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Our final day at SynBioBeta 2023 is complete – and what a day it was! Check out the highlights of the last day of the conference:

 (Credit: Enverno Creative & Isabel Sweet Media)

Birds of a Feather at SynBioBeta 2023 (Credit: Chad Cook)

From Sohum Phadke: 

This morning, Latch Bio’s Alfredo Andere and Laura Deming from The Longevity Fund spoke on Silicon Valley’s growing investment in aging and longevity. “We can remove one of the biggest thieves that exist in healthcare,” Andere shared. 


While aging has historically been littered with false promises, Twitter dramas, and more, Andere voiced his excitement about the changing perceptions of study. He attributed this change to two factors; the field’s ability to attract the world’s best scientists as well as the pace of science in adjacent fields like Synthetic Biology. 

Alfredo Andere, Co-Founder and CEO of LatchBio. (Credit: Patrick T. Power)


Making big waves today was the budding movement of Decentralized Science, or DeSci for short. DeSci aims to instill fairness and equity in every step of the bioentrepreneurship process, from funding to creation to storage and crediting. 


This afternoon, John Cumbers presented Paul Kohlhass–CEO of Molecule and pioneer in the DeSci space– with the Rising Star Award, stating that “DeSci is the hot new thing.” In addition, Kohlhass was joined by an exciting panel to discuss the potential of DeSci. 


Fellow panelist Allison Duettmann, representing the Foresight Institute, enthusiastically expressed her excitement for the "DeSci" space, highlighting its potential to revolutionize traditional business models, drive advancements in scientific research, and foster open access and innovative funding avenues. 


Michael Baran echoed this sentiment from Pfizer Ventures, who described DeSci as an "emerging business model" that Pfizer is actively exploring. With Pfizer's remarkable revenue in 2022 largely attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic, the company aims to address anticipated revenue gaps by investing in groundbreaking concepts such as DeSci.

Molecule’s Paul Kohlhass accepts the SynBioBeta Rising Star Award from John Cumbers.  (Credit: Patrick T. Power)



In the late afternoon, a panel on alternative proteins discussed the exciting developments in food tech. The first presenter, Jason Ryder, shared Oobli's proprietary plant-powered protein, which is part of the company's line of sweet ice teas. Another panelist, Sanah Baig, highlighted upcoming policy initiatives aimed at funding minority-run institutions, emphasizing that diversity fosters innovation.


The panel also emphasized the need for greater collaboration, taking inspiration from DeSci, and emphasized the importance of education in the food tech industry. "We must educate young individuals and raise awareness about the growing field of food tech," pointed out Sunil Sukumaran from Perfect Day. Baig further emphasized the importance of educating policymakers and scientists as well.

“Alternative Proteins: Opportunities and Challenges for the Future of Food-Tech” panel. (Credit: Patrick T. Power)

 


From Jenna Gallegos:

“Biology, not chemistry” is a resounding battle cry of SynBioBeta. But biology, how? In the session “how biology is remaking the chemical building blocks of the modern economy,” there was a bit of a debate about whether products previously chemically synthesized from petrochemicals should be generated by fermentation or cell-free systems.


Solugen prefers a cell-free system because they don’t have to worry about off-target metabolites. Checkerspot uses a fermentation-based approach because they can achieve scale.


Either way, there are still challenges to overcome to achieve cost parity with traditional, petrochemical-based products. In the meantime, the synbio community can use either approach to create new, high-value end products and to complement those companies still relying on non-renewable building blocks to help them meet their carbon neutrality goals.


In a breakout panel about biomanufacturing in space on Thursday afternoon, we learned some interesting factoids about microbes in space. The microbiome of the international space station is really limited and really controlled. Everything has to be irradiated before it can go up there, and the astronauts aren’t even allowed to eat the lettuce grown in space unless they clean it with a bleach wipe first. NASA is really concerned about astronauts getting infected with pathogens in space, and probably rightfully so, since the microgravity environment seems to impact the dosage of antibiotics needed to kill pathogens.


Speaking of microgravity, it turns out atmospheric pressure also has significant impacts on crystal structure formation. When small molecule and biological drugs are produced in the absence of buoyancy driven convection, the resulting crystals are different, more pure, and more consistent. Oh yeah, and in case you missed it, we’re going to the moon again...


