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State of Biotech 2022: The Future of Synthetic Biology
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State of Biotech 2022: The Future of Synthetic Biology
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Language: EN.
Segment:1 Introduction to GEN Biotechnology.
FAY LIN: My name is Fay Lin, and I'm senior editor of GEN Biotechnology. GEN Biotechnology launched in early 2022, publishing exceptional research, reviews, opinion, and analysis across the biotech spectrum, from genomics, synbio, to artificial intelligence and drug development. The journal benefits from a combination of academic leadership and professional editing. The first four issues of the journal have amassed approximately 40,000 full text downloads and featured groundbreaking original research on gene editing in livestock, CRISPR-based pest control, base editing in a single AAV vector, and cost-effective 3D printing.
FAY LIN: But wait. There's more. We've also featured exclusive interviews with biotech AI CEOs, topical views and news articles, insights from financial analysts, and news features from GEN reporters covering the state of aging research, the launch of the Arc Institute, and advances in organs on chips.
FAY LIN: We'll consider any manuscript reporting novel and interesting results in the biotech field. We offer fast and constructive peer review, and we hope you'll consider submitting your paper to GEN Biotechnology. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:2 The Future of Synthetic Biology.
FAY LIN:
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our last session of the summit The Future of Synthetic Biology. I'm Juliana LeMieux, science writer at GEN. So some of my favorite assignments when reporting for GEN are when I get to dig into the science and the technologies being developed in the synthetic biology space and the innovations that are being done in this field. There's little doubt that it's an exciting time to be in synbio.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: The field has seen mind-boggling growth over the past few years, both in scientific innovation and in financing. At the heart of all of the varied synbio companies and researchers is a passion for using biology to build a better and more sustainable way of living. But what is synbio? And how does one field have their hand in everything, from making clothes and food to medicines?
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Today, we'll break down how synbio companies are working to bring new solutions to the market. To do that, I'm joined by three experts, each of whom represent a very different area of synbio. Our guests are Deepak Dugar, the president of Visolis, a company that produces bio-based chemicals for different applications, and Emily Leproust, the CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience, a pioneer in the DNA writing space, and Eben Bayer, the CEO and co-founder of Ecovative Design, which is leveraging mycelium or nature's glue into making different materials.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Thank you all so much for joining us today.
DEEPAK DUGAR: Thank you.
EMILY LEPROUST: Thanks for having us.
EBEN BAYER: Thank you.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Let's start with each of you taking a moment to introduce your own companies. Eben, we'll start with you first. And please tell our audience a little bit about what's going on at Ecovative.
EBEN BAYER: Sure, happy to tell you a little bit about Ecovative. Technically, we use mycelium, which is the root structures of mushrooms, to grow fully-formed materials. And so we do what single-cell biology does in terms of making compounds for structure using mycelium. And we get many of the same properties you might find in a mushroom in the forest but re-imagine them for industrial applications.
EBEN BAYER: So we grow mycelium tissue into lightweight packaging materials that replace Styrofoam as our home compostable Styrofoam alternative in our packaging business. And we also grow slabs of pure mycelium in our indoor vertical farms. And these slabs can be 100 feet long, 4 feet wide, a couple inches thick. And depending on the type of mycelium we select, if we do any engineering on the strain itself and then actually the environmental conditions we put around this strain, we get very different products.
EBEN BAYER: And those can range from a supple strong leather that you might use in bag or shoes through a really delicious whole cut of mycelium meat, which can mimic what you might find in pork, which is what's in our MyBacon product under MyForest Foods, which is a subsidiary.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, yeah, terrific. And if anybody wants to check out-- I know Ecovative has this terrific video on your website. Because when I was thinking about mycelium farms, I was thinking big farms. But when I saw the pictures of the slabs of mycelium, it really gave me a picture of what's going on there.
EBEN BAYER: Yeah. So our farms are super capital efficient. They reuse a lot of existing industry infrastructure farm, that conventional like mushroom industry, the white button mushroom industry. And then, of course, there's no lights in these farms. So they look a lot like the indoor farms. You might have seen vertical farms for growing plants. But they're lights out, just like what every manufacturing floor strives for.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, great. All right, terrific. Emily, can you tell us a little bit about what's going on at Twist?
EMILY LEPROUST: Yes, at Twist, we write DNA from scratch. And so the chemistry of writing DNA has been known for decades, but we've ported the DNA synthesis of AC G&Ts on a silicon chip, and on silicon chip that's the size of a 96 well plate. We can print up to a million oligos, and then we can assemble those oligos into genes. And we can then make IgG from it. We can develop some diagnostic tests that are used by liquid biopsy companies.
EMILY LEPROUST: We also have developed a service of being the drug discoverer of last resort. So when drug companies have targets that where they can't find an antibody, they come to us. And 100% of the time, even when it's very, very hard target, we're able to find antibodies or bispecifics. And then we also have a business, where we can store data in DNA for archiving.
EMILY LEPROUST: So we are the tools provider of the synbio ecosystem. And our goal is to provide all the DNA that people need in a way that's very fast and inexpensive and then to give a researcher more shots on goals to enable them to find what they're looking for in a way that's as efficient as possible.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. Thanks so much. And, Deepak, what's happening at Visolis?
