Hi ,

Have you got your ticket for SynBioBeta 2023? If not, here’s your chance to grab one before the price increases on January 1st! The Marriott room booking is also filling up, so get your discounted room rate by clicking here.

This week’s SynBioBeta newsletter features stories about bio-mining microbes, making use of Borneo’s biodiversity, tropical flavored brews and more. Let’s dive in:

• Ginkgo has hired a new Head of Biopharma to disrupt the gene and cell therapies market. Cell and gene therapies promise to cure deadly diseases but they can cost up to millions of dollars. But what if cell engineering was outsourced to synbio companies like Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc. that specialize in programming biology?

Behzad Mahdavi, Senior Vice President Biopharma Manufacturing & Life Sciences Tools at Ginkgo Bioworks.

• Cancer mRNA vaccine completes pivotal trial: Researchers say they have successfully completed a trial of a personalized cancer vaccine that uses the same mRNA technology as Covid-19 jabs.

• Meet Jesse Evans and Eric Herrera, co-founders of Maverick Bioworks, a Y Combinator graduate that designs custom-made microbes and enzymes for industrial applications. They are starting with a lithium bio-mining microbe that is capable of pulling out lithium metal used for batteries from hard mineral deposits with an enzymatic process that is much cleaner and cheaper than existing methods.

Jesse Evans and Eric Herrera, Co-founder of Maverick Bioworks, and John Cumbers, Co-founder of SynBioBeta.

• Ginkgo Bioworks launches Ginkgo Enzyme Services, enabling applications across pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, food and agriculture, and beyond. From computational design of novel enzymes to improving function and commercial scale-up, Ginkgo’s services enable the discovery, optimization, and production of enzymes for innumerable uses.
• Biodiversity makes good business: Basecamp Research just raised $20 million to build a database of all life. With a mission to reconnect biotechnology with biodiversity, they are building the world's largest database of natural DNA sequences that is entirely ethically sourced.

• In case you missed this talk from SynBioBeta 2022, Dr. Mark Kotter, CEO and founder of bit.bio explains how his company is leading synbio v2.0 by harnessing the power of human cells to enable the next generation of therapies. Bit.Bio is also our newest partner and will be sponsoring the Human Health track at next year’s conference.

Fiona Mischel, Director, International Outreach at SynBioBeta, and Mark Kotter, CEO and founder of bit.bio.

• "My Conversation with ChatGPT about Synthetic Biology." Andrew Hessel recently "spoke" with ChatGPT, a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model-based natural language conversational system developed by OpenAI, about synthetic biology. See what AI thinks about synbio!
• Gamida Cell announces closing of $25 million. The company developed omidubicel, an advanced cell therapy candidate that can enable life-saving allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell (bone marrow) transplants for patients with blood cancers.
• Portuguese biotech company SilicoLife secures Series A investment of €9.8 million to accelerate the biological production of ingredients, such as dietary supplements, using precision fermentation and microorganism engineering.

SynBioBeta 2023 speakers:

Hear what our speakers have to say at SynBioBeta 2023. Get the inside scoop on where the biggest opportunities are – get your ticket TODAY!

• Julianna LeMieux has been a science writer at GEN for four years where she covers synthetic biology, genomics, infectious disease, genome editing, and more.

• Soichiro Tsuda, CTO of bitBiome, is leading new application developments using microbial single-cell genome sequencing technology and massive microbial genomic database.

• Sarah Richardson, Co-founder of MicroByre, is working to domesticate bacteria to support partners developing cost-effective solutions to climate change.

• Terri Quenzer, Executive Director of Bioscience Workforce Development Hub, is a chemist leading initiatives that bring community college biotech programs in CA together with industry and other stakeholders.

SynBioBeta 2023 Sponsors:

Thank you to our sponsors:

• Bit.bio is empowering biomedical innovation and a new generation of cures through precision reprogrammed human cells.

• Natech Plastics provides engineering, designing, custom injection molding, and contract manufacturing services.
  

• Kura Biotech develops superior enzymatic tools to streamline sample preparation workflows enabling scientists to overcome life science challenges.
  

Health news

• Touchlight and Odimma Therapeutics sign deal to develop personalized cancer therapy. Odimma will gain access to Touchlight’s doggybone DNA (dbDNA) vector technology to support the development of their immunotherapy cancer treatment.
• Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer. Doctors in England used base editing to perform a feat of biological engineering and build a new living drug for a teenage girl. Thanks to the treatment, an incurable cancer (T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia) has been cleared from her body.
• We can cure disease by editing a person’s DNA. Why aren’t we? "Unless things change dramatically, the millions of people CRISPR could save will never benefit from it. We must, and we can, build a world with CRISPR for all," says Fyodor Urnov of the Innovative Genomics Institute.

Innovation news

• Top 20 biotech accelerators and incubators: Veteran nurturer of startups, Ryan Bethencourt, Co-founder of Wild Earth, outlines several key qualities that distinguish the better biotech accelerators and incubators from lesser ones.
• CATALOG achieves historic DNA computing milestone: CATALOG’s innovative approach shows, for the first time, how to leverage the massive parallelism of DNA chemistry to search almost any amount of data stored in DNA without the expected proportional increase in resources.
• The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is recommending actions for maintaining United States competitiveness in the global bioeconomy.
• GenScript Partners with Allozymes to accelerate protein discovery and target identification: The companies will offer a one-stop solution that includes construction of variant libraries, screening, and target protein identification.
• Berkeley Yeast announces Thiol Boost: their yeast strains produce pure, plant-based precursors for molecules with tropical fruit flavors in liquid form. With Thiol Boost, brewers can easily tune the intensity of tropical flavors while using a single yeast strain.

Regards,
John

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John Cumbers
Founder, SynBioBeta

Who's hiring?

• Director of Content‍, SynBioBeta, Flexible in the U.S.
  
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