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Check out the recipients of the 2023 SynBioBeta Global Synthetic Biology Awards, selected by the community to recognize their outstanding contributions to synthetic biology. Read more about this year's honorees.


Check out the highlights of day 2 of SynBioBeta 2023 by our writers Embriette Hyde, Sohum Phadke, Jenna Gallegos, and others.

Seth Bannon and Thomas Middleditch (Photo by Patrick T. Power)

Thomas Middleditch and Seth Bannon concluded today’s amazing line-up of speakers with a session that proved comedy and science can mergewell.

From Embriette Hyde:
The morning kicked off with the presentation of the SynBioBeta Lifetime Achievement Award to J. Craig Venter and the SynBioBeta Pioneer Award to Martine Rothblatt, CEO of United Therapeutics. After the award presentation, John joined both onstage for a fireside chat. They dug deep into the exciting and inspiring story of United Therapeutics, which is developing xeno pigs to produce transplantable hearts, lungs, and kidneys. 


“I’m in awe of what cells do, and I think we’re maybe 1% of the way toward understanding all of the biophysics of the cell,” said Martine. “Our job is to ride nature, not reinvent nature. For me, nature is a horse, and we’ve just got to learn to gallop and jump fences and stop on a dime.”


“We can really move to designer organisms to create the new industrial revolution, truly based on biology,” said Craig. “We’ve been talking about it for 20 years—I think the wave is about to hit us.”


Our fascinating discussion ended with an honest and deep reflection on the ethics surrounding the engineering of biology.

Martine Rothblatt and Craig Venter receive the SynBioBeta awards. (Photo by Patrick T. Power) 

Following the opening fireside chat was a panel discussion on realizing the promise of the intersection between synbio and pharma. Two main themes came out of this important discussion: the importance of communication and education and how to navigate the novel regulatory challenges a new wave of synbio-based therapeutics will introduce. 


“Synbio can learn by observing how agencies are adapting themselves to think about cell and gene therapies. There’s hope—it’s not easy to work with those agencies, of course, but it shouldn’t discourage anyone from engaging with them. I would encourage constant engagement, communication, and education with the agencies,” said Thaminda Ramanayake, Global Head of Business Development at Sanofi. 


After the coffee break, the mushroom godfather Paul Stamets and Ecovative’s Eben Bayer treated the audience to an incredibly entertaining and provocative fireside chat all about mushrooms and their role in the future of medicine (and even Mars colonization). 


“This is our opportunity for a paradigm shift in consciousness,” said Paul. “I believe psilocybin is a message and a medicine for our time.”

Paul Stamets(Photo by Patrick T. Power) 

Next came a series of lightning talks covering various topics, from DNA synthesis to leveraging the microbiome for animal and human health. Enzymatic DNA synthesis was a big topic, with both Kura Bio and Ansa Bio presenting their unique approaches, which are propelling enzymatic DNA synthesis to the forefront of DNA writing.


After lunch, Genscript hosted a series of talks on the Double Helix Stage centered around biopharma tools and technologies, including synbio-enabled advances in nanomedicines, microbial engineering, and cell-free enzyme engineering.


Meanwhile, on the main stage, Jake Glanville (Centivax) and Dave Hava (Synlogic) participated in a panel discussion exploring synbio tools and tech for human health’s greatest challenges. Using rare metabolic disorders and vaccines for infectious disease as the use cases, Jake and Dave discussed the many challenges facing these tools, including regulatory considerations, interaction with the public, and just understanding the basic biology behind the systems we’re engineering.

Next up on the main stage Jason Kelly of Ginkgo Bioworks spoke about how to make biology easier to engineer. Returning to a common theme from the panel he participated in yesterday, Jason highlighted the importance of collaboration.


“How do you get stunning results from biotech in only six months? You don't start from scratch,” he said, highlighting a success story from a Gingko customer.


From Sohum Phadke: 

“We are set for Synthetic Biology to fundamentally go mainstream and change our lives,” Mayfield’s Ursheet Parikh shared in a dynamic fireside chat this morning with Raj Judge. The conversation delved into the need for manufacturing within the US and the effects of the current geopolitical climate and the Inflation Reduction Act.


Both panelists emphasized the crucial necessity for Synthetic Biology to synergize with politics, recognizing the interconnectedness of these realms. Parikh concluded the session by quoting former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, leaving the audience with a resounding call to action: 'Only the paranoid survive.'

Raj Judge and Ursheet Parikh. (Photo by Patrick T. Power)


This afternoon, a panel on India’s Bioeconomy spoke about the nation’s growing interest and effort in expanding biomanufacturing and bioentrepreneurship. “India is ready to be a significant player in India’s bioeconomy,” Reliance Industries’s Santanu Dasgupta stated. 


On discussion was India’s recent synergy between industry and government, including the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC). BIRAC has begun offering early-seed grants to 15 to 20 companies per year, with recent additions to later-stage grants up to the pilot-scale stage. In addition, the Indian government has increased the number of incubation facilities in highly-populated ecosystems like Bangalore and Mumbai. This partnership between industry and government has boosted India’s Bioeconomy ten-fold. 


As India seeks to expand in the global market, panelists Ezhil Subbian at String Bio and Bhaskar Bhandra with Reliance Industries agreed on the need for greater communication and collaboration. Subbian voiced that “India’s strength is in its biomanufacturing side”, and therefore should leverage that to build partnerships with other ecosystems.  


Towards the end of today’s set of panels, Qian Zheng from L’Oreal and Nelson Barton from Geno spoke on their partnership, aimed at combining nature and beauty with technology. Their talk covered L’Oreal’s commitment to utilizing synthetic biology tools to develop bio-based solutions that cut pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. 