DEEPAK DUGAR: Sure. Thanks for having us here on the panel, Julianna. At Visolis, we use biology to manufacture high-performance materials that are also carbon negative. And you can see that in all our products as we rule them out. What we do at Visolis is we take a systems level approach that integrates innovation across microbe engineering, chemical catalysis, and process development scale-up to bring these new products to and technologies to marketplace.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So we have applications which range from personal care, all the way to automotives to even high energy density jet fuel. And all of these come from the same core chemicals which develop through fermentation and then use chemical catalysis to upgrade them to a lot of these different end products.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: I mean, what's really striking is that I knew when putting this panel together that having Twist, Visolis, and Ecovative would be a very diverse panel. But actually, each of your companies is doing multiple different diverse things with your platforms. So it's like even with three companies, we have so many different areas to talk about. It's really amazing how this wide scope that we're showing that synbio is representing here.
EMILY LEPROUST: Hey, you can go from baking to data storage. So it's a pretty good spectrum.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Exactly. OK, so before we dig into more details, let's start with a very big picture question that is, what do we mean by synthetic biology? Because the word and the concept mean different things to different people. So I'd like to take the first question to get a sense of what synthetic biology, synbio, means to each of you? Emily, let's start with you.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yeah, sure. So to me, it's the engineering of biology. People conceptually understand biology. They may take biological drugs like insulin or things like that. And in the past, biology was just so hard that you'll have to-- it would be very expensive. It would be kind of an art. And so you could frankly only apply it to drugs because therapeutics was the only area where the markets were big enough that you could make a return on your R&D. And with synthetic biology, researchers are bringing some engineering approaches to biology.
EMILY LEPROUST: So it's less of an art and more of an engineering. And so what that means is that as you automate things, the cost per data point frankly goes down. And so you can do things that are a lot less expensive from an R&D point of view, and then you can apply it to markets that are not as big as therapeutics drugs. But the number of potential markets is much bigger. There's only a few dozen blockbuster drugs, but there are thousands of applications that synthetic biology enables.
EMILY LEPROUST: So to me, it's bringing an engineering approach to biology or reducing the cost of R&D and making it available to-- basically deploying the bioeconomy to all parts of the broader economy.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. Deepak, how about yourself? What does synthetic biology mean to you?
DEEPAK DUGAR: Let me give what my thinking is of a historical perspective here. So as Emily mentioned, I had started in the pharma sector with using enzymes to chop up DNA and then copy them using PCR. And then bring them back together into a plasmid, putting in a microbe. And that paradigm slowed us very well in terms of pharmaceuticals. So but that was the limitation of it.
DEEPAK DUGAR: You could only copy and paste DNA the way it existed. If you wanted something different than that, it wasn't practical at that point. The first time we synthesized any meaningful short chunk of DNA was actually goes back all the way to 1969. Har Gobind Khorana, who was the pioneer in the space, who had the Nobel Prize for that. It was done at that time, and it was considered a big success when the small chunk of oligos was synthesized.
DEEPAK DUGAR: What has happened in the time where synthetic biology, as a term, became popular was in late '90s and early 2000s when we had brought down the cost and improved the technology to a point where you could stitch these short pieces of DNA into longer chunks of DNA, i.e. synthetic DNA. So because this DNA was not an amplifier from nature and copy and paste but something which was written de Novo, something which did not exist in nature, that's the element of synthetic biology.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that's where the term became popular, and then everyone has their own idea of what it means today. The way I think of it is it allows us to precisely engineer biology the way it has not been practical before. One of the earlier-- very early applications was in terms of codon optimization. If you're trying to take DNA from one place and put it in somewhere else, the same DNA may not work because it was not in the same context, so by changing some of the usage patterns you could change.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So it was very much deeply technical the origins of it. But now if you talk to an end consumer, they might have heard of the term synthetic biology. And to them, it could mean anywhere from Frankenstein to something which is just nature-inspired and nature-like. So it is better for you. So I think it has evolved dramatically in the last 20 years, but that's the historical perspective from my point of view.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK.
EMILY LEPROUST: And you know what? Deepak said I think it's great that [INAUDIBLE] don't even know it's synthetic biology. It's like the phone. It's built on quantum physics. Nobody cares about quantum physics. They care about how do I have my app? Is my Uber showing up on time?
DEEPAK DUGAR: Yep, yep. And the physicist who have worked on quantum physics never anticipated that it would be at some point utilized to deliver cat videos to bring joy to everyone. So who knows where synthetic biology will go in next 20 years?
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Good point. OK, thanks. Eben.
EBEN BAYER: I'm trying to make a joke about the quantum entanglement of cat videos, but I can't quite get it together. Yeah. At Ecovative, I think our-- we've stretched the definition of synthetic biology quite a bit. So in some of our product lines and some of our earlier product lines and what we do with MyForest Foods, which makes our bacon, we're actually using environmental triggers to bring out new phenotypes in our mycelium that already exists.
EBEN BAYER: So we're finding ways to actually create new tissues or growth dynamics from the organism that you never see in nature by perturbing it in unique ways. And so we do a lot of backend sequencing to figure out what environmental conditions are bringing what genes into play. And then on the other side of the house, we're doing what you consider more conventional synthetic biology, which is inserting genes either from mycelium or other organisms into our species to get totally novel properties that we either see in nature but we can't see controllability in our indoor farms, or we don't see in nature but we'd love to see in the mycelium.
EBEN BAYER: And so in some areas, we've really focused on that or around the industrial ecosystem, so making our organisms more tolerant to these less sterile indoor grow farms and then some fun projects that are very consumer facing benefits which are around like creating color without dye in the mycelium.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK. And quick question, Eben, for those in our audience who don't know. The MyBacon, can you go into that-- I mean, I-- yeah, sorry. The MyBacon, can you explain that a little bit more? Is that 100% mycelium?
