Good chemistry

Daniela Blanco and Sunthetics bring AI into the mix at facility in the Temple Health & Bioscience District

By Janna Zepp | Photos by Skeebo

Eyewitness to the loss of the Amazon rainforest, Dr. Daniela Blanco grew up in Venezuela, raised by her single mother, Maria, during violent civil unrest, wondering what she could do to save it. Of all the things affecting the rainforest, including cattle ranching, the oil industry struck her as a major threat to wiping it out at a rapid clip. Something that environmentally destructive in its processes to extract fossil fuel could not possibly be sustainable. Her first step toward a solution was to become a chemical engineer.

But there were some big roadblocks on the path to Blanco’s dreams. For the last 11 years, Venezuela has experienced the worst economic crisis in its history, and it is also the worst facing a country in peace time since the mid-20th century. Political corruption, chronic shortages of food and medicine, closure of businesses, unemployment, deterioration of productivity, authoritarianism, human rights violations, gross economic mismanagement and high dependence on oil have also contributed to the worsening crisis. Blanco’s only choice was to leave. She opted to come to the United States and earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at New York University, a private research university in New York City.

Throughout Blanco’s education, she learned that chemical production is indispensable in the manufacture of electronic, textile and food products, but it is also the third largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions, with more than half of its resources ending up in waste streams. Her gut instinct about the oil industry in the rainforests was spot on.

But it also left her with more questions, the foremost being: What might change all that to create a positive future for the rainforest and for industrial manufacturing and production?

Her answer came, quite literally, from the sun.

“We need to develop more sustainable chemical processes, solar-powered processes.” However, the development of such processes can be very expensive and take too long. She found a way to speed this up using artificial intelligence. “There is a huge gap of knowledge and understanding between chemistry and artificial intelligence,” Blanco said. “But we are closing it one day at a time.”

The “we” of whom Blanco speaks includes NYU Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Miguel Modestino. They developed a way of using water, plant waste and solar energy to manufacture nylon, eliminating the need to use fossil fuel to make it. Their solar-powered reactor used 50% less energy and fewer raw materials, while producing less waste and removing 20% of carbon emissions. Their research results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team’s invention opened the possibility of changing the entire chemical-manufacturing industry, so they formed a company named Sunthetics. The mission: to introduce greener production methods to the chemical-manufacturing world, or as it says on its company website at sunthetics.io, to “make the chemical industry more sustainable, one reaction at a time.”

Sunthetics, of which Blanco is now chief executive officer, swept entrepreneurial competitions and grants nationally and internationally, earning about $650,000 in prize money. But these competitions also taught Blanco and her team how to run Sunthetics as a real-world business in chemical engineering. They found a way to raise money for the company without relying solely on investors to maintain ownership of the company and its vision.

So what does this New York-developed, internationally recognized entrepreneurial chemical engineering innovation business mean for Central Texas?

“We needed a space large enough to build our business and my husband is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin,” Blanco said, smiling. “The Temple Health & Bioscience District had everything we needed to keep working toward our goal of serving the chemical industry in sustainable ways.”

So while New York might have been the company’s birthplace, Temple is where Sunthetics has chosen to grow. The Temple Health & Bioscience District was born of legislation passed by the state and approved by Temple voters to establish it in 2003. In 2009, Temple voters gave THBD taxing authority. The THBD Office and Laboratory Facility provides office and lab space for startup life science companies that are taking health-related products from conception to manufacturing.

Sunthetics develops machine-learning platforms for more sustainable chemical manufacturing. With this technology, the chemical industry can switch from fossil-fuel dependent reactions to electrical, renewable and resource-efficient methods of production. Its artificial intelligence-supported software saves time and labor in the creation of previously inaccessible specialty chemicals and in identifying the “optimal point” for conducting multi-variable chemical reactions. Bottom line: Sunthetics hopes to democratize the use of AI in the chemical industry for more efficient manufacturing.

“Climate change is real. We’re not talking about someday,” Blanco said firmly. “There is no more ‘someday.’ We have to act now to fix our problems or there will be no more planet for us to live on.”

Learn more

To learn more about Sunthetics and Dr. Daniela Blanco, watch Own the Room, a National Geographic documentary now streaming on Disney+. The film tells the story of five students from around the world as they take their startup businesses to Macau, China, to compete in the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards.

In the film, the young entrepreneurs conquer difficulties in pursuing their dreams, from hurricanes to poverty to civil unrest. As they represent their countries as the top student entrepreneurs, the high-stakes global finals are their opportunity to win worldwide attention and the $100,000 grand prize to make their life-changing business ideas a reality and transform the world.