Tucked away on a quiet street in Medford is a company hard at work, promising to create a sustainable, renewable alternative for oil and gas. True, there are several other soldiers fighting that fight. But only a few use silk as the weapon.
Evolved by Nature is one of them. Like most inventions are incidental, the startup is a product of a healthy mix of red-tape and innovative thinking.
Greg Altman and Rebecca Lacouture, who have doctoral degrees in biotechnology engineering and biomedical engineering, started out by wanting to create a positive impact on people's health. While at Tufts University as PhD students, the pair discovered that in a medical setting, silk could be used to regrow ligaments, tendons and portions of the skin.
"[Lacouture] and I started this company because we spent 12 years trying to develop multiple medical products that took the best part of our lives," Altman said. "We eventually found it intertwined with the Food and Drug Administration corporate politics, shifting regulatory landscapes."
Thanks to slow-moving FDA bureaucracy, Altman and Lacouture decided to take a different route to achieve immediate impact. Instead of waiting on FDA approvals for medical treatments, the duo considered silk as an alternative to harmful chemicals.
That's when Evolved by Nature's technology pivoted to replace plastics derived from petrochemicals with natural silk. To retain the integrity of the mission while not compromising on the impact, the two used silk to create products to ensure contact with the human body or human skin is made safer and more sustainable.
Today, the company, which has grown since its inception in 2013, uses silk protein it produces for three main applications: in personal care (dermal fillers and skin treatments), medical (implants, ligaments) and in textile finishing. Altman envisions each of these use cases to be spun off into separate businesses.
Its subsidiary, Silk Medical Aesthetics, recently finished the enrollment in a clinical trial for the dermatology industry's first silk-based dermal filler.
In addition to dermal applications, Altman wants to create polymers with silk to reduce the harmful chemicals used in the textile industry.
By some counts, 25 percent of global chemical output is used in the textile industry, and to make matters worse, the fashion industry also creates 92 million tons of solid waste each year.
"A very large portion of the recycled polyester material on the market today in the form of garments will actually be toxic—because of the finishing agents," Altman said.
Finishing agents used for treating clothes are often made using harmful chemicals that get captured in the recycling process and get embedded in the yarn. As a result, even recycled polyester tends to be toxic. Altman said the FDA wouldn't allow even Band-Aids containing any of those chemicals to come in contact with the human body.
In a large washing machine-like tank, the company uses silk protein to create chemicals. Put simply, just as one can extract benzene ethylene, polyester from oil and gas, Evolved by Nature is extracting a variety of different chemicals from the natural silk protein.
"We have unique formulations that will bind to the surface of nylon. We have some others that will bind to the surface of natural leather. We also have formulas that will bind to the surface of human skin, and it's bio-compatible," Altman said. "So it's not that we have one cell protein, but we have this entire chemistry platform."
The company has raised $51 million in venture funding so far and wants to take its mission global in 2020. In addition, the company will also forge partnerships with those chemical manufacturers looking to make a change for the better.
"We're, at the end of the day, a [green] company making chemicals out of natural feedstock," Altman said.