EBEN BAYER: Yeah, so to create MyBacon, which is a replacement for pork bacon, we grow a slab of basically mushroom meat. So we take a gourmet mushroom from the forest. Normally, it takes six weeks to grow. It looks like a mushroom coming out of the ground. Instead, we grow the same tissue, texture, and flavor in basically this indoor farm that makes a slab of meat that's like feet long, feet wide, inches thick.
EBEN BAYER: And we literally slice that up like a pork belly. We call it a mush belly internally. And then we treat it like pork bacon. We add salt. We add sugar. We add some fat. There's no fat in mushrooms. We smoke it. We add a few natural flavors to give it that pork smell when you're cooking it.
EBEN BAYER: But it's 90% mycelium by mass. Mycelium does all the heavy lifting in terms of umami, which is your meat flavor, texture, which is like your pork gristle, and then all the nutritionals. And so yeah, that is mostly mycelium and a little bit of added ingredients, five ingredients.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. Thanks for explaining that. I will say that I was fortunate enough to have-- I think I got the last piece of MyBacon at a conference recently, and it was terrific. So it went very, very quickly. OK, so I want to talk a little bit about challenges. I mean, all of these amazing things that we're talking about today, they're not easy. And the industry's Achilles' heel traditionally has been that many companies that have a product can't successfully scale.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: But why is that? What are the fundamental challenges of scaling up in synthetic biology?
EBEN BAYER: So challenges in scaling, I mean, I think fundamentally, you have just geometrical challenges, whether you're doing liquid fermentation or solid state fermentation. So you're just going to different scale systems. And physics behaves differently at different levels, and you've got to deal with it. And then candidly, the other side of it is running a business that does research and creates lab scale titers is totally different than running a business that's creating commercially viable product at scale.
EBEN BAYER: Culture is different. Quality standards, not saying they're worse or better, but they are different. And what you build in terms of team infrastructure and price points are very different. And I think some of the challenges are more, how do you move an organization that maybe proved like, hey, we've got a compound or a product that the market loves, then you've got to move as a team from making small quantities of that for demonstrations to actually delivering it week in week out, dealing with distribution, dealing with sales and marketing, and making that a product that people can depend on in their daily lives?
EBEN BAYER: And I believe fundamentally, synthetic biology, however we do it, it's got to delight the consumer in a way that conventional approaches don't. The technology is the enabling thing to do that. But it's all the blocking and bracing you build in an organization that lets you do that at scale, which is actually gets you to the output. And in some ways, it's actually the rest of that that is harder than the technical scale up, at least in my experience.
EMILY LEPROUST: And I think the good news is that, as an industry, people are focused on that. And if you flash forward a few years, maybe a decade, you'll have massive fermentation capacities throughout the US and the world to produce those biomaterials. So it used to be the science didn't work at all. And now the science does work. And so now it's a question of scale up. And if there is a will, there's a way.
EMILY LEPROUST: There may be a few companies that don't make it along the [? way. ?] And there's also will be some companies that become expert at that. And I think that that fermentation capacity is also going to actually create a lot of amazing great jobs that would be blue collars jobs but very well-paid meaningful jobs throughout the US. It won't be necessarily found 50 miles from the coast because you'll have to be where the biomass is being created.
EMILY LEPROUST: So why this is a challenge-- and I have a problem. My glass is always 3/4 full. But where there's the challenges, we saw a huge opportunity for companies to come into the gap, create leverage fluidics, chemical-- physical fluidics of scale and create a lot of great jobs.
EMILY LEPROUST: So I think there's also a lot of opportunities to be optimistic.
DEEPAK DUGAR: And I'll go back to some of the things which are driving this. As long as you are aligned with those kind of megatrends, be it climate change, be it environmental persistence and deterioration for a lot of the stuff which we make today, the aging population, which requires health and wellness, supply chain resilience, which has been really exposed in the last three years through a combination of COVID and inflation and everything else on shoring, look at from all of those lenses, synbio can tap into those opportunities opened up by these megatrends.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So and those mean great new technologies are needed. Trillions of dollars of investment in infrastructure is needed. Hundreds of billions of dollars is needed in retraining and having a workforce which can run that infrastructure and in the end, having a distribution network which is ready to rapidly absorb these new technologies and new products. All of those are very critical elements.
DEEPAK DUGAR: They could be considered challenges-- depends-- you can look at them as opportunities. So I think that's where we are. And as Emily mentioned, right now, as we speak today, infrastructure, scaling it up quite physically is some of the bottleneck that's been worked upon. Historically, one of the major challenges was just like, can you engineer a robust processor or microbe? Those, I think we have had enough learnings in the last decade in terms of how you engineer robust strains.
DEEPAK DUGAR: How do you engineer robust processes? And those challenges are very, very, very relevant challenges, where companies in the past have spent hundreds of millions of dollars making mistakes. And there's an opportunity to learn from those and not repeat those. And I think that is important to recognize. Like the investments that happened in the last 20 years in this space are of relevance in terms of the experience and the learnings we have gotten.
DEEPAK DUGAR: And we can translate them now into real world. A very simple example, like when you engineer a microbe or a strain in the lab and you'll get amazing results out of 1 liter reactors like, wow, I did it. You can extrapolate from the techno economics that this will be perfect. It will be whatever cheaper than xyz. But the moment you put the same strain in a 1,000-liter or a million liters or 100,000 liters in bioreactor, it doesn't behave the same.
