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We hope this finds you well.

Exciting news: 2021 was the best ever for synthetic biology startups, which raised a total of nearly $18 billion – nearly as much as the entire amount in all prior years since the emergence of the field in 2009. What might be surprising to many is the fact that sustainable food companies led all investor sectors in Q4, surpassing health and medicine by an order of magnitude. According to industry analyst Mark Bünger and BWB Partner, "Synthetic biology will change the game for the food industry, offering massive benefits inside the food itself as well as the people and planet outside." To read more, please see our report here.

Also exciting is that fact that noted futurist, Amy Webb, plans to release her book The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology next week. Amy was designated as one of the "top five women who will change the world" by Forbes magazine, is a professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Säid School of Business, and is CEO of the Future Today Institute, a leading foresight and management consulting firm. Come meet Amy live as she moderates the Leaps by Bayer® panel discussion at our global conference (April 12-14 in Oakland, CA).

We hope you enjoy the Q4 Investor Report and will check out Amy’s highly engaging book, as both should provide insight into where the SynBio industry is headed over the coming months!

Thank you for reading, and as always, don’t hesitate to reach out with any suggestions on people, companies, or organizations you’d like us to cover.

Larry

Larry Upton

Editor in Chief

larry.upton@builtwithbiology.com

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Built With Biology Insights

The Likelihood of Unlikely Events

Humans struggle with probability. Part of the problem is that we’re not great at estimating the outcome of multiple interactions and combinations. The other part is that we’re incredibly good at imagining that the way we understand the universe is the same as how it actually works.

The Birthday Riddle is a perfect example of how an intuitive understanding of probability fails us as soon as combinations enter the picture. It’s a simple question: How many strangers do you need in a room before two of them are likely to share the same birthday?

The key to solving that riddle is to take yourself out of the equation. The people in the room don’t have to share a birthday with you; the condition is met when any two people in the room share a birthday. As a result, the answer - just 23 people - is lower than you might expect. It has to do with the odds that you don’t share birthdays more than the odds that you do (you can read this article for the math).

Birthdays can also illustrate our relationship with chance - and our tendency to put ourselves in the middle of the story. Have you ever been delighted to realize that a friend or acquaintance has a birthday close to yours? It’s a low-stakes, unexpected connection, one we make just because two unrelated events ended up in close proximity to one another in the system we designed to track time. But the urge to see proximity as the basis for understanding is persuasive. Astrology is what happens when we assign power to shared birthdays.

We should know by now that correlation is not causation, but humans love the idea that proximity alone demonstrates a relationship between one thing and another, one person and another, one number and another. As a result, we tend to underestimate the random occurrence of events that are sequential or even identical and to overestimate their impact. Our brains, used to navigating our ordered and designed world, label these events as ‘not likely’ regardless of how likely they actually are.

What does this mean for us as people building with biology? It means the unexpected should be expected, especially when we grapple with the really large numbers found in a strand of DNA or the combinations of amino acids that make a protein. It also means that when we identify something ‘unusual’ we take the time to investigate not only the event but why we thought it was significant in the first place.

Strengthening our understanding of probability and chance will help us build better, because combinations are the future of the Built with Biology ecosystem. New vaccines will be made by predicting the combination of mutations that alter viral proteins. Manufacturing platforms will graduate from single microbe fermentations to communities that act as assembly lines. Numbers and narrative will come together to turbocharge interest and enthusiasm in building with biology. The unlikely is likely in our line of work, and it’s time we embraced that.

To learn more about what we at Built With Biology think the future holds, please plan to join us live for our Global Conference (April 12-14 in Oakland, CA).

Spotlight on: Moligo Technologies

Gene therapies could one day cure life-threatening diseases like ALS and Cystic Fibrosis. But how can we ensure these therapies will be accessible for all? Meet Moligo Technologies, an enzymatic DNA synthesis company producing affordable and error-free gene-length sequences of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA). Making affordable ssDNA (up to 10,000 bases!) is critical: ssDNA is much safer and more effective than double-stranded DNA for gene-editing therapies. Moligo uses an "injection molding" technology to synthesize DNA from a template. And because the company doesn’t need PCR to scale its product, Moligo can produce huge quantities of DNA, including highly complex sequences, quickly and cheaply. Learn more about Moligo’s goals to make gene therapies available for all!

Spotlight on: Renaissance Bioscience

Yeast are known for their amazing ability to produce novel, bioengineered ingredients. Meet Renaissance Bioscience, a company modifying yeast to produce RNA interference (RNAi), a molecule that targets and turns off specific gene actions in many biopesticide and biotherapeutic applications. Using this technology, the company is creating safer, biodegradable, and more targeted biopesticides for agriculture. Early tests have already shown 98% mortality against the Colorado potato beetle. This yeast-based RNAi technology also has significant therapeutic potential for animal and human health. Learn more about Renaissance Bioscience’s mission to develop its exciting RNAi technology and its diverse commercialized work in food, wine, beer, and more!

The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

There are growing calls for more open dialogue with the public about how technologies like synthetic biology and AI will impact our world. One of the most optimistic voices behind this call is quantitative futurist Amy Webb, founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute. Click here to read more about Amy’s insightful new book The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology.

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