Having an entrepreneurial mindset doesn’t necessarily mean you have to establish your own business. At least, that’s the message of the article on pp. 49–55, “Encouraging the Entrepreneurial Mindset of Chemical Engineers.” The authors, a group of multidisciplinary researchers and professors, inspire an entrepreneurial mindset in their students through assignments that encourage creativity and a hands-on approach.
Meeting the challenges of decarbonization, climate change, and plastic waste circularity will require engineers who are capable of making connections between disparate ideas, technologies, and disciplines — i.e., engineers who embody the spirit of entrepreneurship. One of the biggest challenges that chemical engineers have confronted thus far in the 21st century is the COVID-19 pandemic. At the core of the innovations necessary to develop, test, and scale new vaccine technologies was that entrepreneurial mindset.
For synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, the pandemic was a catalyst for their new biosecurity and public health business unit, Concentric. Using the model of widespread COVID testing they developed over the past few years as a springboard, the company aims to provide critical insights into public health in order to inform mitigation strategies. One goal of this biosecurity platform: preventing the next pandemic.
“Integrated, end-to-end capabilities are needed to prevent, detect, and respond to biological threats, regardless of their origins,” writes Casandra Philipson, Director of Bioinformatics at Concentric, in the article on pp. 34–40. “The first, critical step is to build a global infrastructure to monitor biology and provide early warning for anomalous events at the moment they arise — a sort of ‘biological radar.’” Philipson’s article goes into more detail about what it would take to create a system capable of detecting, identifying, and tracing the origins of biological threats.
In many ways, entrepreneurship is driven by necessity. For example, by exposing just how vulnerable the human population is to biological threat, the pandemic highlighted the importance of biosecurity and public health, paving the way for new business endeavors like Concentric by Ginkgo.
The pandemic also catapulted new vaccine tech to the forefront of society, including Moderna’s mRNA-based COVID vaccine. Although the group of entrepreneurs who founded Moderna — which includes chemical engineer and entrepreneur Robert Langer — had already formulated the idea of an mRNA-based technology platform in 2010, the pandemic (and funding through Operation Warp Speed) accelerated the pace at which the first mRNA-based vaccine made its way to patients. In March of this year, Moderna announced that it was planning to hire 2,000 more employees by the end of 2023 to scale up the development of its mRNA-based vaccines for skin cancer, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Chemical engineers are problem-solvers at heart. Solving the challenges of the 21st century, preventing the next pandemic, and ushering in the newest era of biopharmaceuticals will require problem-solving, technical agility, and a new generation of entrepreneurs.
Emily Petruzzelli, Editor-in-Chief
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