DEEPAK DUGAR: And the reason is very, very simple. Its underlying substrate is biology, biology's core more fundamental directive principle, whatever you want to call it, is to replicate and reproduce, not to make the product you want. As long as your engineering your biology respecting that core principle, you will be fine. But if you don't respect that core principle, you're going to get in trouble because it will happen is as the microbe or the strain or whatever you're using duplicates and replicates, it will go back to its core directive of replicating more and not preserving the function you wanted to preserve, which is produce xyz, whatever you want.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So when you add a 1 liter benchtop scale, it might go through 10 generations or whatever you're doing for a microbe, for example. And the probability of it deviating away from its core challenge is lower because the more mutations you can get in that cycle is lower. If you go to 100 generations, which is more typical in a larger industrial scale facility, you're going to have a problem because of the accumulated mutations.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that is kind of-- in retrospect might seem obvious, but as what challenges should not addressed fundamentally in a lot of the early stage biotech companies. And even today, we see that kind of mistake being repeated. And it's important to recognize challenges like that as you're thinking of scaling processes and technologies. So to borrow a term from other industries, there is a concept of design for manufacturing.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that element of design for biomanufacturing is not taught anywhere. It's not learned anywhere. You just have to figure it out somehow. So I think that's an important element, which I think everyone is working on. And I know Eben has been nodding there, so I'll let Eben jump in there.
EBEN BAYER: Yeah, I just want to say, Deepak, I think that's such a great first principles analysis of some of the challenges you run into that are just fundamental to how life works. We fight that too. One of the ways we got-- tried to make that more of a strength for the way we're using mycelium biology is we use the entirety of the biomass. And so one of the ways we're leaning into that is we're trying to lean in to what the organism wants to do mostly, which is replicate as many of its cells as possible.
EBEN BAYER: Within that cell replication, we still can't tolerate too many mutations off course. But rather than really trying to get the cells to make a unique new thing they don't make, we're trying to get them to make lots of themselves in different structures, which they might make in nature but aren't usually comfortable making in large mats. And so just love how succinctly you describe that. And it's absolutely something we see in mycelium biology as well.
EBEN BAYER: It's totally conserved across life.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. OK, so that's enough of the challenges. I want to talk about successes in the field now. So I mean, it's-- everybody knows that the last 10 or even 20 years of the synthetic biology field have been successful. But if I were to ask you to point to some of those successes, what would you say? Emily, let's start with you.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yes, happy to do it. There's definitely lots of successes on the complete spectrum, just starting with some direct to consumer applications. I don't know if you're familiar with a company called ZBiotics. They very well thought out engineered probiotics that just the acetaldehyde-- oh, yeah, Eben is--
EBEN BAYER: I haven't opened it yet, but I love the concept. So I own it. Yeah.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yeah, I have a hundred pack in my-- all my friends they always want one when they come up. But you don't have any hangover the next day if you drink alcohol. So that's a great example. In the area of agbio, there's been some very successful field trials by using bacteria engineered-- engineer bacteria at the root of plants to deliver fertilizer to corn, wheat, and rice.
EMILY LEPROUST: So instead of fertilizer, which is very expensive, it's getting even more expensive with the war in Ukraine, which makes natural gas more expensive and fertilizer very expensive. That that's the way to improve food security. On the material side, there's a number of example of consumer product made by-- with spider silk, so very light, very strong.
EMILY LEPROUST: On the health side, of course, we've all-- almost most of us got the COVID vaccine. That COVID vaccine is a synbio product. And there are some companies like Neogene that are going after solid tumor, where the tumor of a patient is sequenced. And then DNA is read, so it's written to make the exact TCR that will create immuno-oncology response.
EMILY LEPROUST: And when that gets approved, that could change cancer treatment forever and make cancer a chronic disease instead of a painful and expensive disease to treat. So in my mind, the success stories are many and all exciting and just the beginning.
DEEPAK DUGAR: I can add to that from some of the chemicals and material space. And Emily did a fabulous job in terms of capturing a lot of the more recent interesting ones, I think, which are on the cutting edge. Historically, I think a lot of the companies in the industrial biotech space have drawn inspiration from success of chemicals like propanediol, which are used to make carpets, biocarpets, but also used now in skincare, cosmetics, and also in food applications.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that's one application which it took probably I think a decade plus to get to the first, let's say, 100,000 tons a year volume. And now, it continues to grow from there. Second one would be PLA, Polylactic Acid, which is used in everything which is disposable. If you go to a trendy cafe, you can always find that green kind of a cup for your favorite beverage. And it's made from PLA, which is biodegradable.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that's another example again in the chemicals and material space which was enabled by synthetic biology. So those two come to mind. And more recently, there are many, many more I can talk about. Visolis recently launched one of the world's first carbon negative brands for skin care called AMEVA. So that's again a success story, in my opinion, where we have scaled up a technology to a point where it is commercially viable for a consumer product to use.
EBEN BAYER: I'm not going to add to that list. But I do want to up some of the ones that were discussed like Z Biotechs. I'm so interested in their product because I think it offers a tangible benefit to the consumer. And I think that is where there's tipping point between medicine like insulin, or it's like you die if you don't get it. So there's arbitrary pricing power.
EBEN BAYER: I say this is type I diabetic. And then starting to get to things that are optional but really can have a positive impact in folks life, and that can be in food. That can be in a probiotic you take, it being a skin care ingredient. But we're definitely in those examples you heard, starting to hit that tipping point, where people might-- will buy products because they are engineered and give them an exceptional experience.
EBEN BAYER: And in my belief, that's when the magic of capitalism starts to suck in-- starts to kick in and suck these things up to like total global scale. And that's where we get like a really cool profit impact flywheel.
EMILY LEPROUST: I really like what Eben said. It's about the not instant gratification but instant validation of the product feature. It's not like, oh, take this probiotic, and you live 30 years longer. No, you'll never know. But with that probiotic, you know the next day if it works or not. And so I think that that's the path to success, is that instant validation of the product features.
