The Team:
Myriam Sbeiti and Daniela Blanco (with the help of Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Miguel Modestino)
The Story:
The startup Sunthetics found a way to harness energy from sunlight to fuel the electrochemical and thermochemical reactions necessary to transform plant waste into the precursor materials needed to produce nylon – and much, much more – and the company, under the leadership of Daniela Blanco (‘20), is now leveraging AI to help chemists pinpoint and innovate on viable processes quickly and efficiently, accelerating their path to market significantly.
It began in 2017, when Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Miguel Modestino garnered a Global Change Award from the H&M Foundation for a proposed method of using water, plant waste, and solar energy to manufacture nylon, instead of the fossil fuel currently used. Now, two of his students, undergraduate Myriam Sbeiti (‘18) and doctoral candidate Daniela Blanco, have joined forces to launch Sunthetics, in order to shepherd that innovation from the lab to the real world. They envision the process being of interest to not just the fashion industry – which produces millions of tons of petrochemical-based nylon each year, thereby generating significant emissions of carbon dioxide – but to anyone in the broader chemical-manufacturing world seeking greener production methods.
After Blanco earned her Ph.D., she continued to develop Sunthetics, and she quickly realized that most of the buzz the company was generating stemmed from the machine learning platform she was building to improve her manufacturing process. “Although the production of petrochemical-based nylon undeniably needs to be addressed, the sustainability issue in chemical manufacturing on the whole is much larger than our original area of focus,” she admits. “We were getting exceptional results using AI, and that sparked wider interest.”
While innovations in the chemical industry, as well as other sectors, traditionally require years of experimentation and large amounts of data to generate insights, the Sunthetics platform uses substantially smaller datasets to provide the same – or even better – results, reducing the number of trials needed by up to five times.
Blanco subsequently pivoted to focus on making the platform available to others, reasoning that the company, now headquartered in Texas, could make an even greater impact that way. “The best way to create lasting sustainable impact is to fast-track innovation, leading to better materials and more efficient processes,” she says.
Given the savings in both cost and time, it’s easy to see why industry partners like Merck, Lehvoss, Boehringer Ingelheim, Standard Industries, Toyobo, and Biohaven Pharmaceuticals are using the platform, named SuntheticsML, to streamline its development of vaccines and other vital products and why organizations like the United States Patent and Trademark Office have been singing the company’s praises.
Watch Daniela Blanco speak about Sunthetics:
