Hi ,

The Startup Bringing Home The $400B Bacon…Minus The Pig. With $30 million series A funding—Uncommon plans to take pork to sustainable and healthy new heights with a creative, quick, and safe RNA-based way to cultivate meat. (Forbes)

Benjamina Bollag, center right, holds up a plate containing cultivated pork belly. Image: Uncommon.

• Illumina CEO Francis deSouza Resigns Amid Controversial Grail Acquisition: Illumina has recently announced the resignation of its CEO, Francis deSouza. This development follows a contentious acquisition of Grail, a cancer diagnostic test maker, and a subsequent proxy battle initiated by activist investor Carl Icahn. (SynBioBeta)

• This week, Antheia launched its newly redesigned website and reinvigorated its brand identity. Check out Antheia’s new website and learn more about how this team is leveraging synthetic biology to transform pharmaceutical supply chains and end drug shortages. (Antheia.bio)

Antheia Biology Lab

• Economic Partnership Between US & UK Shored Up with New Tech-Focused Framework. The United States and the United Kingdom announced the Atlantic Declaration for a Twenty-First Century U.S.-UK Economic Partnership to ensure U.S.-UK leadership in critical and emerging technologies such as synthetic biology. (SynBioBeta)

• How can synthetic biology help address the challenges facing our planet? Killer tomatoes, plant-based cement, lab-grown steak, and other sustainability-minded projects took center stage at the first-ever Synthetic Biology for Sustainability Symposium in early May. (Stanford)

• iMicrobes welcomes Dr. Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech, and Dr. Jim Barber, ex-CEO of Metabolix, as advisors to the company. By preventing waste biomethane from directly entering the atmosphere and using it as a feedstock, iMicrobes has modeled a 30% to 45% cost reduction and net-zero emission for processes like acrylic production. (iMicrobes)

Other news:

• Octant announces OCTOPUS 3.0, a better method for high-throughput full plasmid sequencing (Octant)

• Verb Biotics: Next-gen ‘precision biotics’ will deliver ‘measurable effects that consumers can feel.’ (Agfunder News)

• Bit.bio Strengthens Leadership Team With Appointment of Dr. Michael Booth as Senior Vice President, External Affairs and Investor Relations (bit.bio)

• Startup Opera Bioscience Creates Proteins for Meat Alternatives, Biofuel. Opera has developed a microbial platform that allows scientists to source the proteins, growth factors, and reagents they need quickly and inexpensively. (Northwestern University)

• Could fruit flies give microbes a run for their money? Future Fields thinks outside the fermentation tank (Agfunder News)

• Force of Nature: Caribou Biosciences Hits Clinical Runway with CRISPR-based Cancer Therapeutics (GEN)

• SCiFi Foods on cultivated meat unit economics: ‘We can make a blended product commercially viable without needing crazy-scale bioreactors’ (Agfunder News)

• The Overlapping Galaxies of Delian Asparouhov. On planet Earth, the 29-year-old Peter Thiel protégé has been groomed for a top spot at Thiel’s Founders Fund. With the firm’s help, Asparouhov’s startup has also rocketed into the commercial space race. (The Information)

  
  

Regards,
Jeff

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Jeff Buguliskis, PhD 

Director of Content, SynBioBeta

Who's hiring?

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