EMILY LEPROUST: And you know what Eben is doing, who is still using Styrofoam in packaging? I mean, it should be-- there should be legislation on that because it's going to have a huge impact. Some people are-- they love meat, but they are vegetarian because they know that it's better for the environment. Well, you could have a much bigger impact by getting rid of all the Styrofoam tomorrow.
EMILY LEPROUST: So there's a lot of things that if you did at scale, it will improve the health and sustainability of humans in the planet.
EBEN BAYER: And that I think is the fundamental value proposition of synbio, which is biology is the technology that's lived on Earth for billions of years. We've lived with it. It's like self-repairing for the planet. We got everything we could out of first generation biology 2000 years ago with farming and agriculture. Now, we're entering the second S-curve. And the cool thing is capitalism takes S-curves and with extreme benefit and scales them.
EBEN BAYER: This will be the first technology-- the Industrial Revolution was amazing, but we released all this carbon. This will be the first technology that as it scales can actually do global good on the planet while also unlocking new things that consumers really want. And so it'll be the first time in my belief that capitalism is a want or need fulfillment. Machine will be coupled with the technology that intrinsically can do good by scaling, and that's what gets me excited about synthetic biology.
DEEPAK DUGAR: At Visolis, we just call it regenerative capitalism. So you're going to not just extract from the environment but help it. And in doing so, you delight the consumers and delight the planet at the same time.
EMILY LEPROUST: Hey, there is nothing wrong with carbon. Carbon is just in the wrong place. That could be mycelium instead of being in the air. Carbon should be MyBacon mycelium.
DEEPAK DUGAR: Carbon should be everywhere else apart from the atmosphere.
EBEN BAYER: We'll get to where it needs to go.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: And what about consumer adoption? What do you think it will take for customers to buy synthetic biology products?
EMILY LEPROUST: In my mind, yeah, the consumer-- in my mind, consumers are not going to change their behavior just based on morality. I mean, it's just not going to happen. And you, you're going to change a fraction, but the vast majority won't. And so if you ask people to make sacrifices, it's not going to work. And so you have to create solutions where that get adopted at scale, and that creates 1 plus 1, which is, it's great for the lifestyle of what that person wants to do.
EMILY LEPROUST: And at the same time is great for the health of the planet. And that's the power of synthetic biology, is that you get an improved lifestyle, and you get improvements sustainability for free. And therefore, whatever product you sell, it has to be better for the person, better for the environment, and most likely also has to be cheaper. And technology will deliver that.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: So moving on to talk a little bit about synbio business, what impact has the downturn in the biotech sector, at least in public markets had on your business and growth plans, if any?
EBEN BAYER: I'm happy to talk to that. So we're full steam ahead in this growth-- in this environment. We've brought a bunch of plants online this summer for end use products. So we built the world's largest aerial mycelium farm in the world this summer. That allows us to produce upwards of $20 million of our MyBacon product and similar amounts of hides for the leather industry.
EBEN BAYER: And we see incredible demand. We're in 10 different locations now in our-- for our bacon product. We still sell out weekly at four or five times the sales velocity. And so I do think the funding environment has changed drastically, which happens. People are either manic or depressive in terms of these markets.
EBEN BAYER: But what we're not seeing is consumer pull changing. We're still seeing the same demand for the products we're creating and the same long-term cultural trends around those. And so I do think accessing capital is going to be more expensive for everyone in the coming years. But I haven't seen anything change in the fundamental reasons why we're in the field, both the strengths that synbio bring, the things that people want to buy, and then what we're actually able to now create at scale.
EBEN BAYER: And so prepared for higher cost of capital but buoyed by the fact that consumers want what we want. And ultimately, that's what's going to decide what goes.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, so in our last couple of minutes, I just want to ask each of you, why are we even talking about this today? It seems like people who are at the forefront of synthetic biology are willing and incredibly motivated to take on sometimes huge headaches in order to forge these new paths in all the different areas that we've been discussing. So why is that?
DEEPAK DUGAR: I think it's still such a new industry. If you think of it from the context of what's up ahead for us to build, there are still massive amounts of products to be made, services to be delivered in the space. And none of that exists today. And we are the very, very, very beginnings of creating those technologies, scaling those technologies. It's not something where you can just go to someone and like, I want to license a technology to build a mycelium farm.
DEEPAK DUGAR: You cannot do that. Eben has to build it himself. For example, for us, we'd love to just have that off shelf and just build that. Even that does not exist today. So we're at this very, very early stage and a lot of the things we're talking about is how do we make sure that we can deliver on that promise? Make sure that all the work we are doing goes towards building something which is lasting and impactful.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So I think it's very topical to be talking about this at this stage.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Emily.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yeah, to begin on what Deepak said, indeed we are at the beginning. And what that means is it's like the semiconductor in 1960s. Coming out now and trying to compete with NVIDIA and Intel and AMD is like just so-- it would be so difficult. But it's just nascent and industry. There is massive wide space. And yeah, it's just an amazing amount of opportunities for people that are smart and they're willing to take risk and entrepreneurial.
EMILY LEPROUST: And I think it will attract a lot of great minds, and it will have just an amazing positive impact on the planet. We hire a lot of people. And some of the science software engineers we are hiring, they have a choice of working for Google, working on the autofill or work at Twist to build tools that are going to help customers cure cancer and remove carbon from the air.
EMILY LEPROUST: It's just so much more exciting. And so I think it will suck in and appeal to a lot of really smart people that want to have a positive impact on the planet and create economic value. And I can't wait to see what happens in the next few decades. But I think it's going to be great.
