Helen Hailes, Professor of Chemical Biology and the Alexander Williamson Professor of Chemistry University College London’s Department of Chemistry is a Co-Investigator with P3EB. Her work links aspects of the project’s enzyme discovery research with chemistry. In October 2025, she and colleagues published a study on the enzymatic molecular recycling of an elastane component, also known as lycra and spandex, whose post-consumer waste is currently disposed of in landfill. The story made the cover of Royal Society of Chemistry’s Green Chemistry journal.
Helen Hailes grew up in a village in Nottinghamshire, UK. Drawn to mathematics at school, she passed the Cambridge entrance exam in Chemistry, Physics and Maths, which made her generation “the first in my family to go to university.” In many ways, the University of Cambridge was to be a formative experience for her. A significant influence in her career at this time was Professor Jim Staunton, an undergraduate chemistry tutor who would later supervise her PhD, which she completed in 1991. Hailes describes Staunton as “outstanding”: it was his support that gave her confidence in chemistry. “He was a lot of fun, as well as being a great scientist. I actually started to like chemistry in my second year at university”, she jokes. “So my chemistry route was partly through mentorship, and finding my niche in something that I could do quite well.” Staunton, a great supporter of women in science, in fact, remained a mentor to Hailes “until he died in his late 80s.”
Hailes’ PhD had been in organic synthesis, exploring “an area of biosynthesis where I wanted to try to understand how molecules were made in plants and bacteria”, she explains. During that time, she started performing reactions in water, using UV light to catalyze some of those reactions. Later, in her post-doctoral work, Hailes began combining chemistry and biology. During her early days at UCL, she applied for grants to work on water-based, ‘green chemistry’, in which she developed methodologies to perform more reactions in water, rather than using organic solvents, because of their potential for harm. It was at that point that Peter Dunhill, a pioneer of biochemical engineering invited her to “join a team where I would use my background in biosynthesis, my synthetic skills, and we would look at using microorganisms and enzymes to make molecules.” During this period, working on multidisciplinary projects was established in Hailes’ approach. “I bring my skills, and my colleagues bring other often complementary skills… it expanded my knowledge and skills and I learned new things. You can’t do everything yourself, so you’ve got to work as a team”, she says. Starting from that early project with Biochemical Engineering, Hailes became more aware of the potential of natural enzymes that could be developed to make molecules.
“Once you start working with one type of enzyme, you think, what else can I do? What other enzymes are out there? That established my career in biocatalysis, and it led to a question: if we can use biocatalysts to make molecules, what about using biocatalysts to break molecules?” For Hailes, and her collaborators with a diverse range of scientific expertise, this was the work “that brought us to the idea of using enzymes to chop up plastics, and other waste materials.”
By the time the team started working on breaking down plastics, they were already using enzymes to break down biomass. Working with Prof John Ward, based at UCL Biochemical Engineering, and Prof Mark Miodownik, at UCL Mechanical Engineering, they began thinking about “the plastics that go in with food waste, and we wondered, can we break these down as well? How do waste management systems deal with them? That’s when we looked at that enzymes that can break down PLA, which is a biodegradable plastic, but which normally breaks down slowly.” They also looked “at a whole class of hydrolytic enzymes that can break up ester bonds”, present in PET, PLA, and PBAT plastics; as well as the amides in nylon and polyurethane plastics. “They basically all contain bonds where water comes in and it chops it up”, Hailes explains, “but some bonds are harder to break than others.”
In 2023, the team received research funding from the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and with it, they set out to deal with environmental pollution by breaking down polyurethane plastics. The team called the project ‘Bug Busting Spandex’, targeting the elastomer known variously as Spandex, elastane or Lycra. “And of course, other polyurethane plastics are everywhere.”
A year later, in 2024, Hailes became part of a core team that was awarded funding for a far larger, collaborative project embracing a consortium of six academic institutions across the UK: The Preventing Plastic Pollution with Engineering Biology Mission Hub. From the outset, the co-investigators leading P3EB brought together a range of research expertise to further develop efficient, enzyme-inspired breakdown of plastics, with a goal of circularity.
Hailes describes her role in P3EB as “the link between the enzyme work and the chemistry. I’ve worked on both for a long time…I’m leading mechanochemistry with enzymatic reactions, which essentially involves milling plastics to break them into smaller particles, then we add enzymes to that. I’m also using alternative solvents, to help solubilize the plastics, and I’m working on enzyme assay development together with mutagenesis and enzyme discovery, which is led by Dr Jack Jeffries.
A further goal of Hailes’ work is to attempt to break down plastics that do not do so easily, and then, where possible, upcycling the breakdown products into useful other molecules.
In another avenue of collaborative research, she is also focusing on “aspects drug discovery, particularly anti tuberculosis compounds”. In this, Hailes and colleagues are “investigating carprofen, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug used by the veterinary field. Working with her colleague Sanjib Bhakta, a professor of molecular microbiology and biochemistry at Birkbeck University London, Hailes is building on the carprofen anti-tubercular motif, developing chemistry around making more biologically active analogues that are easier to produce, as some have much better activities.”
With her history of work in drug discovery, with P3EB, one of Hailes ideas for upcycling plastics was to take some of the units “from polyurethane to paracetamol.” Doing most of this work in vitro, Hailes is now leading a package of research for P3EB “interested in taking some of those molecules that we break, that come out of the plastics, and trying to convert that— upcycling the waste, to make useful small molecules.”
For Hailes, the scope of P3EB’s ambitions are made possible because “we all bring different expertise…You can achieve so much more working with collaborators”, she adds. “My hope is that within this consortium we can really bring all of our skills together, to have a bigger impact than we would individually.”