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.
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