EBEN BAYER: Yeah, I'd build on that. I think more and more, we see folks that want to work with purpose and not just folks coming out of college but people have been in big corporate for 20 years. They're like, I'd love to work-- I'm worried about the world. I'm worried about my children or my friends children's lives. They want to work with purpose. And so biology is really at that scaling point.
EBEN BAYER: I love the semiconductor in the 1960s. I agree with the placement. I mean, nylon is synthesized, and the program started in 1928. It was on the market in '38. You could argue at the end of 100 year optimization cycle. We are still so early in this, and during this, we just talked about tangible things you can get now that actually work in capitalism that are starting to scale up.
EBEN BAYER: And so just so much opportunity in this space, again build great businesses, get paid, have a good life, and leave the world better than you found it. It's the first time in the past 200 years in an economic system like capitalism, you can have that value proposition for the world. That gets me out of bed in the morning.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. I mean, is there one thing-- this will be my last question. Is there one thing that you wish people knew about synthetic biology that you think is either misunderstood or which people don't know? Eben.
EBEN BAYER: I would just say synthetic biology always sounds like synthetic. But most of biology is around-- has always been around moving genes around, either through breeding, horizontal gene transfer. And my view is we're taking this beautiful technology that's always been here, always been working to make a Spaceship Earth a habitable place. And we're finally getting to be stewards of this technology and use it in ways that support life on Earth without damaging the planet.
EBEN BAYER: So I just want people to feel like it's not this new scary concept that humans have brought into the world but instead a toolkit that was always there. It's always been part of nature. And now we're just tuning it as we have many other things over the years.
DEEPAK DUGAR: Yeah, it's just biology, as Eben said. No one is cared about biology. But I think people get scared about things they don't understand or believe they don't understand or might have a big negative consequence. So I think to me, as a student of this piece, it's just biology. We have gone through multiple terms. It used to be called recombinant DNA technology. And I don't know if people recognize today, but back in the day, there were three flavors of biotech.
DEEPAK DUGAR: There was a white biotech. There was a green biotech. There was a red biotech, each defining the application, which is funny to think of today. But these are just terms we utilize, and they generally emerge in academia, where people want to know what's new, what's different than what was done previously? So the origins of these terms has historically been academic, trying to pin down what is new and different from the previous 5, 10 years.
DEEPAK DUGAR: But that may not be very amenable when you're trying to communicate with the broader general public. So I think it's just biology from that perspective.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yeah, totally agree. I think talking about synthetic biology was important at the beginning to rally the science around. But now I think we're probably moving into more needing to talk about applications about products. And the other great products that the customer will use, be delighted with, enable them to have wonderful lives, and at the same time doing great for the planet.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, great. Well, thank you, Emily. Thank you, Eben and Deepak for this terrific conversation. We look forward to following Twist, Ecovative, and Visolis in the future here at GEN. And to our audience, please stay tuned for some closing remarks for all of GEN's editorial staff.
EMILY LEPROUST: Thank you.
DEEPAK DUGAR: Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:1 Introduction to GEN Biotechnology.
FAY LIN: My name is Fay Lin, and I'm senior editor of GEN Biotechnology. GEN Biotechnology launched in early 2022, publishing exceptional research, reviews, opinion, and analysis across the biotech spectrum, from genomics, synbio, to artificial intelligence and drug development. The journal benefits from a combination of academic leadership and professional editing. The first four issues of the journal have amassed approximately 40,000 full text downloads and featured groundbreaking original research on gene editing in livestock, CRISPR-based pest control, base editing in a single AAV vector, and cost-effective 3D printing.
FAY LIN: But wait. There's more. We've also featured exclusive interviews with biotech AI CEOs, topical views and news articles, insights from financial analysts, and news features from GEN reporters covering the state of aging research, the launch of the Arc Institute, and advances in organs on chips.
FAY LIN: We'll consider any manuscript reporting novel and interesting results in the biotech field. We offer fast and constructive peer review, and we hope you'll consider submitting your paper to GEN Biotechnology. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:2 The Future of Synthetic Biology.
FAY LIN:
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our last session of the summit The Future of Synthetic Biology. I'm Juliana LeMieux, science writer at GEN. So some of my favorite assignments when reporting for GEN are when I get to dig into the science and the technologies being developed in the synthetic biology space and the innovations that are being done in this field. There's little doubt that it's an exciting time to be in synbio.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: The field has seen mind-boggling growth over the past few years, both in scientific innovation and in financing. At the heart of all of the varied synbio companies and researchers is a passion for using biology to build a better and more sustainable way of living. But what is synbio? And how does one field have their hand in everything, from making clothes and food to medicines?
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Today, we'll break down how synbio companies are working to bring new solutions to the market. To do that, I'm joined by three experts, each of whom represent a very different area of synbio. Our guests are Deepak Dugar, the president of Visolis, a company that produces bio-based chemicals for different applications, and Emily Leproust, the CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience, a pioneer in the DNA writing space, and Eben Bayer, the CEO and co-founder of Ecovative Design, which is leveraging mycelium or nature's glue into making different materials.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Thank you all so much for joining us today.
DEEPAK DUGAR: Thank you.
EMILY LEPROUST: Thanks for having us.
EBEN BAYER: Thank you.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Let's start with each of you taking a moment to introduce your own companies. Eben, we'll start with you first. And please tell our audience a little bit about what's going on at Ecovative.
EBEN BAYER: Sure, happy to tell you a little bit about Ecovative. Technically, we use mycelium, which is the root structures of mushrooms, to grow fully-formed materials. And so we do what single-cell biology does in terms of making compounds for structure using mycelium. And we get many of the same properties you might find in a mushroom in the forest but re-imagine them for industrial applications.
