Hi ,

I’m sending today’s newsletter from Washington D.C as I’m here for the White House Summit on Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing where $2b in funding was just announced to support President Biden’s bioeconomy agenda. I’ll be live tweeting the highlights of the meeting here and you can tune into the live stream here. In case you missed it, I covered this week’s landmark Executive Order in my Forbes piece here.

Bioeconomy policy warriors
Mary Maxon (Schmidt Futures), Ali Nouri (Department of Energy) and Mike Fisher (Federation of American Scientists) have all been invited to speak at SynBioBeta next year and we’re building a number of sessions on global bioeconomy policy as a central part of the conference. I hope you choose to join us in Oakland from May 23-25.

SynBioBeta is hiring a Chief Operating Officer
In some very important hiring news: I’m looking for a Chief Operating Officer to join SynBioBeta to support our industry as it grows and scales, if you know of somebody who you think would be a great fit, please have them e-mail Tyler Young (tyler.young@synbiobeta.com).

New Video: Scaling Breakout Engineering Biology Companies
Arvind Gupta and Ursheet Parikh from investment firm Mayfield, along with Raj Judge from Wilson Sonsini and Trevor Martin from Mammoth Biosciences, recently talked about scaling bioengineering startups, fundraising, hiring and product design. If you missed the discussion at SynBioBeta 2022, you can watch it now on YouTube.

Arvind Gupta, Ursheet Parikh and Trevor Martin.

Roche Acquires Good Therapeutics
In funding news, Pharmaceutical giant Roche will acquire Good Therapeutics for $250M. John Mulligan, a creative scientist who helped setup one of the first early human genome centers and founded one of the first synthetic biology companies, decided to start Good Therapeutics to invent a new type of protein drug. Karl Handelsman, a Good investor said, "I think this startup effectively integrated tools of synthetic biology to crack a very difficult therapeutic design challenge. John brought together a talented team with a strong culture of working closely together on challenging projects. They developed a proprietary design-build-test process that allowed them to come up with multiple exciting pre-clinical programs."

Renee Wegrzyn will lead the new ARPA-H
President Joe Biden plans to appoint longtime biologist and former government scientist Renee Wegrzyn as the first director of the nascent Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. For the last 2 years Renee has been instrumental in scaling Ginkgo’s Biosecurity business.

"I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to shape ARPA-H’s ambitious mission and foster a vision and approach that will improve health outcomes for the American people, including President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot," Wegrzyn said in a statement.

Nucleate’s Activator program
Nucleate is now taking applications for its next cohort! Nucleate is a student-run nonprofit organization that facilitates the formation of new life sciences companies through its equity-free Activator program. You might have met the Nucleate team at SynBioBeta this year. Over four years, the Activator has supported 107 venture teams which have raised over $170M in funding to develop technologies like protein sequencing (Glyphic), drug design (Manifold Bio), & microbial fertilizer (Ivu Biologics). Applications are open until 10/1/22 – apply now!

What’s Happening with Synthetic Biology in Africa?
Recently, our friends at Synbio Africa (SBA) hosted the Inaugural Synthetic Biology and Biosecurity Conference in Africa. Here are some highlights by Policy and Communications Officer Ian Peter Busuulwa of what’s been happening in the field lately:

• In April 2022, Synbio Africa launched its Global Catastrophic Biological Risks Initiative (SBA- GCBRI) aimed at building Africa’s capacity to prevent and manage global catastrophic biological risks.

• In June 2022, South African-based company Afrigen Biologics announced a collaboration with Belgium-based company Univercells to pave the way for the development of the first-ever African-owned COVID-19 vaccine through open-access intellectual property.

• Ginkgo Bioworks through its biosecurity and public health initiative, Concentric by Ginkgo, recently announced that they have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with Rwanda Development Board to develop and implement new biosecurity capabilities in Rwanda.

• The iGEM Community’s Ambassadors to Africa collaborated with Africa Open Science Hardware (AfricaOSH) to organize a webinar on July 22, 2022.

• In April 2022, Synbio Africa hosted the African iGEM Teams Showcase Event - sponsored by the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

I’ve invited Peter and his colleague Geoffrey Otim to lead a breakout session on synthetic biology in Africa at the next SynBioBeta conference and I hope you’ll join us there.

If you like my synthetic biology newsletter, then please share it with a friend or colleague. They can sign up here.

Have a great week.
Regards,
John

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John Cumbers
Founder, SynBioBeta

Featured News

Other News

• Lesaffre acquires genome editing company Recombia Biosciences: Over the past two years, Recombia and Lesaffre have joined forces to design and develop new innovative yeast strains and to optimize the production of several biosourced ingredients and biofuels. (Labiotech)
• Tiny algae could help fix concrete’s dirty little climate secret: 4 innovative ways to clean up this notoriously hard to decarbonize industry (The Conversation)
• Onego Bio secures extra funding for egg white production technology. Onego Bio’s animal-free egg white ingredient, Bioalbumen, is produced by precision fermentation. (Labiotech)
• Join Mintz’s Fifth Annual Bay Area Diversity Event, which will be in person this year. A panel of accomplished female leaders will discuss how allyship has impacted their careers — including how they serve as allies to others.
• Modern Meadow Appoints Catherine Roggero-Lovisi as CEO (Press release)
• Bond Pet Foods enters meat proteins phase  with $17.5M Series A (TechCrunch)
• Could combining biotech and photosynthetic cyanobacteria help the energy crisis? (Labiotech)

Who's hiring?

• Senior Knowledge Analyst, Deep Tech, BCG, Remote, US or Europe based
• Head Of Strategy, Verb Biotics, Boston, MA
• Marketing Director, Verb Biotics, Boston, MA
• Lab Support Specialist - Media, Conagen, Bedford, MA
• Lab Support Manager, Conagen, Bedford, MA
• Senior Scientist, Analytical, Conagen, Bedford, MA
• Molecular Biologist, Conagen, Bedford, MA
• Research Associate, Synthetic Biology, Conagen, Bedford, MA
• Research Associate / Chemist, Conagen, Bedford, MA
• Scientist, Microbial Engineering, Conagen, Bedford, MA
• Scientist, Fungal Biology, Conagen, Bedford, MA
• Senior Software Engineer/ Staff Software Engineer, Inscripta, Pleasanton, CA or Boulder, CO
• Senior Scientist/ Engineer, Inscripta, Pleasanton, CA

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