A few years ago, Paige Whitehead was swimming off of Savary Island when she noticed the water around her was glowing; fast forward to 2024 and she was about to go on stage to pitch an entirely new technology on the show Dragons' Den.
Whitehead grew up in the Comox Valley, on Vancouver Island and now heads a company making compostable bioluminescent enzymes for industrial and commercial uses, which is a complicated way of saying her company, Lux Bio, makes non-toxic, biodegradable glow sticks and related products. Since that fateful night of swimming, she has figured out how to make the enzymes present in many bioluminescent animals create light for far longer than they naturally would, and how to put that biotechnology into commercial products.
"Our company develops bioluminescent enzymes to create long-lasting light formulation," Whitehead said. "The enzyme that creates light in algae — like what you can see in the summer around Vancouver Island — would create light for about five minutes. The work we do in our lab is to evolve them in a direction so that they'll produce continuous light.
"Now our enzyme produces bright light for six hours, and is visible for 24 hours, which is just huge compared to before."
Whitehead said that the technology has gotten the attention of some big players in industries as far ranging as fishing, cancer research and even NASA.
"The NASA project is really interesting because it showcases the use of bioluminescence outside of a glow stick," she said. "They're doing testing on microfluidic devices where they were using chemical luminescence to illuminate the channels. They were looking in to the hazard classification, trying to find something safer and that's how they found us. They've been using that as a chemoluminesence alternative at the jet propulsion lab for their planetary defense team."
NASA's planetary defense team looks for asteroids and other Near-Earth Objects and takes measures to redirect them if they approach too close to Earth. That includes missions like DART (Dual Asteroid Redirection Test), which successfully pushed two asteroids away from the planet in September, 2022.
Whitehead's company has also partnered with the Canadian Coast Guard to create a bioluminescent sea dye marker.
"So if someone's lost at sea, they can basically dump a brick of bioluminescence into the water and it'll make a pool of light around them to hopefully localize the rescue crews to where the person is lost at sea," Whitehead explained. "It's also very safe, you're not dealing with pyrotechnics or anything like that when you're out on the water."
The groundbreaking thing about the technology is that it is 100 per cent biodegradable. The enzymes are naturally occurring, and will degrade in the natural environment. The plastic out of which the tubes the glow sticks are made are also backyard compostable, itself a new development in material sciences. Whitehead is interested in pursuing FDA approval for the technology, since everything used is already food-grade.
"I really wanted to study bioluminescence as an alternative to chemical luminescence after I volunteered at a music festival," Whitehead said. "I saw a bunch of glow sticks and wondered what the heck would happen if they broke and animals got into them. This was at Shambhala, which is a family farm for the rest of the year.
"These things are everywhere," she said about current commercial light sticks. "There are millions of calls to poison control for kids chewing on them, and almost everyone I've talked to has a story about it ... It was just really getting to me, and I thought we could do something with bioluminescence instead. It's kind of taken over my life after that, but now we're actually doing it. It's crazy."
That experience and the experience of swimming among the bioluminescent algae got her mind heading in that direction. It was a local teacher, Mr. Andrew Black at Highland Secondary School who got her to pursue microbiology and, as Whitehead said "completely changed my life."
Which all led to her standing in the Dragons' Den.
While Whitehead was not at liberty to say how her pitch went — those interested will have to tune in to CBC or CBC Gem on Nov. 28 — it's fair to say that the future looks bioluminescent.
