About This Project

What's the best funding opportunity for supporting proofs of concept? How can we fund great projects while also increasing the sense of community in climate biotech? Climate biotech has so much potential to reinvent industries, but suffers from the opacity of good problems, siloed efforts and lack of funding that supports de-riskign experiements.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Protein engineering in 2023 could be equivalent of transistor engineering in 1945. We have our intellectual tools to think how we might engineer sequences of amino acids to solve problems such as a catalysis or chelation, but we don't yet have the economic tools to make these a reality. When you read 350,000 NSF Grants and DoE-funded publications, you see that <1% of government funding has gone to the intersection of climate and protein engineering. But it's more than just adding more funding into another black box grant making program: if we are serious about creating exponential progress, then we need grantmaking to increase, not decrease, community interaction.

What is the significance of this project?

The constraint to community-first grantmaking has been a mental model deriving from a theory of change.

What are the goals of the project?

We at Homeworld posit that public problem statements, paired with private solution statements, can be a way of balancing community creation with protection of the practitioner's project