Hi ,

We hope this finds you well and having enjoyed a restful holiday weekend.

We at Built With Biology are back to work after enjoying what we believe to be a ground-breaking annual conference last week in Oakland, CA. Record attendance aside, what most inspired us was you… our friends, family, and partners who joined us in celebrating how biology can make the planet a better place. We were particularly proud of the ~ 500 students and start-ups who joined us on day three of the conference, due in no small part to the generous support of Ginkgo Bioworks and Schmidt Futures.

For those of you who attended, we sent out a post-conference survey earlier today to solicit feedback on what you as our partners most liked (or did not) about the conference. Please be candid in your responses, as we are always open to feedback on how we might improve the ROI on our annual summit. For those who were not able to join us, we plan to publish key excerpts from both our plenary stage and most-intriguing breakout sessions over the coming weeks

We greatly appreciate your having participated as attendees, speakers, sponsors, and thought leaders. And we look forward to having you join us again in London (July 20-21, 2022) and Houston (October 4-5, 2022), as we continue building the movement toward using biology to better feed, fuel, and heal the world.

As always, thank you for reading.

Larry

P.S. If you know someone who would enjoy reading the Built With Biology weekly Digest, we encourage you to please forward this email.

Larry Upton

Editor in Chief

larry.upton@builtwithbiology.com

Built With Biology Insights

Lighting the Way

The 2022 Built With Biology conference leaned into serendipity and surprise, with yard-sale style posters and hundreds of young minds coming together to learn from industry veterans in the new "Race Against The Clock" summit (RATC). Held on the last day of the conference, RATC brought a hopeful energy to the community, helping us reconnect with our enthusiasm for biology and the world we can build with it.

To get to the main stage, the attendees strolled through a conference hall filled with the materials of the future. Checkerspot, a Utah company making bio-materials synonymous with high performance function, talked great skiing and how to keep snow on the mountains by divesting from petroleum. Ecovative, a long standing partner of the conference, showed out with a new video that captured the power of mycelium to make strong, lightweight, fire-resistant building materials. K18 brought beauty into the mix with bio-based hair products that strengthen and improve strands.

Tucked away in a dark room off to the side of the main hall, was the intriguing Light Bio display. Light Bio makes flowers that glow. They look for all the world like petunias you would buy in a box store, glowing softly in the exact way your standard petunia does not. By using light-making genes borrowed from a fungus, Light Bio has completed a regenerative metabolic cycle within the plant. As a result, making light is as natural to these petunias as capturing sunlight or scenting the evening air. The plants, like all the products on display at the Built with Biology conference, are the result of decades of research devoted to cracking the codes of life and the companies that have built a backbone of bio-infrastructure allowing us to capture information in DNA and develop new functions in living cells.

Products like these are a promise to the students and early-stage scientists joining the Race Against the Clock that this is a community that follows the vision of a brighter world. From the bio-identical breastmilk at Helaina to the skillful way Sampling Human conducts an orchestra of cells to spotlight the origins of disease, Built with Biology is a community of explorers contributing to knowledge that will lead to unexpected collaborations with nature and with each other.

Tell us about your experience at the conference! What was your favorite moment?

Spotlight on: Officinae Bio

Leveraging data to extract actionable insights from experiments can be a challenge. Particularly when optimizing growth media, reagents, DNA sequences, and metabolic pathways. Meet Officinae Bio, a company turning data into actionable insights to design better bio-based products. Officinae Bio’s full-stack modular platform can be incorporated into any lab to integrate and structure data at every step of the R&D process. The AI-native design and collaboration platform creates powerful and actionable insights and enables exponential learnings, moving research beyond trial-and-error discovery. Learn more about Officinae Bio’s desire to empower biologists to use their data to guide their next best experiment and design.

Checkerspot and DIC Corporation announce joint development agreement to bring the power of microalgae to skin care using the WING™ platform

Checkerspot scientists are leading the way in microalgae research, developing unique materials that seek to visibly hydrate and nourish the skin.

Built With Biology Insights

Spotlight on: Officinae Bio

Checkerspot and DIC Corporation announce joint development agreement to bring the power of microalgae to skin care using the WING™ platform

DNA Script launches early access program for latest advancements to enzymatic DNA synthesis technology

What's next for AlphaFold and the AI protein-folding revolution

Protecting the human intestinal microbiome with synthetic biology