New Dawn Bio makes a piece of wood in the lab

The first piece of wood, like a mini postage stamp, is ready. Although it looks delicate, it should be as robust as wood tissue from a tree. With this piece of wood, systems biologist Tom Clement and cell biologist, and WUR alumnus, Ruben van Spoordonk are taking an important step towards manufacturing wooden products such as tables and chairs without growing a tree. But why would you want to make wood directly from wood cells, rather than from a tree?

“Why grow an entire organism when you only use a small part?”, Clement replies, turning the question around. “It was something I found myself wondering about during my studies in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology. It's kind of crazy to make rectangular planks from a round tree trunk. But since you cannot make the tree square, you just have to grow cells to make wood from. This is already happening in the development of cultured meat, cellular milk, and cheese. All we're doing is expanding this idea to the plant world. From one cell to the world's largest forest. That's what we’re aiming for.”

But what problem does that solve?

“If we can make wood without growing trees, we can stop problematic deforestation and human rights violations. The idea is that we will soon be able to build materials with substances that we have complete control over. For example, if you add more xylem than fibres, the material becomes lighter. This means that we are fully in charge of the process. We can then make wood that is hard to come by, or that doesn't even exist in nature.”

So how do you turn single plant cells into a wooden product?

“It all starts with growing seedlings on gel. We extract specific cells from these seedlings, and grow these cells into a clump of cells in a solution containing nutrients and growth hormones. We then let these cells differentiate into the same types of cells you find in wood, such as xylem and fibres. A lot of knowledge already existed in science about how to do this. Last year, we used that knowledge in the laboratory to build a kind of library of wood cells from six different species of trees.”

Loose cells are not yet a wooden plank

“Firstly, we will multiply those cells further and then we use a new technique to glue the cells together into a certain shape. So we make wood tissue from those loose cells. That is now working well enough to enable us to make that first piece of wood. We will continue to work on the technology until we have a wooden product, like a tabletop.”

What are the next steps?

“We are working hard to get the business model right, also with the help of Wageningen accelerator StartLife. A programme from this non profit that supports food & agri startups involved other start-ups from all over the world. We continued to work with coaches on a stronger message and a solid financial plan for the future. Such a path to the future needs to be well mapped out to attract investors, because the potential market for these kinds of wooden products is bizarrely large.”

“In practice, we are still spending a lot of time in the lab working on developing the technology further. We do that here on Wageningen Campus, also in collaboration with our advisers at the university, like cellular biologist Tijs Ketelaar. After that, we plan to set up a production facility. Ideally, we would want it to be not too far from here either. Ultimately, the wood production will become a licensing model for the method and materials. Then it can be produced anywhere in the world.”