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What Should Already Exist

The last century was spent chronicling how pollutants drive chronic diseases.
The next decade should be spent engineering ways to stop it.

What is Engineered Resilience?

Many chronic diseases on the rise today are driven by environmental exposures, so the bulk of our attention should be on better understanding exposure-disease relationships. Pollutants are a type of environmental exposure and are a great place to start: many are already characterized and the mechanisms of action are documented. What's missing is the molecular infrastructure to act on what we know. The damage from pollutants accumulates at the cellular level for years before symptoms appear. The latency period leaves a trail of clues that are largely ignored but could be harnessed for early detection and treatment.

Engineered Resilience is an initiative to propel the field of environmental health towards addressable molecular targets and to mobilize biotech against the disease burden that pollutants have created. The goal is to translate biological resistance of pollutant-driven harm into a language that biotech innovators can understand for developing the next generation of tools to curb chronic disease.

Sarah Daniels, PhD

Sarah came to this problem as an environmental health scientist frustrated that her field constantly generates toxicity data for regulators but lacks data on addressable targets for biotech interventions. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, where she focused on blood biomarkers of chemical exposures and adverse health outcomes. She has spearheaded population health studies on diabetes, endocrine disruption, and gut microbiota dysfunction. Before Homeworld, Sarah conducted health services and economics research at the Department of Veterans Affairs. At Homeworld, she drove the research that budded into this initiative by building the evidence base and defining the scientific agenda. Sarah now leads Engineered Resilience.

Daniel Goodwin, PhD

Daniel came to this problem as an entrepreneur, engineer, and field-builder who saw pollution as an untapped molecular challenge that biotech has yet to take seriously. He holds a PhD from MIT, where he developed advanced tools for neuroscience under Ed Boyden and George Church. He also co-founded MileIQ, which scaled to over a million users before being acquired by Microsoft, bringing a background in computer science, product design, and experimental biology. He co-founded Homeworld Collective to advance biotech solutions at the intersection of human and planetary health. For Engineered Resilience, Daniel has shaped the vision, frameworks, and strategic direction of the initiative.

Build First Mindset

At Homeworld, Sarah drove the testing of the thesis. In collaboration with partners, Sarah and team published the first-ever Target Product Profile on a new blood diagnostics for an environmental contaminant. Recognizing an existing demand to measure long-term effects of exposures, she secured the first known funding for blood biomarker discovery linked to past lead (Pb⁺²) exposure.

Daniel and Sarah initiated more action after an infamously severe pollutant exposure. After the largest-ever battery fire was set ablaze in Northern California, they deployed a team to collect environmental and human samples, generating molecular exposure signatures in record time. Their preliminary findings of highly specific immunological responses warrant further analyses and follow-up experiments on these unique samples.

Building on the momentum, Daniel and Sarah co-hosted the first-of-a-kind "Trends to Targets" Workshop. They brought together key stakeholders, healthtech start-up founders, and leading experts in environmental health, policy, and biotech to pressure-test a new framework and chart a research direction focused on identifying addressable targets and developing early interventions to mitigate the effects of harmful environmental exposures.

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