Expert Interview: Blake Simmons

Dianne Wentworth: Hi, I am Dianne Wentworth with Strategic Communications at Berkeley Lab, and I’m here today with Blake Simmons who is the Division Director of Biological Systems and Engineering in the Biosciences Area at the Lab.

Blake, thank you for joining us today. We want to talk about biomanufacturing. Can you briefly describe what biomanufacturing is? It sounds complicated.

Blake Simmons: Biomanufacturing can be as complex or as simple as you want to make it, depending on how far in the weeds you want to go.

But at a very high level, it’s how can we use biology and biological systems to perform certain operations in a manufacturing-relevant scenario so that you can produce goods and products that you sell in the marketplace. To boost what we call the bioeconomy. These biological systems can be microbes, they can be microbial communities, they can be enzymes, but at its foundation is how do you industrialize biology so that we can create an advanced manufacturing enterprise that is more aligned with our national priorities, and manufacturing dominance in the United States.

Dianne Wentworth: Can you give me some examples of biomanufacturing?

Blake Simmons: Well, biomanufacturing has been around for quite a while. Some examples include wineries, breweries, and making beer. That’s probably the first example of biomanufacturing at scale. Every time that people go out and enjoy their adult beverage of choice in a responsible way, we celebrate biomanufacturing because that is feeding sugars to an organism known as brewer’s yeast, and converting those sugars into ethanol. And that is a biomanufacturing process. 

Other examples include pharmaceuticals and vaccines. Those are almost all produced using microbes, including the adjuvants that go into vaccines, the vaccines themselves. And so I would put forward the biggest contributor to biomanufacturing as it currently stands is in therapeutics, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and things like breweries and wineries.

Biomanufacturing has been with us every step of the way in human evolution; it is the template for how we exist. 

Dianne Wentworth: Is there money to be made in biomanufacturing?

Blake Simmons: Oh, the bioeconomy is huge right now. The National Academies report highlighted that it’s close to a trillion dollars a year right now across the world. So it is big business. It is expected to grow with the era of genomics and biology and the industrialization of biology.

Dianne Wentworth: Berkeley Lab is known for its innovation, both in the past and currently. What is the Lab doing in this area of biomanufacturing that makes it really stand out from other labs or other organizations?

Blake Simmons: Biology has been in the DNA of Berkeley Lab all the way back in its beginning. And I’d say Berkeley Lab has been at the forefront of that industrialization and maturation of biology, and very pronounced in significant ways.

Berkeley Lab is rather unique in the ability to scale up biology from the bench to an industrial-relevant scale like the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit that is at Berkeley Lab. That is a scale-up facility that is really geared around the critical transition point between things that happen at the bench, at the micro- and milliliter scale, and going up to 300 liters of production in a fermentor.

The ABPDU has really demonstrated the power of working with early-stage technologies to get them to scale as quickly as possible. It does so in a collaborative facility framework that really gives startups and other companies the ability to de-risk their technologies, get them to market faster, and realize their presence in the marketplace faster.

Dianne Wentworth: So way back in 1931, right when E.O. Lawrence started this place, he said, team science. It sounds like biomanufacturing depends on team science to make it all work.

Blake Simmons: Absolutely correct. And I would say that every manufacturing sector out there that is in existence today and has been around for a long time is based on integrated team science in order to make it what it is today.  There’s a great kind of 0.2 metaphor in the semiconductor industry that, back in the early days of the fifties to the seventies, there were artisanal semiconductor fabrication facilities.

That there were pretty much one-offs on the chip design and very rudimentary, very, beginning stages of what would become a technology that would transform the world. And it was in the seventies and eighties where they started adopting and transforming it from an artisanal science to an industrially relevant and robust technology.

That’s where you saw the tipping point and this non-linear gains in the systems and impacts that they could have on society. And I would say that right now, in biology and biomanufacturing, we are just getting onto that crest, which we move from artisanal practice to industrial standard practice. And that’s where you’re going to really see the significant improvements in innovations that will, again, transform the world.

Dianne Wentworth: Is Berkeley Lab leading that tipping point to go to the manufacturing level for biomanufacturing?

Blake Simmons: I think we’ve been stitching together those integrative tissues for a long time, and we’ve also helped set the stage for what comes next in the transfer to the marketplace by virtue of the entrepreneurial spirit that is also at Berkeley Lab and our ability for PIs to start up companies. That’s also been a really foundational contribution to establishing what comes next.

I would say projects like the Agile BioFoundry, the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit, the Joint Bioenergy Institute, the Joint Genome Institute, the National Microbiome Data Collaborative, you know, all of the Scientific Focus Areas that we have from the Office of Science. What Berkeley Lab is able to do is take that integrated team science approach, apply it to really fundamental science and discoveries and innovation, and then apply that and transfer it over to the applied side that is more industrially relevant. And so it’s having that pipeline, that continuum from fundamental science to use-inspired, mission-driven science that’s really driven and defined by the application and or industry interests. That full spectrum integrative bioengineering capability, approach, and philosophy has kept us at the leading edge, has kept us at the forefront of the field, and that’s why industry comes to us so often to work with them, to advance their state of industrial manufacturing.

Dianne Wentworth: So, Blake, 20 years from now, what is different than what we have today from a consumer standpoint, from a manufacturer standpoint? As a society, what’s different?

Blake Simmons: I am an optimist, so I’m going to give you a very optimistic view of the world. In 20 years. I think we’re going to be in an era where our ability to harness biology, and again, not just the single microbe, not just the single enzyme, but even microbial consortium, microbial communities, understanding the plant-soil interface as well, understanding plants as biomanufacturing factories as well.

I think what we’ll have is biology on demand. We can tune it for a given purpose, be it the production of a polymer, be it a production of an advanced material, be it for fuels and chemicals, be it for food.

And you know, like locavore; that phenomenon that came out of the California area – think global but act local. I think it’s going to be the same thing for manufacturing. It’s not going to be reliant on supply chains that come from other parts of the world necessarily. You can basically come up with a biological replicator, like in Star Trek, but instead of being synthesized by little atomic printers, it’s actually done by microbial communities and the like.

Dianne Wentworth: So I have one final question for you. What excites you about working at Berkeley Lab?

Blake Simmons: The people, it’s always the people and the mission, but it’s the people first.

Berkeley Lab is an incredibly dynamic place to work at. It is always a foundry of new ideas and new approaches and always questioning things and not accepting them as they are, but willing them to be what you want them to be and working as a team to get that done.

And the fact that we are open to new ideas, that we’re not threatened by them, it is such a vibrant place to work, and an exciting place to work at. You always feel like you feel lucky every day you come into work. You feel like you have your fingers on the pulse of pioneering science and innovation, and you get to work with world class scientists from across the world.

It’s just a really exciting, thrilling, and energizing place to work.

I’ll just say if the future is to be fermented, right? We need to have the engineering discipline and robustness in order to harness that potential and make it a reality.

Dianne Wentworth: I like that. I like that slogan, fermenting the future.

Blake Simmons: Yeah. Yep. Exactly.

Dianne Wentworth: All right. Thanks, Blake. I really appreciate your time for our conversation, and we’ll look forward to doing this again sometime. Thanks.

Blake Simmons: Thank you, Dianne.