Plastic degradation and synthetic biology company Breaking has launched from stealth based on a core discovery out of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

Breaking, which gestated at Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, said that its discovery, X-32, will be developed to address the global plastics crisis.

Breaking said it had raised $10.5 million in a seed round prior to today’s announcement. The company was co-founded by Donald Ingber, founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University; biotech entrepreneur and Harvard geneticist CEO Sukanya Punthambaker; CSO Vaskar Gnyawali; Alba Tull; Kent Wakeford; and Colossal Co-Founders George Church and Ben Lamm.

“We could not be more thrilled to launch Breaking from stealth from Colossal,” Lamm said in a statement. “The technologies co-developed by the Wyss Institute provide limitless applications to address our planet’s pervasive plastic contamination challenges. Part of our core mission of ecosystem restoration at Colossal can only be achieved with the removal of plastic that plague our ecosystems and negatively impact biodiversity.”

In its natural state, X-32 can degrade polyolefins, polyesters, and polyamides leaving behind carbon dioxide, water, and biomass in as little as 22 months, the company said. Colossal said that with future synthetic genetic edits, the team is focused on making X-32 faster, more efficient, and more effective with a harmless environmental impact.

“I’ve spent my career in synthetic biology and protein engineering with the hope of developing something this transformational,” Breaking co-founder and CEO Sukanya Punthambaker, Ph.D., said in a statement. “In the future, our solution will be able to work across terrestrial and marine environments to break down today’s greatest threat to humankind/our existence: the plastic that is choking our world.”

Solving the global plastic problem

Colossal said the world’s plastic problem is growing increasingly more severe:

• 5,000 million tons of plastic are sitting in landfills, oceans, and our ecosystems.
• 390 million tons more of plastic are produced each year; up 22,400% since 1950.
• Plastics have been found in Antarctic sea ice and in marine animals in deep ocean trenches.
• Even bottled water contains almost a quarter of a million nanoplastic fragments.

The company said that X-32 is a breakthrough microbial discovery that destroys multiple types of plastic by breaking down hydrocarbon chains across different chemical structures quickly. It works with polyolefins (the toughest plastic bonds), which include products like packaging materials, polyesters such as PET bottles, and polyamides such as nylon.

Colossal said that in its current state, X-32 has been shown to degrade up to 90% of polyesters and polyolefins in less than 22 months. This is a significant improvement over other solutions which target only a single plastic type.

The microbe starts to work immediately, Colossal said.

The company said that in lab tests, X-32 started to break down paint brush bristles, fishing wire, and dental floss in less than five days. If left untreated, paint bristles brushes can take 450-1,000 years to decompose, fishing wire can take 600 years, and dental floss would take 80 years.

Concurrently, X-32 utilizes plastics as a primary carbon source and needs no pre-treatment, sorting, cleaning, or decontamination and it emits carbon dioxide, water, and biomass during the degradation process, Colossal said.

‘One of the biggest breakthroughs of the decade’

The company said that today’s primary recycling processes are inefficient and either degrade the plastic to a point it becomes unusable or further contributes to other environmental harms. Crushing and grinding destroys the fibers in plastics, making them unsuitable for re-use, Colossal said. As a result, it said that only 9% of plastic makes it to a recycling plant. The most efficient disposal method, incineration, furthers the carbon crisis and releases noxious chemicals.

Colossal said that Breaking’s X-32 has no known negative environmental ramifications.

“Breaking is solving one of the biggest problems on our planet. They are using the natural world as inspiration and layering on cutting edge technology to transform how we break down plastics,” Jim Kim, general partner of Builders VC, and a lead investor in Breaking, said in a statement. “This is going to be one of the biggest breakthroughs of the decade and I’m excited to be part of it.”

Colossal said the team has identified numerous applications including utilization in wastewater, food waste and marine applications where X-32 and its further enhanced versions will be added to current microbe-based degradation programs.

And, within the next few years, Colossal’s team hopes to utilize the technology to ensure that newly created plastics have a faster degradation period and smaller overall impact on the environment.

“The first in-field pilots will target the food waste and composting industry,” Kent Wakeford, executive chairman and co-founder of Breaking, said in a statement. “Food waste into landfills is costing $16B in taxpayer dollars per year. But that food can’t be composted because of plastic contamination. If we can remove the plastics, we can save the government a lot of money, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and help improve overall quality of life.”

Also, as X-32 degrades plastics, it generates biomass containing different biomolecules that may also hold great value in various industries. Those molecules unveil potential for utilization in the production of biofuels, biodegradable plastics, and high-value chemicals. The team will continue to investigate the use cases as they more deeply explore X-32’s enzyme secretion and biomass byproduct.

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