From Aishani Aatresh: 

This last day began with a panel on international collaboration and the global bioeconomy. Touching on key aspects ranging from the importance of bipartisanship to the potential for revitalizing rural and urban areas alike, the conversation repeatedly returned to the idea of distributing benefits of the bioeconomy to broadly realize all it has to offer. 


British Member of Parliament Chi Onwurah noted the need for a “mission-based approach” to truly impact people’s health, incomes, and environments. 


“We need bold goals for biotechnology and biomanufacturing,” agreed Georgia Lagoudas of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It’s fun to see and feel biology. It’s not just medicine you swallow, but it’s clothes you can wear and materials you can touch. It’s exciting to see biology come alive!” 

“International Collaboration to Drive the Global Bioeconomy” panel. 

 (Credit: Patrick T. Power)



The following panel on Decentralized Science (or “DeSci”) walked through the “revolution” happening at the intersection of biology and the blockchain to fix broken science, democracy, economies, and incentives. Panelists talked about ongoing work to map out ongoing initiatives in the space to help people more easily get involved with efforts to make science more collaborative and open. 


The discussion reflected on what it means to bring together broader communities around science and why it’s so important. Alok Tayi of Vibe Bio pointed to the power of distributed ownership and stakeholdership in drug development, and Michael Baran of Pfizer Ventures noted his excitement about the blurring of more traditional investment and DeSci funding in tackling these varied challenges. 


Continuing onward, the morning’s lightning talks featured presentations on questions of global biological security, manufacturing, training, and community. Closing the round of talks was Geoffrey Otim from SynBio Africa, which was launched in 2021 and brings together the private sector, civil society, public sector, and academia to work on initiatives ranging from community biolabs and pandemic preparedness within Uganda and beyond.  
 



Geoffrey Otim receives the SynBioBeta Impact Award from John Cumbers. (Credit: Patrick T. Power)

While the early afternoon series of breakout sessions continued to talk about DeSci, manufacturing, and security, the early evening MainStage panels featured higher-level reflections on the state of the bioeconomy. The first-ever panel comprised entirely of United States government officials at SynBioBeta highlighted the nitty-gritty of federal initiatives to build the bioeconomy. 


With panelists ranging from the Department of Energy, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Department of Agriculture, and National Science Foundation, the discussion left the audience with a clearer picture of the national government’s commitment to the bioeconomy. In creating jobs, bringing bioproducts to market, bolstering national security and supply chain resilience, and mitigating climate change, the panelists invited the various companies in the audience to work closely with their agencies. “We’re stating where we want to go,” Devinn Lambert (DOE) said. “You have to tell us how to get there.” 


A fireside chat with Esther Dyson zoomed out even further to think about monopolies and capitalism at large. “You get measured on your exits, not on building actual, living businesses,” Dyson said, as she lamented the extent to which instant gratification in society has been channeled as an ethos of selling rather than sustaining companies. In thinking about how to imagine fairer possible futures, she underscored the need to think about how we’re training people—and not just machine learning models. 


The final panel of the conference featured a dynamic conversation — or rather, comedic sketch — between New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter, Stanford professor and synthetic biology luminary Drew Endy, and actor Ahmed Best. Sitting in a “Department of Awesome,” the trio discussed solutions ranging from mycological to microbial manufacturing and “ever-better plants” for feeding the planet. 


After threading together challenges of energy, zoonotic spillover, and “manufacturing at light speed” with the “BioNet,” the crew changed sets to drums and rocking chairs. “How did you make a bridge if you didn’t grow it?” asked Best. Endy sneezed “purple snot” in an infectious-disease-free world, Specter marveled at how we used to grow food on “thousands of acres,” and the crew closed by reminiscing about that thing called SynBioBeta in Oakland from 2023 — when the Department of Awesome began. 


From Embriette Hyde:

The afternoon kicked off in the breakout rooms with a series of sessions digging much deeper into many of the concepts introduced over the past two days. John Nicols, Christina Smolke, and Cameron Fox explored the drug manufacturing supply chain issue and the uphill — but winnable — battle ahead to fix it.


“There will have to be governments coming together to develop policies and ways to incentivize and push supply chain players,” said Christina.


John also highlighted the different cultures across the patented and generic drug supply chain players, which have disparate openness toward synthetic biology solutions, and he alluded that understanding and leveraging those differences will be key.


“If we get involved with [patented drug manufacturers] as they go through the development process for their drugs and help them see a better biosynthetic pathway vs. what the chemists have come up with when they are educated by our community and see it, they will embrace it,” he said.

