Cancer's climate innovation

An enzyme inspired by brain cancer DNA that has the potential to slash greenhouse gas emissions from the production of nylon won the 2024 Cambridge Climate Challenge.

Benign, a team of Cambridge students, have developed a start-up business model that can drastically reduce the environmental impact of producing nylon for everything from stockings to swimwear.

The idea from a team of Cambridge master's students is the culmination of 10 years of cancer research leading to a paper in nature's communications biology journal on the discovery of the enzyme.

“There isn't really anything good to say about cancer, except possibly this,” said Benign CEO, Kevin Tu, an MPhil student in Medical Science at Churchill College.

Applying their research to the world of business, they plan to reduce the environmental impact of nylon to produce more sustainable clothing.

The winning team, featuring Kevin Tu, Karen Copeland and Tyler Colenbrander alongside judge panellist Nicky Dee, Founder and CEO of Carbon13

During the 2024 Climate Challenge, Tu joined forces with fellow Churchill chums, Public Policy MPhil student Karen Copeland and Physics MPhil student Tyler Colenbrander, to turn cancer on its head into a climate solution.

"It started with my mentor, Dr Zack Reitman at Duke [University School of Medicine], who did the leg work in discovering the enzyme. I've just taken up the torch in the last year to make it a more scalable, market-viable product," said Tu.

Benign CEO, Kevin Tu: "there's no actual cancer in our product, we're just taking some inspiration from its chemistry"

Benign CEO, Kevin Tu: "there's no actual cancer in our product, we're just taking some inspiration from its chemistry"

Chemical manufacturing relies heavily on processing petrochemicals, which leads to toxic by-products and greenhouse gas emissions.

“Two-thirds of emissions from the fast fashion industry are from the production aspect,” said Copeland.

Nylon manufacturing currently produces large amounts of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Benign's patented technology slashes the emissions of nitrous oxide and adapts the manufacturing process to occur at room temperature, reducing the need for high temperatures powered by fossil fuels.

“One of the biggest problems we have with [manufacturing] is the high temperatures needed…so you’ve made a very good innovation,” said judging panellist Okello Gabriel, Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellow at Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), to the winning team during their pitch.

Finalist pitching team, Armadillos for NetZero featuring Ruby Haji Naif (pictured) and Noah Berrada

Finalist pitching team ZeroC featuring Manjari Gupta and Prakash Gupta

Audience Choice Award winners, MenstruVive, featuring Parul Chugh (pictured) and Nga Chan

Finalist pitch: Seeds of Resilience, featuring Nima Tavasoli Roudsari and PEI JIANG (pictured).

Runner-up: Terracotta Cooling - featuring Jerrell Ong, Eric Tay and Sebastian Lindner-Liaw. Carbon13 Founder, Dr Dee, pictured on the right.

Runner-up: Thermalytics, featuring Guillaume Bigot, Aline Van Driessche and Camilla Billari. Carbon13 Founder, Dr Dee, pictured on the right.

"Decarbonising fashion, recycling hygiene products, enlisting satellites to find heat loss...Our fourth annual Climate Challenge really demonstrates the global scale and ambition of Cambridge students," Cambridge Zero Student Engagement Coordinator Elizabeth Simpson said.

Out of 23 applications, eight ventures headed to a finalist pitching competition to face a panel of climate innovation experts, including Dr Nicky Dee, Founder of climate-focused venture capital group Carbon13, Sebastian Dunnett, Nature Scientist at UNEP-WCMC, Okello Gabriel, Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellow at Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), and Frankie Fox, Co-Founder and CEO of FoodSquared.

The runners up included Thermalytics, pitching for the use of satellite data to assess heat loss from commercial properties, and Terracotta, pitching for the use of terracotta-based cooling systems around data centres.

The audience choice award went to MenstruVive, pitching a novel recycling technology for menstrual products.

“It takes courage for women to come out and talk on this topic,” said Parus Chugh from the MenstruVive team.

The 2024 Climate Challenge follows two particularly successful years of competitions, where winners produced “elegant” solutions such as using algae to tackle methane emissions in the Global South and employing AI and drone technology to capture carbon credits for peatland regeneration projects.

“This programme helped me to rethink my research from a practical way of what the real world problems are,”

Pei Jiang, Geography PhD student and Climate Challenge Finalist pitching for Seeds of Resilience, a sustainable agriculture educational game.

The Climate Challenge is an eight-week innovation competition for early career researchers, designed to give young academics the skills to scale-up their own climate solutions into successful and impactful businesses. “We need to challenge the status quo,” said Dr Dee.

The competition is run in partnership with CISL Canopy, Carbon13, Energy IRC, Cambridge Enterprise, the Maxwell Centre and sponsored by Moda Living.

“Researchers at Cambridge are producing ground-breaking solutions to climate change,” said Dr Amy Munro-Faure, Head of Education and Student Engagement at Cambridge Zero. “We’re giving young academics the skills to scale-up their solutions into successful and impactful businesses.”

The competition launched at the start of Lent term with guest speaker Dr Shima Barakat, the Director for the Entrepreneurship for Sustainability Programme at the University of Cambridge, instructing students to “go and shake things up.”