Genomatica and the new road to bioeconomy innovation

BG, a Goldilocks molecule

Butyl glycol, known as BG, is the Biggie Smalls of renewable chemicals. Not too big that anyone has really focused on improving the economics, not too small that you can’t do well if you bring forward a new, renewable process. So, Genomatica has developed a process technology for it.

Now, those of you who track Genomatica’s phenomenal story might be asking, “What about Geno’s BDO?” And chemists might be tut-tutting and pointing out that BG is really not much of a switchover at all from BDO. I’s a BDOesque molecule with its atoms in different positions. That small difference in configuration opens up some interesting chemical applications, and there’s a lively, pricey albeit smallish market for it. 

Small move into a solid market, what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that this molecule falls into a particularly interesting part 3 of the chemical universe we outlined above. It’s one of the few molecules out there with a pretty good market, and that is difficult and expensive to make from petroleum or natural gas. You can design an organism and a processing technology to produce it far more cheaply from sugar. 

Like, an order of magnitude cheaper, in the Department of More or Less.

Looking into the world of Genomatica

Visiting Genomatica, there’s an awful lot of glass because the company is dedicated to a certain kind of transparency that is quite appealing. It’s not that the senior executives want glass walls so they can peer in and make sure everyone’s working. They noticed along the way that all the tours that occur at emerging companies — investors, new customers, stakeholders — are disruptive for those working, not to mention the hassle of always putting on and taking off safety glasses and lab coats. So, the glass allows visitors to look at Genomatica’s world without having to step into some of the more sensitive development lab rooms.

One of the things you can see from almost any vantage point is the La Jolla skyline, dotted with a zillion buildings housing biotechnology companies usually focused on pharma and medical applications — therapeutics, diagnostics and the like. You can make up just about any pronounceable combination of eight letters ending with an A, and there’s a company by that name somewhere on the north side of San Diego. 

Why didn’t Genomatica become one of these? It’s core technologies are based in computation, and there are strong applications in the pharma side of biotech.

Schilling pointed me towards the next building, a character-less dark brown structure, that is notable only because it has an near-empty parking lot, a rare sight in these parts.

“That parking lot used to be crammed with cars,” he said. “This company was formed, they expanded rapidly, it was busy, and then whatever it was they were working on didn’t pass the final stage of the clinical trials, and that was it, they were gone. They might not even known all the specific details of what caused them to fail, and even if they did, they weren’t in control of anything. Either it worked or it didn’t, and the technology and the company was entirely dependent on factors beyond its control, really.”

“I didn’t want to have a company like that. I wanted us to be the UOP of renewables,” Schilling added. In other words, the process technology experts that supported a whole range of molecules and applications. Yet, with the big-market great molecules they had focused on at first, like BDO, they were entirely dependent on the oil price. Just like the drug companies, no matter how good or work could be, there wasn’t a market demand for renewable BDO with $20 oil.

“We had become what I feared, a company dependent on factors beyond our control,” Schilling said.