Pentagon awards Biosphere $9M to build portable "protein from air" bioreactors
What's the deal? Biosphere, a California-based startup that makes UV-sterilised bioreactors, has won a $9M grant from the US Department of Defense (DoD) spanning 3.5 years. The funding will support development of portable bioreactors that produce protein via gas fermentation — essentially making protein from air.
The company was founded in 2022 by materials scientist Brian Heligman and molecular biologist Arye Lipman. It recently acquired intellectual property from a distressed gas fermentation company, which it plans to deploy in the DoD project.
Why now? The DoD is increasingly focused on biomanufacturing as a way to produce food, materials, and therapeutics in "contested" environments where normal supply chains are unreliable. The Pentagon wants distributed production across multiple scales — from skid-sized units to larger facilities.
Biosphere's core innovation is replacing traditional steam-in-place sterilisation with UV light, which it says cuts capital and maintenance costs, speeds up sterilisation, and enables smaller, more productive bioreactors. The company has validated the tech at benchtop scale and is now working on a 20,000-litre demo facility.
What could go wrong? Gas fermentation — feeding microbes gases instead of sugars — is notoriously difficult. It requires specialised bioreactors optimised for gas-liquid mixing and safety measures for handling gases. Several companies in the space have struggled financially, including the unnamed firm whose IP Biosphere acquired.
The technology promises lower input costs and longer production runs due to reduced contamination risk. But scaling it into a portable, continuously operating prototype with water recycling and downstream processing is a significant engineering challenge.
The signal: This grant sits at the intersection of two growing trends: military interest in resilient supply chains and the push to make biomanufacturing cheaper and more distributed. If UV sterilisation can truly simplify bioreactor design, it could unlock applications well beyond defence — from alternative protein production to decentralised pharmaceutical manufacturing.
The DoD contract also gives Biosphere room to experiment with exotic bioreactor designs that would be harder to fund in purely commercial settings, according to Heligman. Defence funding has long served as a proving ground for technologies that later find civilian applications, and protein-from-air bioreactors could follow that pattern.
Read more: agfundernews.com
