RemePhy Case Study

RemePhy Technologies ✔️ Startup ✔️ Soil ✔️ Collaboration

A new spinout, RemePhy, is revolutionising the way we address heavy metal contaminated soil, one of the world’s most critical environmental challenges

“In short, we’re harnessing nature’s power to clear our soil. Every year, 15 billion tons of soil is contaminated by heavy metals from mining. We’re using plants to turn it into usable land – 15 times more efficiently than traditional clean-up methods.”

RemePhy chose Rothamsted as their base as it’s the home of agri-science and innovation. Being on campus gives them easy access to knowledge, funders, and fields and labs, as well as researchers and like-minded entrepreneurs.

Discover more about RemePhy

We need more land for housing and wild spaces, and clean soil for agriculture, but so much of the earth has been polluted by heavy metals from various industries, including mining. Scientists know that plants could remove metals from the earth, but until now, the actual process of accumulation was slow. RemePhy identified a plant, a native weed in the Northern hemisphere, that could successfully accumulate metals within its biomass – and then went one step further and identified a bacteria which thrived within these plants. The bacteria and the plant work together to accumulate metals faster, creating a symbiotic relationship that increases metal uptake 17 times more than regular plant types. The bacteria and plant combination is patent pending.

In more detail:

This environmentally-friendly phytoremediation process extracts harmful metal ions from the soil. The hyper-accumulating plants themselves can be harvested and the metals extracted from the biomass. This not only makes the soil remediation cleaner but also profitable as it recycles metals and potentially heralds a new, greener way of mining metals.

RemePhy are based in Rothamsted labs and are undertaking more field trials to help optimise their process further. Their focus is currently on mine tailing, which is when materials are left over and stored following commercial mining operations, but the application could also be used on other contaminated soils on brownfield sites, such as where metals are deposited following coal combustion.

A short history of RemePhy

2024 Founded by Franklin Keck and Ion Ioannou whilst PhD students at Imperial College London

2025 Joined the Cambridge Future Tech portfolio

Awarded a BBSRC Innovation grant to tap into Rothamsted’s world-class scientific services and collaborate with Rothamsted Research scientists

RemePhy chose Rothamsted because:

RemePhy was founded by PhD graduates Dr Franklin Keck and Dr Ion Ioannou.

“Being at Rothamsted helps us to accelerate R&D on our microbe-powered hyperaccumulator technology – bringing field-ready, circular solutions for heavy-metal soil remediation one step closer. A huge thank you to the entire Rothamsted team for championing early-stage deep-tech companies like ours.”

RemePhy benefits from:

On site facilities	Rothamsted’s reputation drew us to the campus but it was the impressive and cost-effective space that encouraged us to make Rothamsted our home. With labs, offices, fields and glasshouses, the site has it all!
Kit	A fully-stocked analytical chemical suite and access to ICP-MS equipment has allowed us to further our research and validate our approach.
Location	Rothamsted offers us fields and space to grow and harvest our plants. Not only that, it’s close to London and part of the golden triangle, a huge benefit to our company.
Collaboration	We are regularly introduced to new potential collaborators including amongst the scientists at Rothamsted Research. We also network regularly with other on-campus entrepreneurs with some future partnerships in the pipeline.
Opportunities	Being part of the Rothamsted ecosystem gives us access to funders which led to us securing a BBSRC Innovation grant. We’re also invited to speak at events, such as the recent UKSP conference, to share our work more widely.

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