EBEN BAYER: So we grow mycelium tissue into lightweight packaging materials that replace Styrofoam as our home compostable Styrofoam alternative in our packaging business. And we also grow slabs of pure mycelium in our indoor vertical farms. And these slabs can be 100 feet long, 4 feet wide, a couple inches thick. And depending on the type of mycelium we select, if we do any engineering on the strain itself and then actually the environmental conditions we put around this strain, we get very different products.
EBEN BAYER: And those can range from a supple strong leather that you might use in bag or shoes through a really delicious whole cut of mycelium meat, which can mimic what you might find in pork, which is what's in our MyBacon product under MyForest Foods, which is a subsidiary.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, yeah, terrific. And if anybody wants to check out-- I know Ecovative has this terrific video on your website. Because when I was thinking about mycelium farms, I was thinking big farms. But when I saw the pictures of the slabs of mycelium, it really gave me a picture of what's going on there.
EBEN BAYER: Yeah. So our farms are super capital efficient. They reuse a lot of existing industry infrastructure farm, that conventional like mushroom industry, the white button mushroom industry. And then, of course, there's no lights in these farms. So they look a lot like the indoor farms. You might have seen vertical farms for growing plants. But they're lights out, just like what every manufacturing floor strives for.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, great. All right, terrific. Emily, can you tell us a little bit about what's going on at Twist?
EMILY LEPROUST: Yes, at Twist, we write DNA from scratch. And so the chemistry of writing DNA has been known for decades, but we've ported the DNA synthesis of AC G&Ts on a silicon chip, and on silicon chip that's the size of a 96 well plate. We can print up to a million oligos, and then we can assemble those oligos into genes. And we can then make IgG from it. We can develop some diagnostic tests that are used by liquid biopsy companies.
EMILY LEPROUST: We also have developed a service of being the drug discoverer of last resort. So when drug companies have targets that where they can't find an antibody, they come to us. And 100% of the time, even when it's very, very hard target, we're able to find antibodies or bispecifics. And then we also have a business, where we can store data in DNA for archiving.
EMILY LEPROUST: So we are the tools provider of the synbio ecosystem. And our goal is to provide all the DNA that people need in a way that's very fast and inexpensive and then to give a researcher more shots on goals to enable them to find what they're looking for in a way that's as efficient as possible.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. Thanks so much. And, Deepak, what's happening at Visolis?
DEEPAK DUGAR: Sure. Thanks for having us here on the panel, Julianna. At Visolis, we use biology to manufacture high-performance materials that are also carbon negative. And you can see that in all our products as we rule them out. What we do at Visolis is we take a systems level approach that integrates innovation across microbe engineering, chemical catalysis, and process development scale-up to bring these new products to and technologies to marketplace.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So we have applications which range from personal care, all the way to automotives to even high energy density jet fuel. And all of these come from the same core chemicals which develop through fermentation and then use chemical catalysis to upgrade them to a lot of these different end products.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: I mean, what's really striking is that I knew when putting this panel together that having Twist, Visolis, and Ecovative would be a very diverse panel. But actually, each of your companies is doing multiple different diverse things with your platforms. So it's like even with three companies, we have so many different areas to talk about. It's really amazing how this wide scope that we're showing that synbio is representing here.
EMILY LEPROUST: Hey, you can go from baking to data storage. So it's a pretty good spectrum.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Exactly. OK, so before we dig into more details, let's start with a very big picture question that is, what do we mean by synthetic biology? Because the word and the concept mean different things to different people. So I'd like to take the first question to get a sense of what synthetic biology, synbio, means to each of you? Emily, let's start with you.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yeah, sure. So to me, it's the engineering of biology. People conceptually understand biology. They may take biological drugs like insulin or things like that. And in the past, biology was just so hard that you'll have to-- it would be very expensive. It would be kind of an art. And so you could frankly only apply it to drugs because therapeutics was the only area where the markets were big enough that you could make a return on your R&D. And with synthetic biology, researchers are bringing some engineering approaches to biology.
EMILY LEPROUST: So it's less of an art and more of an engineering. And so what that means is that as you automate things, the cost per data point frankly goes down. And so you can do things that are a lot less expensive from an R&D point of view, and then you can apply it to markets that are not as big as therapeutics drugs. But the number of potential markets is much bigger. There's only a few dozen blockbuster drugs, but there are thousands of applications that synthetic biology enables.
EMILY LEPROUST: So to me, it's bringing an engineering approach to biology or reducing the cost of R&D and making it available to-- basically deploying the bioeconomy to all parts of the broader economy.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. Deepak, how about yourself? What does synthetic biology mean to you?
DEEPAK DUGAR: Let me give what my thinking is of a historical perspective here. So as Emily mentioned, I had started in the pharma sector with using enzymes to chop up DNA and then copy them using PCR. And then bring them back together into a plasmid, putting in a microbe. And that paradigm slowed us very well in terms of pharmaceuticals. So but that was the limitation of it.
DEEPAK DUGAR: You could only copy and paste DNA the way it existed. If you wanted something different than that, it wasn't practical at that point. The first time we synthesized any meaningful short chunk of DNA was actually goes back all the way to 1969. Har Gobind Khorana, who was the pioneer in the space, who had the Nobel Prize for that. It was done at that time, and it was considered a big success when the small chunk of oligos was synthesized.
