BioChemInsights is an industrial biochemical engineering and consultant firm that integrates molecular biology expertise with its groundbreaking electrochemical bioreactor to produce high yields of customized chemicals sustainably and more efficiently.
“Our products and services, derived from renewable resources and based on sustainable technology, are at the leading edge of the rapidly growing industrial and consumer markets, including bioplastics, biofuel production, wastewater treatment, and food and beverage development,” says Dr. William Armiger, company founder and president.
Armiger, is a serial entrepreneur who holds a B.S.E. and Ph.D. in chemical and biochemical engineering from Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. He has over 45 years of technical and business experience in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and the environmental markets and has held a Professional Engineering license from Pennsylvania since 1979.
“Our technology is at the intersection of the current emphasis on hydrogen technology, and the effort to maximize carbon efficiency in organic chemistry, especially for renewable chemicals,” adds Dr. David Dodds, a distinguished biochemist with 35 years of experience in leading interdisciplinary process development groups using biological methods to perform organic synthesis. Dodds and Armiger have worked together for a dozen years on BioChemInsights technology and are co-inventors on the electrochemical bioreactor patents.
Over the last 50 years, biochemical engineering has resulted in unprecedented products for healthcare, and the process looked promising in industrial chemical production as well. “The challenge has been that a natural biological process produces a low theoretical yield somewhere between 30% and 50% from the raw material,” Armiger says. “But we now have the tools to solve this problem. Our platform produces theoretical yields approaching 100% on carbon with much higher production rates.”
The core principle behind BioChemInsights’ breakthrough electrochemical bioreactor is its ability to leverage electricity to generate reducing equivalents for efficient synthesis of target products, thereby maximizing carbon utilization. The result is a carbon efficiency that’s 90-100%.
“Reducing equivalents, in the form of molecules like NADH (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) generated in central carbon metabolism, serve as carriers of ‘biological hydrogen’ required for these reactions,” Dodds says. “With a small electricity boost, industrial grade chemicals can be produced at scale with nearly 100% carbon utilization, without forming any carbon dioxide (CO2) as a byproduct.”
BioChemInsights’ revolutionary approach not only boosts productivity, but also aligns with the pressing need for sustainable practices to combat climate change.
“The whole concept behind our platform is that we will not have to take oil and gas out of the ground to make highly desired chemicals,” Armiger says. “No CO2 is evolved in our processes, unlike petroleum-based chemical production, which produces millions of tons of CO2 that escape into the atmosphere every year.”
BioChemInsights, established in Pennsylvania in 2000, relocated its bioreactor technology to the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2015. At that time, BioChemInsights had a sponsored research project with RPI, with significant support by Walt Disney Imagineering. The company moved into the Rensselaer Technology Park Campus in 2021 and has since expanded its electrochemical bioreactor to twice its size.
“The space in the Technology Park and close proximity to the university have been essential to our business growth,” says Dodds, adding that several RPI researchers have played a vital role in refining the electrochemical bioreactor's capabilities. These researchers include Mattheos Koffas, a respected biochemical engineer who works in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology; Jonathan Dordick, renowned biochemical engineer in enzyme engineering and catalysis; and Vidhya Chakrapani, who specializes in semiconductor electrochemistry.