The Engine is a coworking and shared lab space located in Building 750 on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where start-ups and technology entrepreneurs try to develop inventions that can tackle the world’s most challenging problems. Foray Bioscience, a company started by Ashley Beckwith, recently joined the fold. Her company aims to disrupt traditional manufacturing of wood products, which involves harvesting lots of trees. Source: Timberbiz
Ms Beckwith has witnessed how the construction of new housing developments encroached on forests, which sparked her interest in plant research. She founded Foray in 2022, after completing her PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT. She explains how growing demand for wood products is driving the loss of natural forests, in the last 25 years the world has lost about 500,000 square miles. With Foray she hopes to change that, using a technology platform she’s developed that combines cell culture and tissue engineering.
Foray’s process involves extracting live cells from the leaves of plants such as the black cottonwood, a popular species for making fibre products, which is used as a model plant for testing the company’s methods.
Leaves are first cultured into a kind of liquid broth until the cells reproduce. Then cells are transferred into a gel containing two plant hormones, auxin and cytokinin, allowing researchers to coax the cells to grow into wood-like structures. In this phase, the cell cultures can also be tweaked to produce secondary products such as aromatics for making perfumes and embryos to generate seeds.
In the lab, Foray has demonstrated the feasibility of making samples of fragrance products, and they’re working to refine their process to improve and scale production. But generating successful cell lines, finding the right recipe to turn on the production of target products in the cells, is especially challenging. And because fragrance products are largely derived from more than one compound, getting those in the correct proportions hasn’t been easy.
“We’re bringing biomanufacturing to forestry, and leveraging its tools to protect and restore forests,” Ms Beckwith said.
Applications could range from food and medical products to cosmetics and bioplastics. Trees are rich in useful chemicals with significant medicinal value: tree-sourced compounds serve as chemotherapeutics, vaccine adjuvants, and anti-inflammatory drugs.
Shawn Mansfield, a professor of forestry and tree biotechnology at the University of British Columbia, says he’s skeptical that the technology can have much impact in the big scheme of things.
Mr Mansfield, who has worked with cottonwoods and plant tissue techniques, says the production of specialty chemicals “will not offset the harvest of trees.” But Ms Beckwith says that because she and her colleagues can grow tree cells in a controlled environment, they can grow the products up to “100 x faster” with less land than what’s possible with traditional methods. This means they can harvest what the trees make without cutting any trees down.
Ms Beckwith and her team hope to commercialize Foray’s biomanufacturing technology and generate profit through the products that they’re developing. But it’s still early days; the company has yet to send any samples for external validation, and scaling the technology would require significant financial and research investment. They hope what they’re learning about the process could aid seed production to support forest restoration in the near future.
