BIOMIMICRY

Nature is rich in elegant solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Using organic chemistry and the Molecular Toolkit, Nature’s designs are engineered for better efficiency, new capabilities, lower costs, and better performance while retaining the wisdom of the original design.

The water membranes incorporate over a dozen of Nature’s inspirations from plants, animals, and human physiology into strategies for the membrane designs. One of the most important inspirations comes from aquaporins. Aquaporins – “aqua” meaning “water” and “porin” for “pores” – are the water superhighways that transport water in and out of the cells of all living things.

The aquaporin design inspiration was then engineered for even better performance. The large aquaporin transmembrane protein was miniaturized and scaled down to one atomic layer in thickness. The pores that make up the Agua Via membranes operate with flow rates calculated as 1,000 times more efficient than the natural aquaporin structure.

Then, the aquaporin-derived pores were designed to do something completely different: mimic the output of the kidney’s Loop of Henle in a pore rather than the complex active transport of the nephron.  This enables implementing the kidney’s biological paradigm for filtration rather than an old-style, conventional industrial paradigm.  With current industrial filtration, multiple treatments are needed at ever-greater cost and at ever-greater energy to get rid of successively smaller classes of contaminants or a newly identified contaminant. But the kidney’s paradigm is elegant: keep what is vital to life and throw out everything else.  The kidney-mimicking pore enables taking heavily contaminated water and producing only the water that the human body wants in a single, low energy filtration pass.

It’s all about Nature.  It’s where many of the challenges are…and where we find the solutions.

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The kidney’s paradigm is elegant: keep what is vital to life and throw out everything else.