John Paschkewitz, Nelson Barton, and Qian Zheng (Photo by Patrick T. Power) 



From Jenna Gallego:

One of the most striking features of the SynBioBeta conference is the diversity of markets represented. On day two, we heard from a huge variety of companies applying similar synthetic principles to vastly different applications.


Modern Meadow combines materials science with biotech to produce “molecular shapeshifters” with capabilities well beyond their naturally occurring counterparts. For instance, they’ve found a way to combine collagen and hyaluronic acid into a skincare product that “turns back time on extracellular matrix in your skin.” 

David Williamson, Chief Science and Technology Officer at Modern Meadow. (Photo by Patrick T. Power) 

Aanika went beyond creating an innovative product - a food coating made from non-germinating microbial spores to track produce through the food system. They created an insurance program to incentivize food producers to use their product. Companies that work with Aanika can, thus, simultaneously mitigate their risk of food-borne pathogen outbreaks and insure against it. 


For Pivot Bio, the product is an organism. They produce engineered bacteria that help corn fix nitrogen in the soil to produce crops with reduced chemical input. The ultimate end goal for Pivot is to decrease the environmental impact of farming, but for their customer, the immediate gain is a more reliable nitrogen supply with less runoff. 


From Other SynBioBeta Writers:

Today’s flurry of lightning talks covered advancements in the actual tools and technology that we need to engineer biology. Cell-free chemistry has the potential to accelerate protein engineering at GeneFrontier and Daicel Arbor Biosciences; meanwhile, BiomEdit proposes using probiotics and microbial medicines to improve the health of animal agriculture. We learned about next-gen DNA synthesis techniques being developed by Ribbon, Ansa, and Elegen and heard from Ganymede Bio about lab automation and integration.


This afternoon, a breakout session on open science, automation, and the future of lab work put scientific leaders of lab automation in energetic conversation with early-stage biotech investors. Seth Bannon of Fifty Years explained that for a brief moment in history, “centaurs” — people working with computers — were the strongest chess players of their time. Although centaurs were soon overtaken by fully computational chess-playing algorithms, the union of person and automation in the wet lab could greatly decrease the cost of research. Jon Brennan-Badal of OpenTrons believes that with emerging large language models like ChatGPT, pipetting would be easier to use than ever before. In the future, biological research could become much more publicly accessible via operable labs-in-the-cloud.


But getting to this point would require a revolution in the way biological data is being processed and utilized. A following breakout session explored the data infrastructure driving the biocomputing revolution with representatives from Latch Bio, which is making an integrated bioinformatics platform, and their early adopters, Manifold Bio and Bayer Crop Science. Panelists challenged the archetype of the lone lab bioinformatician with an integrated platform where experimenters could easily convert raw data, run downstream workflows, and explore the results without having to do much programming at all. 


Day 1 Highlights from Other SynBioBeta Writers:


Creating Drugs at the Speed of AI


With lots of hype around generative AI spurred by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the biotechnology industry has also begun to develop similar tools to revolutionize the industry. Absci is at the forefront of this, utilizing generative AI for drug discovery, and CEO and founder Sean McClain spoke about their goals to “design drugs at the click of a button.” Generative AI uniquely predicts drugs from protein interactions that do not exist in nature. By merging synthetic biology with AI, companies can significantly shorten the development timeline of drugs, McClain claims “a full cycle of 8 months instead of 25 years.”

Breakouts – Generative AI Protein Design


(Ali Madani, Profluent | Sean McClain, Absci | Stef van Grieken, Cradle | Claes Gustafsson, Atum Bio)


Later in the day, McClain led a breakout panel, “From Code to Cure: Exploring the Potential of Generative AI for Protein Design,” with Ali Madani from Profluent, Stef van Grieken from Cradle Bio, and Claes Gustafsson from Atum Bio, each of which leading companies using cutting edge generative AI to transform drug discovery and development. They explain that the field of generative AI in biotechnology is a large ecosystem where there exists space for many companies due to “startups are in their own modalities with scientific rigor, expertise, execution, focus.” With the great potential of this technology, there is also concern for biosecurity and using these platforms for harm with possible biowarfare, but Gustafsson ensures that laws already exist to prevent this and “it is unethical to prevent drug prices from decreasing.”

Breakouts – GenScript DNA Synthesis


The synthetic biology industry is built on the backbone of affordable DNA synthesis, and year after year, people attend GenScript’s breakout session to note down the price of their latest services. While their first DNA synthesis chip had one thousand electrodes, they expect to be able to pack a billion parallel reactions in the same area by 2025, thanks to improving CMOS technology from the semiconductor industry. With synthesis costs coming out to around $20/Terabyte, this could push the feasibility of future applications like DNA data storage.

The Biomanufacturing Dilemma: Building Capacity in the Context of Capitalism


(Brian Brazeau, Ferment Co, | Joshua Lachter, Synonym | Mark Warner, Liberation Labs | Michael Davis, The Plymouth Group | Shannon Hall, Pow.Bio)


The afternoon panel grappled with questions about how to realistically scale these new technologies. Joshua Lachter of Synonym argued that right now, “we’re not really biomanufacturing anything yet — we’re bio-making.” To manufacture means improvements in efficiency, such as in electricity and water usage, that continuous fermentation facilities have yet to tackle. In addition, the cost of building and improving large-scale factories can only be justified if a market for the product is there upon completion. The panelists agreed that as an industry, aiming to replace animal or petroleum products is not enough; companies must also create a product that’s fundamentally better than what we have today.

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Regards,
Jeff

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Jeff Buguliskis, PhD
Director of Content, SynBioBeta

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