Hi ,

In this week’s Built With Biology Digest, we’re excited to share a compelling interview with industry-leading investor, Tom Baruch. This interview serves as an introduction to a series of articles by Tom and noted analyst and author, Karl Schmieder… all designed to provide a roadmap for start-ups who want to become billion dollar companies. We encourage you to see, "The Synthetic Biology Climate Change Opportunity," as the first piece in what is sure to be engaging editorial on using time-tested business principles (as opposed to hype and hope).

Don’t forget to sign up for next week’s (January 26) digital symposium on Digital Genome Engineering: Unlocking the Potential of Synthetic Biology, brought to you by Inscripta® and Built With Biology. This free event will feature perspectives from industry leaders, highlight the latest innovations in Digital Genome Engineering, and provide a vision for the future of SynBio.

Also, please check out the latest Built With Biology Podcast, wherein Patrick Westfall, Senior Director of the Microbe Group at Inscripta®, explores rational versus irrational biology design and shares the tools and mindsets that can help us build more successfully with biology!

Lastly, as we’re working hard to continue polishing the new Built With Biology website, we would ask that you as our readers continue to provide any feedback you think important, as our goal is to find new and better means to serve you, the people, companies, and organizations using biology to make the planet a better place!

As always, thank you for reading!

Larry

Larry Upton

Editor in Chief

larry.upton@builtwithbiology.com

Built With Biology: Insights

Biological Businesses With Staying Power

If you want your business to be around a hundred years from now, take your cues from nature.

Living things make their, well, living, by optimizing for robustness, not efficiency. In an unpredictable world, being able to survive changing environments and internal states is essential to longevity. It doesn’t matter how quickly you can convert sunlight to sugar if a single cloud leaves you without enough energy to survive until the sun returns.

Businesses face the same challenge, and it’s showing up in the data. The lifespan of your average company has dropped by half over the last 40 years as new complexities in political, technological, and social dynamics make even identifying the challenge difficult, much less exploring the solution space and thriving. The nature of today’s challenges are such that businesses (and organisms) may not even recognize that they’re in trouble until it’s too late.

What’s really interesting is that long-lived businesses don’t have an especially good crystal ball. They prioritize responsiveness instead, monitoring current resources and relationships, developing a variety of tools to maintain stability in a changing environment, and shaping the ecosystem in their favor. Consider these biological design principles. They not only keep organisms alive, they offer a blueprint for building the systems, organizations, and businesses that will be cornerstones of the future.

Our industry excels at building solutions with biological tools. We are endlessly amazed by the elegance of natural systems. What would happen if we challenged ourselves to not only develop tools, products and processes based on biological principles, but viewed our companies through that lens as well? How would organizational structures change, or the way projects are initiated and implemented? What does our community need to not just survive but thrive in a world of kaleidoscopic challenges? It’s time to take a closer look at the guiding principles of living systems to build organizations and businesses that meet today’s challenges and thrive for a century.

Built With Biology is cultivating an ecosystem for a resilient and responsive industry that is here for the long term. Our companies are moving the economy away from extractive and unsustainable production and towards living carbon cycles. There is a wealth of knowledge to bring to bear on the economy through new manufacturing methods and never-before-seen products. And now, Built With Biology is cultivating an environment to help us thrive, advocating for the passionate storytelling that weaves our technological problems and solutions into larger narratives of social benefit, prosperity, and abundance. Be a part of the journey by signing up for the newsletter and joining the conversation today.

Spotlight on: Strateos

What do the labs of the future look like? Increasingly, they’re becoming digital! We’ve all seen how valuable remote-accessible automated labs can be in a global pandemic. But these labs can also connect international teams, improve the reproducibility of complex experiments, and test scalability. Meet Strateos, a company pioneering remote-access laboratories and lab control software for life science discovery. Strateos’ robotic cloud labs can be accessed anywhere in the world through a computer, speeding discovery and generating actionable data. Strateos also helps companies design and build out their own advanced labs from instruments to modules to multi-level facilities empowering R&D scalability. Learn more about how Strateos is enabling companies around the world to accelerate in the bioeconomy!

Spotlight on: Rubi Labs

Imagine a world in which harmful carbon emissions are turned into carbon-negative clothes. As you read this, that world is becoming a reality. Meet Rubi, a company leveraging bioproduction to turn industrial emissions into clothing fibers! Through a cell-free enzymatic process, their technology "eats" carbon to produce the same cellulose that’s already used in today’s fashion industry. The cellulose can be spun into fibers like lyocell, satin, jersey, and other fibers that mimic the properties of wool, cotton, and silk. The company’s processes turn the carbon emissions of today’s textile industry net negative, and use virtually none of the water and land. Learn more about Rubi’s planet-positive impact and stay tuned for their upcoming brand collaborations!

An interview with Tom Baruch by Karl Schmieder

Tom Baruch, a seasoned entrepreneur and venture capitalist, began shifting his VC practice from materials science, IT and biotechnology to the then-nascent field of synthetic biology in 1997. Over the years, he has funded more than 12 synthetic biology companies and has an enviable track record.

Keep Reading »

The future of seafood starts in North Carolina: Pearlita Foods is bringing oysters from bioreactor to table

The co-founders, Nikita Michelsen, CEO, and marine biologist Joey Peters, PhD. cand., Head of Science, are headed to Raleigh to build the future of seafood at Pearlita Foods, starting with Oysters. Together, they will use cellular agriculture to grow oysters in their lab.

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With this $125 million investment, there’s about to be a lot more mushroom leather

MycoWorks is using the money to build a factory to mass-produce its cow-free product.

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How do we design biology? Get ready to be surprised!

Patrick Westfall, Senior Director of the Microbe Group at Inscripta, joins the show to explore rational versus irrational biology design and share the tools and mindsets that can help us build more successfully with biology!

Keep Reading »

MORE TO EXPLORE

Covestro and Genomatica produce important chemical raw material using biotechnology

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First pig-to-human heart transplant: what can scientists learn?

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Scientists are making CAR-T cells more clever. Here’s what the next generation could look like

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Insightful Science acquires Omiq to add cloud-based machine learning to its flow cytometry capabilities

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We've Got More »

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Senior Scientist/Staff Scientist, Mammalian Cell Biology, Inscripta, Pleasanton, CA or Boulder, CO

Senior Bioinformatics Data Scientist II/ Staff Bioinformatics Data Scientist, Inscripta, Remote U.S.

Software Quality Assurance Engineer, Inscripta, Pleasanton, CA or Boulder, CO

Staff Systems Engineer/ Senior Staff Systems Engineer, Inscripta, Pleasanton, CA or Boulder, CO

Scientist II, Automated Strain Engineering, IFF, Palo Alto, CA

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