The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)
Issue link: http://wpialumnimag.epubxp.com/i/406282
40 Fall 2014 personal fascination stuck with him and circled back into his profes- sional life after his time at Edeniq. Having worked on novel feed- stock production for biofuels using genetic engineering, he was asked by NASA offcials to speak at the In-Situ Resource Utilization confer- ence at the agency's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley about using similar systems for food and fuel production in non-terrestrial environments. Amid introductions, conversa- tions, and more brain games, DaCunha met Patrick Nee, a mechanical engineer from MIT and a software developer. The two soon were talking about the logistics of exploring and mining in space—never mind that neither had experience in the mining industry. Those discus- sions planted the seed for the start-up of Universal BioMining. DaCunha and Nee launched the company in January 2011, in an offce at the Bioscience Laboratories business incubator in San Francisco run by Connie John. With Nee as CEO and DaCunha as CTO, the company acquired angel funding from friends and scored a $120,000 grant from NASA to study the feasibility of mining the moon and Mars using biological organisms. The partners quickly recognized that the near- term business and R&D; opportunities were back on Earth— after all, few mining companies were utilizing bioengineering and genetic engineering. The company had discovered a niche and soon began working with some of the industry's largest companies, which prompted a 2013 move to Tucson, where UBM is now headquartered. EXPANSION Metals mining remains vital and has even grown in impor- tance to the planet with the expansion of technology and the reliance on copper, gold, and other resources for so many products, from telecommunications to defense to renewable energy. Yet, companies have already mined and consumed the most accessible and highest-grade reserves. The mining indus- try now has to double the amount of earth it moves and exca- vates every nine years in order to sustain metals production, while also spending millions of dollars to leach and process minerals at high temperatures and in extreme environments using highly corrosive agents. DaCunha and Nee are applying their expertise to halt those ineffcient and increasingly expensive and environmentally harmful trends and practices. "We're saying let's change the organism population to suit the environment and the job in- stead of trying to engineer the environment to suit the organ- isms," says DaCunha, "and that's been our long-term vision." This meant pioneering practices and collecting data that hadn't previously been consid- ered. The company spent a full year developing protocols to ex- tract extremophiles' DNA, and de- vising metagenomic data process- ing methodologies, a cutting-edge feld of genetics that uses UBM's proprietary software and runs on cloud supercomputers, to identify organisms found in mining envi- ronments. It allowed new insight into extremophiles' relative abun- dance, and how the community of organisms changes over time. DaCunha and Nee have created a "library" of organisms, genetic material, and identifcation methods that they use for bio-mining research and now offer as a service to the industry. "There's not a lot of published data or knowledge we can apply, and there's a lot of processes we have to develop our- selves," DaCunha says. "You can't manage what you don't understand. We're in this industry where no one really knows what's there—and we can start measuring and seeing the dynamics of [organisms'] population shifts during the leach- ing process, which takes up to two years." Research advances have also enabled UBM to begin develop- ing a bio-leaching process that operates at moderate tempera- tures by genetically manipulating the organisms and bacteria that act as catalysts during processing. "What we're doing is using nature's millions of years of evolution to our advantage," he adds, "and then applying that to mining." So far, Universal BioMining has submitted seven provisional patents on new applications that should improve mining yields. The company's research and development projects will likely continue for several years still. DaCunha and Nee's interest in bio-mining in space also remains a simmering yet constant pursuit, thanks to the NASA grant. With more than 70 percent of copper ore reserves consid- ered low-grade chalcopyrite and recovery rates stuck at around 10 percent of the available copper, DaCunha believes the com- pany's technologies could eventually double or triple those recoveries while also reducing the environmental impacts by diminishing or eliminating smelting and more effciently using water. "When it comes to mining, anyone who uses technology is complicit in the environmental impact," he says. The breakthroughs UBM is working toward would be a global game changer. "I've always been conscious of the environment, so it's a big opportunity for me to apply my broad knowledge of engineer- ing and biology—and my background from WPI—to the growing problem of the depletion of copper ore," DaCunha says. "We're trying to do something that's revolutionary in the industry." J