Impossible Fibers

The impossible fibers program at Speculative Technologies (spearheaded by Tim McGee) seeks to transform how proteins & biopolymers can unlock fibers that are impossible with existing technology today.

We believe we can fundamentally change the economics and technology of fiber development and manufacturing, allowing humanity to create incredibly high performance protein-based fibers that are tuned to our desired mechanical, optical, and electrical properties. We imagine a future where anyone could develop a novel fiber within minutes, and prototype it for $20k within 2 weeks. Currently it’s impossible to accurately design a fiber, and on average it takes $millions and 5-7 years for a single new fiber to be prototyped. As a result these fibers largely end up with uncertain performance, difficult manufacturing, and limited ability to scale.

Creating high performance protein-based fibers relies on the ability to align and control the molecular assembly of the final fiber as a result of the manufacturing process. Existing scaled methods of fiber manufacturing are either inadequate, or harness high temperatures and harsh chemicals that aren’t suited to a more nuanced protein based system. This is because our current spinning systems are designed for feedstocks (fossil fuels, cellulose) that don’t inherently have self-assembly capabilities that contribute to their performance, and thus can’t take advantage of protein’s unique capabilities. Impossible Fibers has built a network of exciting emerging technologies and research labs that are forging a new future of fiber creation and performance. We always welcome new conversations, funding, and ideas to move the program forward. 

Information-Rich Assembly for the Future of Materials

There is a prevailing narrative in materials and manufacturing that more energy input yields better materials, that progress can be defined by increasing the embodied energy of a material. While this has held true for high-temperature alloys, it fails to account for biological materials from spider silks to abalone shells where information density, not energy intensity, determines performance. We can decouple high-performance material creation from increasing energy inputs, in fact it might be the key way we are able to achieve elegant future materials that can be just as tough, self-healing, and responsive as the biological materials that surround us. We estimate that we could reduce energy costs of fiber production by over 90%, and create far superior materials.

Protein-based fibers like spider silk or collagen outperform synthetic fibers not because they are energy-intensive to make, but because they are assembled over multiple scales of hierarchy with precision using information-rich sequences and cleverly orchestrated physical assembly environments. These fibers are created at ambient temperature and pressures using phase transition mechanisms such as pH, shear, and dehydration rather than heat, pressure, or harsh chemistry. We have known for well over twenty years that the incredible performance of natural materials is derived from self-assembly processes. Yet the average protein fiber start-up today burns hundreds of millions and years of work attempting to fit their bio-inspired recombinant self-assembling biopolymers into 20th-century polymer extrusion methods that destroy, rather than harness, the information embedded in protein sequences. 

Opportunities

We have identified two critical opportunities to accelerate high performance material assembly.

Opportunity 1 - Build a Bio-Inspired Fiber Manufacturing Center

Labs worldwide are developing remarkable recombinant proteins. From hagfish fibers that are tougher than synthetics, to spider silk stronger than steel, yet there is no viable pathway to prototype and scale these exciting materials. Existing fiber spinning facilities aren’t equipped to spin, let alone rapidly test out different protein fiber forming mechanisms to identify market potential or scalability.

We propose a dedicated facility that enables the rapid exploration of bio-inspired fiber formation processes. In a recent demonstration, we connected researchers developing recombinant hagfish protein with a bio-inspired spinning mechanism that was able to produce fibers with properties up to 100X better than traditional wet-spinning approaches. We have also seen how these bio-inspired spinning mechanisms can reduce capital costs by an order of magnitude, and provide unique distributed manufacturing approaches that are far more adaptable and resilient to market or technological change. Scientists, governments, and companies world-wide have expressed interest in using such a center.

Opportunity 2 - Develop a Foundation Model for Biopolymer Fiber Formation

Molecular modeling of fibers has been computationally intractable, and even the most advanced generative models today fail to predict how protein sequences will assemble into functional macrostructures during fiber formation. Existing models struggle to predict the properties of protein-based fibers because they are primarily designed to anticipate protein behaviors in solution states, not in soft matter structures. This gap in modeling capabilities limits our ability to predict and design protein sequences that can translate into fibers with desired mechanical properties. 

In our latest work supported by DARPA we believe it’s possible to take advantage of the known physics of fiber assembly to generate predictions that match with the outcomes we see in a bio-inspired spinning platform. This has not been possible before, we think, because other spinning methods introduce cross-linking or unpredictable fiber formation into the system, making predictions too computationally complex. This exciting finding means that we can turn AI-Manufacturing on its head and build manufacturing processes that are designed to partner with AI models.

We believe this combined bio-spinning and physics model approach could allow us to create a large synthetic dataset that we can use to jump-start a foundation model. This would be a game changer for materials manufacturing, enabling us to push the limits of what is possible with existing materials, meet biologically relevant outcomes, and create intelligent responsive self healing fibers that transform how we interact with the world.

Unlocks

If we were to achieve our goals this program unlocks unique technological capability to rapidly create, design, and assemble hierarchical fibers from the nano-scale to the micro-scale. This achievement would solidly advance our ability to design materials from the nanoscale on up, and move us closer to the kinds of materials we see in nature, yet with the addition of human scale and design.

 As with most platform manufacturing advancements the applications can be surprising, however it’s clear that this would unlock:

• Ultra lightweight and durable textiles with optical, electrical, and mechanical properties superior existing synthetics.

• Biologically compatible fibers for tissue, muscle, and tendon repair, guide, or replacement.

• Strong and tough gradient fibers for robotics, surgical instruments, or aeronautics

• Fiber based sensor systems, and tunable composites

Join us in creating this exciting future.