The Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) has today announced it is backing 11 new research projects (Creators) with £50 m to develop new ways of manufacturing advanced materials at scale using proteins, as part of its Universal Fabricators program.
The program aims to bridge the gap between molecular-level precision and high-volume production by harnessing proteins to produce a versatile range of advanced inorganic and composite materials that can outperform what industry can mass-produce today.
While modern manufacturing forces a trade-off between cost, precision and production volume, biology offers a sustainable alternative by using proteins to turn abundant, ordinary ingredients into tough, highly structured materials at room temperature. Building on AI breakthroughs like AlphaFold – which enable the design of entirely new proteins – researchers are now tackling the ‘Protein Assembly Problem’ to direct trillions of designed or naturally abundant proteins and surrounding minerals to self-organize into scalable, tangible materials. The Universal Fabricators program exists to solve that challenge.
Led by Program Director Ivan Jayapurna, the 11 research projects that ARIA is funding span the breadth of the UK – including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Sheffield, Birmingham, Cambridge, Bath, and London – as well as Seattle and Berkeley. Research teams are addressing three core engineering challenges, each paired with a high-value material industry needs but currently struggles to mass-produce:
- Fibers: Using proteins to grow hollow-core optical fibers, of the kind used in telecommunications, interconnects, lasing, and sensing cables, with shapes and features that conventional fiber-drawing processes cannot produce.
- Membranes: Growing defect-free protein sheets, hardened with minerals, into filters with precisely sized pores. One example target is separating lithium from magnesium, two ions of almost identical size, which could make the separation stage of lithium refining more efficient.
- Magnets: Using proteins as nanoscale scaffolds to grow and align magnetic crystals, with the aim of producing high-performance magnets that do not rely on rare-earth elements.
Among the funded projects is CoreShell Fibre Factory, an all-Scottish team led by Tell Tuttle using computational modelling and machine learning to design proteins that act as reusable moulds for hollow-core optical fibers. By recovering and reusing the protein building blocks across continuous production runs, the project has the added bonus of eliminating the high costs related to bespoke protein production.
At the University of Edinburgh, S-LATTICE, led by Louise Horsfall, is building two-dimensional metal-protein frameworks from proteins that naturally assemble into regular, porous sheets – the same proteins that form the outer coat of most archaea and many bacteria. Using metal-binding chemistry, the team aims to scale this into large, defect-free sheets with chemical functions beyond nature's own, tuning pore size and spacing precisely enough for highly selective filtration.
At the University of Sheffield, PROTEUS, led by Rebecca Boston, is growing crystals using proteins abundant in wool, silk, eggs, and milk – much of it surplus from the food and textile industries – and setting them into ceramics, starting with cobalt ferrite magnets. Instead of fusing the material with extreme heat, which would destroy the fine structure the proteins have built, the team will press it solid at low temperature through cold sintering.
The program’s success will be defined by a scalable process that uses proteins to produce a high-value inorganic or composite material that outperforms the current industrial state of the art. This would show that protein-programmed manufacturing can combine molecular precision with reliable, industrial-scale production, and could move proteins from high-value, low-volume uses into industrial markets measured in kilotons.
ARIA funds R&D at the edge of what is scientifically and technologically possible, and its high-risk, high-reward model is reflected in the design of the Universal Fabricators program. Backing 11 teams taking different routes across three challenges gives the program several chances to solve the same underlying problem, and allows the strongest approaches to emerge as evidence builds. The research is early-stage and technically high-risk, and commercial translation has been built into the program from the start so that successful approaches have a route towards industrial production.
Ivan Jayapurna, Program Director for Universal Fabricators at ARIA, said: “Ages of human history are defined by new materials, but materials change the world only when processes are developed to make them cheap and abundant. Today proteins are thought of as soft, squishy biologics used for drugs and biocatalysis. But we believe that proteins are a uniquely powerful toolkit to break the precision-volume tradeoff in industrial manufacturing. Our mission is to prove that proteins are "universal fabricators” that can mass manufacture molecularly precise inorganic and composite materials that will revolutionise our electronics, energy, infrastructure and more.”
José Videira, Science and Technology Lead for Universal Fabricators at ARIA, said: “New manufacturing paradigms emerge when manufacturing first principles are blended with technological leaps. We are now at a convergence of computational design, protein production and rapid experimentation that allows us to bring together seemingly disparate fields–from protein design to metallurgy–and make them work in previously unconsidered ways. We are thus expanding the Overton window beyond established processes, which will unlock material ideas that would once have seemed implausible–and determine which can become real industrial processes”