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CEN's 2020 Trailblazers
Frances Arnold: Directed-evolution pioneer
Carolyn Bertozzi: Glycoscience revolutionary
Samantha Du: Setting new standards for biotechs in Asia
Naomi Halas: Nanotech guru
Paula Hammond: Drug-delivery maven
Yamuna Krishnan: Developing DNA nanodevices to track and fight disease
Olga Malinkiewicz: Making good on the promise of perovskites
Mariana Matus: Combating the opioid epidemic with wastewater data
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw: One of the world’s most powerful businesspeople
Erika Milczek: Replacing banned chemicals in consumer products
Amy Prieto: Building a better, safer battery
Sarah Richardson: Engineering wild microbes to produce useful chemicals
Amy Ripka: Taking a new approach to drugging neuro diseases
Cristina Sáenz de Pipaón: Trapping carbon dioxide with innovative membranes
Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao: Aiming to make high-performance treasure from plastic trash
The women of CRISPR
Keeping up with Jennifer Doudna
Entrepreneurship 101: Jennifer Doudna’s top tips for success
Behind the scenes: Learn more about how we produced this issue
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Synthetic Biology
Amazing Women
Frances Arnold on founding a company: ‘Building the right teams is critical’
Nobel Prize winner wants to solve real-world problems with directed evolution
by Bethany Halford
March 8, 2020
| A version of this story appeared in
Volume 98, Issue 9
Credit: Caltech
Frances Arnold describes herself as fearless. Whether she’s creating an enzyme to do her bidding, starting a new company, or appearing on prime-time television, the California Institute of Technology chemical engineering professor seemingly has the mettle to master anything.
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Vitals
➤ Academic title: Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry, California Institute of Technology
➤ Companies: Aralez Bio, founded in 2019; Provivi, founded in 2013; and Gevo, founded in 2005
➤ Most recent funding: $85 million in series C funding for Provivi
Since winning a share of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her pioneering work in directed evolution, Arnold has made bold moves in the business world and beyond. Last year she joined the board of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and even played herself on the popular TV show The Big Bang Theory.
It’s no surprise then that Arnold’s dauntlessness extends to entrepreneurship. “I’m an engineer by training,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in how science can be applied to solving real-world problems.”
After acting as a founding adviser to savvy start-ups, including bioengineering firms Amyris and Maxygen, Arnold says, she had the confidence to create a company based on technology from her lab. And she didn’t stop at one. Arnold has cofounded three companies that use directed evolution to create enzymes that churn out valuable chemicals: Gevo, a producer of biofuel and chemicals; Provivi, a specialist in nontoxic pest control; and, most recently, Aralez Bio, which makes unnatural amino acids.
“Of course I didn’t take on the hard job,” Arnold says, which is to actually run the company. “The key was having the people who would do the actual work because it’s a hell of a lot of work,” she says. “It really takes a lot of teamwork and a lot of different kinds of skills that academic inventors don’t necessarily have, so building the right teams is critical.”
What do you wish you had known at the start?
"You learn on the job. There’s no good class for being an entrepreneur. You do it, and not everything is going to be successful. It’s painful when things are not successful, but that’s part of the process."
Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2024 American Chemical Society
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