by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are funding the development of a vaccine designed to reduce the methane produced by cattle. Regenerative farmer Will Harris called the project “unnecessary” because when properly grazed on well-managed rangeland, rather than in confinement, “cattle are like carbon converting machines.”
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is investing $9.4 million to develop a vaccine designed to reduce the number of methane-producing microbes in a cow’s stomach, Agriland reported.
The funding comes from his Bezos Earth Fund, a philanthropy he established with $10 billion in 2020. The fund intends to distribute all of its money by 2030, by funding projects to “fight climate change and protect nature.”
Researchers at the United Kingdom’s Pirbright Institute and Royal Veterinary College, and New Zealand’s AgResearch are among the groups receiving funding to research how a vaccine could reduce the methane emitted by cows as they digest and expel food through manure, flatulence and burping.
“Vaccines have proven to be an incredibly cost-effective way to deliver global health solutions,” said Bezos Earth Fund President and CEOAndrew Steer in a press release. “If we can apply this approach to vaccinate cattle and reduce emissions, the scalability and impact could be phenomenal.”
Although scientists have sporadically researched methane vaccines for over four decades, no vaccine yet exists. The project’s first goal is to show that such a vaccine is possible.
“This grant is a moonshot for proof-of-concept — risky bets like this are essential to tackling the climate crisis,” Steer said, according to Agriland.
The researchers will study how methanogens, or methane-producing microbes, colonize the digestive tract of calves and how their immune system responds to those methanogens.
Researchers will then determine which antibodies would effectively target the methanogens, as the first step in developing the criteria for their methane vaccine.
Professor John Hammond, Immunogenetics Group leader at the Pirbright Institute, said that before they could develop a methane vaccine, they had to first define “what a successful vaccine needs to achieve. By understanding the precise antibody responses required, we can provide a clear path forward for vaccine development.”
“This approach reduces the trial-and-error aspect and focuses on targeted, high-resolution immunology,” Hammond added. Researchers can use that knowledge to trigger an immune response in cattle that will inhibit methane production, he said.
Crop scientist and regenerative farmer Howard Vlieger told The Defender such a vaccine could be damaging to cows because it is being designed to target the organisms living in cows’ digestive system — organisms the animals need to digest fiber.
Vlieger cited research on glyphosate showing that when necessary microorganisms in a cow’s rumen are eliminated, even in small amounts, it seriously affects the animal’s health.
However, Hammond said dramatic interventions are necessary to cut global methane emissions.
“Vaccination is a widely accepted farming practice that is auditable and can be used in combination with other strategies, such as chemical inhibition, selection for low-methane genetics or early-life interventions to permanently alter microbiome composition in livestock,” he said, according to Agriland.
But Vliegar said that regenerative farmers take a different approach, which is to be attentive to cattle nutrition and to keep their cattle in balance with the environment.
Bill Gates also funding methane vaccine
Shortly after the Bezos Earth Fund announced in August that it was funding the methane vaccine, ag-biotech startup ArkeaBio announced it also had raised $38.5 million to develop a methane vaccine.
Investors include the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Rabo Ventures, the Grantham Foundation and others. The Series A funding ArkeaBio announced was from its second round of funding.
Breakthrough Energy had fully funded its previous seed funding round with $12 million, Axios reported.
Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 to fund start-ups focused on innovating to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Bezos and other well-known billionaires, including Richard Branson and Jack Ma, are also investors.
That means Bezos is funding the methane vaccine through his for-profit investment group and his philanthropic organization.
So is Gates. The Pirbright Institute, which receives Bezos grant funding for the methane vaccine, will use technologies developed in its Pirbright Livestock Antibody Hub, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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