremely targeted, meaning that for reactions that are “easy,” we use traditional heterogeneous catalysis, which has very high yields for those straightforward reactions. And then when we have a hard reaction, we tailor a specific enzyme to complete it. Enzymes are very specific, so we can make that A go to D in one step, there’s just a lot of R&D to make that one enzyme. We’ll do some complex and frustrating chemistry with an enzyme and then we’ll do a final simple chemistry with a heterogeneous metal catalysis. And because we’re doing these reactions very specifically, we get very high yields without a lot of loss or having to do a lot of separation.
If the chemoenzymatic approach is so much more efficient, why had no one tried it before Solugen came along?
That’s a hard one. There are companies—really large food and biochemicals companies—that use both enzyme reactors and metal reactors individually. But I think combining those two technologies was an idea whose time had simply come, and Solugen made the first move.
How do you think Solugen will retain its competitive edge? What are you most excited about working on in the next year?
As a company and a culture, we’re hungry. We’re obviously proud of what we’ve accomplished to date, but there is zero appetite to slow down. Our founders, Sean and G, are constantly hunting for new technologies and new markets, which ensures that we are always finding new products to develop.
Technology wise, we have some really exciting stuff coming down the pike- new precious metal catalysts that are best in class, a new AI-driven method of enzyme engineering, and some exotic chemical separations that should be a ton of fun to play with.
On the 1-year horizon, I’m very excited for Solugen to get into Defense chemistries. It is very novel for a biochemicals startup to get into Defense Contracting, and it’ll be both fun and meaningful.
To learn more about Solugen’s pioneering Bioforge platform, hear directly from Konrad and our other world-class scientists and operators in our Technology Video Series.