John Nicols, Cameron Fox, and Christina Smolke discuss how synbio can address drug supply chain issues. [Photo by Embriette Hyde]


Additional sessions focused on the innovative tools that are enabling important advances in human health and disease research. Single-cell tools, for example, can advance cell and gene therapies by permitting single-cell level assessment of on and off target effects, making these therapies safer for patients. Mekonos is working to build the future of gene therapies on a chip with their ex vivo payload delivery technology. 


Synbio and pharma, a common duo throughout the conference, made their way back to the main stage in the next-to-last session of the day, where a stacked panel discussed some of the challenges to bringing synbio tools to pharma pipelines. 


“Staying close to your customer can keep you from getting sunk,” said Richard Ellson of Beckman Coulter.


“Imagine what the future looks like and work backward from there,” said Casey Lippemeyer of Conagen. 


And Michael Kamdar of Molecular Assemblies urged the community to take advantage of the community. “Synbio-synbio relationships work,” he said, referencing a particularly successful collaboration with Codexis that helped both companies and brought products to customers much faster.


From other SynBioBeta writers:


For attendees interested in anti-aging research, Alex Colville from Longevity Fund spotlighted several opportunities during his morning interview. To enter the field, consider coming to rapidly growing community events, checking out the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, or applying to the Time Initiative (for undergrads). In his opinion, talent is the largest bottleneck in the field, followed by biological bottlenecks for how to measure aging reliably, reproducibly, and on many different scales.  


The last round of lightning talks included an array of groundbreaking tools and technology startups. Yourgene Health opened with their new Ranger Technology, making cloning workflows much more effective. Ouwei Wang from Pow Bio then explored the future of biomanufacturing and explained that “synbio will and can succeed, but that is not until we solve two burning problems: everything is too expensive and there is not enough capacity,” which he proposes to solve with an AI controlled continuous manufacturing platform, SOFe. Another common issue with bioproduction is scaling, as Joshua Lachter discussed in the final lightning talk. Lachter discussed Synonym’s new scaler, which is accessible for free to any startup if you apply today.


Artificial intelligence has become a hot topic, as seen in a number of panels and discussions this week, and its intersection with biology was further explored in a breakout session with Amicia Elliot from Form Bio and Gwen Cheni from Khosla Ventures, moderated by Arizza Ibañez from Synbio Technologies. They discuss one of the key advantages of leveraging AI includes cutting time and costs. Cheni noted that  “instead of having twenty cryoEM experiments on $10 million, you may just need to run two.” They both have had major successes with AI in biology utilizing it in different ways, like “a Swiss army knife,” says Elliot. However, they point out the differentiation in using AI in biology by connecting it to the groundwork of experimentation due to the amount of unpredictability in biology. They are all hopeful of the future of AI and biology, but they remain cautious of the uncertainty with these models.


Larger technology companies, including NVIDIA, have entered AI in the healthcare startup ecosystem. NVIDIA's Renee Yao discusses their inception program, supporting over 2,000 healthcare startups. Despite being less known for healthcare, NVIDIA has become a full-stack company with active research in medical imaging, drug discovery, and genomics. Their recent launch of BioNeMo, a generative AI tool for drug discovery, showcases their commitment to pushing the field forward. The inception program continues to empower numerous companies, such as Absci and remains accessible to those seeking to make a transformative impact in the industry.

Other news:

  • When Vitalik Buterin Met Drew Endy Is When Blockchain Met Bio: In early April, blockchain met biology in the pop-up city of Zuzalu. What happened on the coast of Montenegro? Read about a fireside-turned-seaside conversation between synbio maven Drew Endy and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and a weekend full of worlds colliding — in the name of healthier, distributed futures.

  • Can a GMO Plant Become Your Latest Household Helper? You've probably heard that plants can purify indoor air. But now they do it 30X better, thanks to Neoplants who have engineered a common houseplant to clean up harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

  • Ginkgo Bioworks and Centrient Pharmaceuticals announce expansion of partnership following success of initial project to bring sustainable innovation to the generic API space 

  • ElevateBio raises $401 million in year's largest biotech VC deal: The company will use the money to improve further the company's gene editing, RNA, cell, vector engineering, protein and induced pluripotent stem cell technologies.


Jeff

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Jeff Buguliskis, PhD
Director of Content, SynBioBeta

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