Scientist-turned-founder that’s passionate about climate change
Before founding Number 8 Bio in Australia, together with Alex Carpenter, Tom Williams was a successful academic scientist in the field of synthetic biology, where he engineered microbial metabolism to produce sustainable chemicals and proteins, and helped pioneer synthetic genomics. As CEO Tom leads a talented team that’s focused on decarbonising earth’s primary production systems, starting with ruminant methane emissions.
Decarbonising the planet with synthetic biology
Methane from Earth’s 2.6 billion cattle and sheep accounts for ~10% of climate change, and decreases the efficiency of animal agriculture. As we need to feed 10 billion people while keeping warming below 3.5 degrees to avoid global catastrophes, enteric methane is one of the most impactful and urgent opportunities we can address. Number 8 Bio makes effective, affordable, and scalable methane mitigation feed additives. They are also applying their Performance Digestion products outside of cows to address wider bottlenecks in the fields of precision fermentation and synthetic biology so enable low-cost bio-production without sugar.
Number 8 Bio (Australia)
is selected as one of our
Next Heroes in Food & Agtech 2024
