Three Whitworth seniors created a device to improve water quality after Whitworth’s Startup Weekend, which operated very similarly to the show Shark Tank. The company, Boss Moss LLC, is co-owned by Lance Dunn, Darren Melville and Ty Patterson.
The story of how this company came to be started with a biotech entrepreneurship class taught by Dr. Putsky and Dr. Kegg. In the class (BI-362), Putsky and Kegg break the combined business and biology students into groups and assign them a real-world problem to solve.
Dunn, Melville and Patterson were part of the group assigned to work on getting arsenic out of water. At first, they were tasked with doing research on potential solutions and discovered articles looking at the basic “uptake rates” that plants have of arsenic, according to Melville.
He also explained that while most plants only take in nutrients, or heavy metals like arsenic, through their roots, the moss that they are using uses what essentially functions as the plant’s pores, which span the whole surface area of the plant. Once the arsenic is in the plant, it is methylated, or broken down, and it is no longer toxic after that.
During the rest of the class, the groups are part of a Shark Tank-esque experience, pitching their ideas to “venture capitalists from the real world,” according to Putsky. There is no money involved in the pitches, but they do get feedback on their proposals.
Afterward, the three of them decided to continue with the project. Putsky says this is the first time that a group of students has decided to take a proposed idea from his class and turn it into a real business. Dunn says they should be able to wholesale their product at around $80.
“What they came up with was a simple solution that not only was capable of doing the job, but also it is practical and accessible to a wide audience,” Putsky said. “It’s a simple solution that a lot of people could benefit from. And that’s what does well in the world a lot of times. And it’s novel, it was unique. Nobody had tried this.”
When Melville joined the class late, he decided that the arsenic purification project was what he was most interested in due to his past research experience as a first-year student at the University of Puget Sound.
There, Melville took an AP research course where he learned how to mitigate zinc oxide from leeching into natural environments. He also has experience with clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) gene editing, which was important for Boss Moss’s work genetically engineering two different plants into one moss, which is especially good at absorbing and breaking down arsenic.
Dunn, a senior business management major, likened it to a chlorine filter. “The water flows through it, and it takes up the arsenic, holds onto it, and then within an hour, you have detoxified [the water].”
After that, the moss breaks down the arsenic, and the filter is biodegradable, so it breaks down and can be used as fertilizer and replaced with another filter.
Their current goal is working toward getting patents secured for the idea and the product, with the help of some law students at Gonzaga University. Then they are looking at outsourcing the construction and dispersal of the moss.
Along with that, they need funding. Patterson mentioned their GoFundMe, and says that “Any sort of donations to help cover early legal fees,” is what they are aiming for. They’ve raised close to $800, but their current goal is $30 thousand.
As a long-term goal, Melville said, “I would love for this company to grow and really be able to reach the people… It has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, millions of lives.”
