As brothers growing up in Mexico, Axel and Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza were fascinated by technology and nature. Today, they are leading a material revolution as the founders of Polybion™, a company that is growing bio-textiles using bacteria and fruit waste.
Their main offering — a cultivated cellulose called Celium™ — is vegan, organic, and highly customisable, making it a more sustainable alternative to leather and plastic. In combining design and synthetic biology, Celium™ not only addresses issues like livestock farming and textile waste, but also pioneers a circular and regenerative manufacturing model.
With such a high-performing product and so many potential applications, it’s no surprise that the project became a winner of the Redesign Everything Challenge earlier this year. But what’s next for the biotech company? We sat down with Axel for a conversation about the magic of cellulose, how they built a business on a dream, and why biology is “the most advanced technology we have.”
Axel and Alexis during the Redesign Everything Sprint. Photo: Anisa Xhomaqi.
Hi Axel! Can you introduce yourself and your project?
I’m the co-founder and co-CEO of Polybion. We started the company almost a decade ago, but the story starts in 2013, when I participated a competition hosted by MIT in Boston. In this competition, different universities from all over the world bring solutions to solve industrial problems using synthetic biology.
At one point, while I was sitting in the audience, I was passed a piece of mycelium material. Back then, mycelium wasn’t very well known. The word biomaterial didn’t exist, actually. So it was a very early form of mycelium material that I saw.
At the same time, I had been talking to my brother Alexis about funding a biomaterials company. The industry was still very new, so we were still exploring a couple of different options. One was mycelium, which we had read about, but never seen in person. When I finally had this material in my hands, I told myself, this is the future. This is what I have to do. And so I came back. I graduated, and together with Alexis we applied for a grant to start a company.
“When I finally had this material in my hands, I told myself, this is the future.”
Where does your passion for synthetic biology come from?
My mother, she’s a chemist. So my brother and I basically grew up in a laboratory. Also, we were very lucky in our household because my father is a serial entrepreneur, and he founded a company in the 80s that manufactured computers in Mexico.
So growing up in this environment, you can imagine the conversations we had at the table. Basically, it was all related to technology and science, pretty much. So when we first got the grant for our company, my mom lent us a small space in her laboratory. And that’s where we started doing the first prototypes of our mycelium materials.
How much time did you spend in research and development?
So back when we started, Ecovative was the first company who had managed to scale a mycelium material industrially. We actually reached out to them and tried to get a license for the technology, but they didn’t answer back. So we said, okay, we’ll develop it ourselves.
We thought it would be easy. (laughs) Well, turns out, it’s very complex. We basically lived off of grants and awards for the first five years. We bought some machines to build a pilot plant, and moved to a new space that the government lent us. But we learned that it was all not as easy it looked. Eventually, by around 2018 we managed to solve the process for mycelium at pilot scale and move to a lab that was a little bigger.
Honestly, those early days were fun. But it was also very challenging psychologically, to keep going without any certainty that it would work.
Celium™ is the result of nearly ten years of research and development.
When did you start working with bacteria?
After working with mycelium for a few years, we read about kombucha, and how this bacterial and yeast culture could be used to make an alternative to leather.
And so we decided to start exploring these materials, and we found that bacterial cellulose was actually more powerful than mycelium. So we decided to pivot, to see if we could be the first to scale the process and actually produce these materials at scale. And we did — in 2020 we were able to build the the first biomanufacturing facility for cellulose textiles in the world.
HOW DO THESE TEXTILES COMPARE TO CONVENTIONAL MATERIALS?
So the great promise of biology is that it can circularise the economy very easily. Because if you think about it, all biological systems are circular. There are no linear systems in nature.
So in that sense, if we can apply this concept to materials, it will be very beneficial. For example, in our process, we’re using waste to feed the bacteria instead of giving it sugar from sugarcane that uses land, water, pesticides, and human labour. Our plant runs entirely on solar power, and every part of the manufacturing process is completely local and circular.
We take mango scraps from a very big food packaging company that we work with, and process it into a liquid. We feed the bacteria with this liquid and let it sit in an incubator, where we control everything from the humidity to the temperature. After 10 to 20 days, we harvest the material, and this is what we call raw Celium™.
“The great promise of biology is that it can circularise the economy very easily.”
What does IT look and feel like?
At this stage it looks a bit like chicken tender. (laughs) It is technically a hydrogel. So it’s 90% water, the rest 100% pure cellulose, a nanomatrix structured material. Meaning that its fibres are about a thousand times smaller in diameter than cotton thread — and that’s why it looks like a solid to the naked eye.
Celium™ looks, feels and performs in a similar way to animal leather, but is a new material altogether. Photo: Polybion.
Once we’ve harvested this raw cellulose we process it into leather. The easiest way to describe it is that it’s similar to tanning, but it’s actually just stabilisation. It transforms the hydrogel into a textile that looks and feels like leather. But we’re not here to compete with leather — it’s a material that has been used by humans for thousands of years, and it has its own place. What we’re focused on is offering a sustainable alternative to materials that have a significant environmental footprint, like petroleum-based plastics. We want to offer another solution, a new material, a new category.
“We’re not here to compete with leather. We’re focused on offering a sustainable alternative to materials that have a significant environmental footprint, like petroleum-based plastics.”
Are there already products being made out of Celium™?
So we’ve made prototypes of furniture, wallets, bags, shoes and even some garments like jackets and vests. And right now we’re working very hard towards releasing a first commercial product with GANNI, which we’re very excited about. It will mark an interesting milestone for biomaterials because if it makes it to the stores, it will be the first biomaterial product on the planet to make it past the capsule collection. There are other launches that have occurred of course, but none that have passed the micro scale of a capsule collection.
Then there are other collaborators that we cannot disclose yet. We love working with brands that take risks and move fast, but we’re also still working to elevate the material in terms of performance. Because a material solution is only as good as its performance. So impact requires scale, but it also requires performance. And sustainability is linked to durability.
Celium™ can be customised to various finishes and applications.
So basically the objective we have with this material is to reach a point in which the material can perform as good as — or better than — plastic or animal leather. And have a catalogue of different cellulose-based materials for different applications. We think this is possible because we’re using a biological entity that can be fine-tuned using genetics. Basically changing its DNA sequence to produce other attributes in the material that will increase its performance, change its colour, its smell. So that one day we might have a new material that is better in every regard. It’s a utopian kind of scenario, but we think it’s doable with enough effort and the right team.
“We do not need to reinvent anything. We just need to understand and use biology.”
Lastly, what is the message you hope people will take away from this project?
That biology is the most advanced technology we have. For me, I’ve always dreamt about a future in which humans could coincide with nature. And basically, I believe that the solution to all the problems that humanity has created for itself is biology. So we do not need to reinvent anything. We just need to understand and use biology.
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This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Interview by Natasha Berting and Chieri Higa.