DEEPAK DUGAR: What has happened in the time where synthetic biology, as a term, became popular was in late '90s and early 2000s when we had brought down the cost and improved the technology to a point where you could stitch these short pieces of DNA into longer chunks of DNA, i.e. synthetic DNA. So because this DNA was not an amplifier from nature and copy and paste but something which was written de Novo, something which did not exist in nature, that's the element of synthetic biology.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that's where the term became popular, and then everyone has their own idea of what it means today. The way I think of it is it allows us to precisely engineer biology the way it has not been practical before. One of the earlier-- very early applications was in terms of codon optimization. If you're trying to take DNA from one place and put it in somewhere else, the same DNA may not work because it was not in the same context, so by changing some of the usage patterns you could change.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So it was very much deeply technical the origins of it. But now if you talk to an end consumer, they might have heard of the term synthetic biology. And to them, it could mean anywhere from Frankenstein to something which is just nature-inspired and nature-like. So it is better for you. So I think it has evolved dramatically in the last 20 years, but that's the historical perspective from my point of view.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK.
EMILY LEPROUST: And you know what? Deepak said I think it's great that [INAUDIBLE] don't even know it's synthetic biology. It's like the phone. It's built on quantum physics. Nobody cares about quantum physics. They care about how do I have my app? Is my Uber showing up on time?
DEEPAK DUGAR: Yep, yep. And the physicist who have worked on quantum physics never anticipated that it would be at some point utilized to deliver cat videos to bring joy to everyone. So who knows where synthetic biology will go in next 20 years?
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Good point. OK, thanks. Eben.
EBEN BAYER: I'm trying to make a joke about the quantum entanglement of cat videos, but I can't quite get it together. Yeah. At Ecovative, I think our-- we've stretched the definition of synthetic biology quite a bit. So in some of our product lines and some of our earlier product lines and what we do with MyForest Foods, which makes our bacon, we're actually using environmental triggers to bring out new phenotypes in our mycelium that already exists.
EBEN BAYER: So we're finding ways to actually create new tissues or growth dynamics from the organism that you never see in nature by perturbing it in unique ways. And so we do a lot of backend sequencing to figure out what environmental conditions are bringing what genes into play. And then on the other side of the house, we're doing what you consider more conventional synthetic biology, which is inserting genes either from mycelium or other organisms into our species to get totally novel properties that we either see in nature but we can't see controllability in our indoor farms, or we don't see in nature but we'd love to see in the mycelium.
EBEN BAYER: And so in some areas, we've really focused on that or around the industrial ecosystem, so making our organisms more tolerant to these less sterile indoor grow farms and then some fun projects that are very consumer facing benefits which are around like creating color without dye in the mycelium.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK. And quick question, Eben, for those in our audience who don't know. The MyBacon, can you go into that-- I mean, I-- yeah, sorry. The MyBacon, can you explain that a little bit more? Is that 100% mycelium?
EBEN BAYER: Yeah, so to create MyBacon, which is a replacement for pork bacon, we grow a slab of basically mushroom meat. So we take a gourmet mushroom from the forest. Normally, it takes six weeks to grow. It looks like a mushroom coming out of the ground. Instead, we grow the same tissue, texture, and flavor in basically this indoor farm that makes a slab of meat that's like feet long, feet wide, inches thick.
EBEN BAYER: And we literally slice that up like a pork belly. We call it a mush belly internally. And then we treat it like pork bacon. We add salt. We add sugar. We add some fat. There's no fat in mushrooms. We smoke it. We add a few natural flavors to give it that pork smell when you're cooking it.
EBEN BAYER: But it's 90% mycelium by mass. Mycelium does all the heavy lifting in terms of umami, which is your meat flavor, texture, which is like your pork gristle, and then all the nutritionals. And so yeah, that is mostly mycelium and a little bit of added ingredients, five ingredients.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. Thanks for explaining that. I will say that I was fortunate enough to have-- I think I got the last piece of MyBacon at a conference recently, and it was terrific. So it went very, very quickly. OK, so I want to talk a little bit about challenges. I mean, all of these amazing things that we're talking about today, they're not easy. And the industry's Achilles' heel traditionally has been that many companies that have a product can't successfully scale.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: But why is that? What are the fundamental challenges of scaling up in synthetic biology?
EBEN BAYER: So challenges in scaling, I mean, I think fundamentally, you have just geometrical challenges, whether you're doing liquid fermentation or solid state fermentation. So you're just going to different scale systems. And physics behaves differently at different levels, and you've got to deal with it. And then candidly, the other side of it is running a business that does research and creates lab scale titers is totally different than running a business that's creating commercially viable product at scale.
EBEN BAYER: Culture is different. Quality standards, not saying they're worse or better, but they are different. And what you build in terms of team infrastructure and price points are very different. And I think some of the challenges are more, how do you move an organization that maybe proved like, hey, we've got a compound or a product that the market loves, then you've got to move as a team from making small quantities of that for demonstrations to actually delivering it week in week out, dealing with distribution, dealing with sales and marketing, and making that a product that people can depend on in their daily lives?
EBEN BAYER: And I believe fundamentally, synthetic biology, however we do it, it's got to delight the consumer in a way that conventional approaches don't. The technology is the enabling thing to do that. But it's all the blocking and bracing you build in an organization that lets you do that at scale, which is actually gets you to the output. And in some ways, it's actually the rest of that that is harder than the technical scale up, at least in my experience.
EMILY LEPROUST: And I think the good news is that, as an industry, people are focused on that. And if you flash forward a few years, maybe a decade, you'll have massive fermentation capacities throughout the US and the world to produce those biomaterials. So it used to be the science didn't work at all. And now the science does work. And so now it's a question of scale up. And if there is a will, there's a way.
EMILY LEPROUST: There may be a few companies that don't make it along the [? way. ?] And there's also will be some companies that become expert at that. And I think that that fermentation capacity is also going to actually create a lot of amazing great jobs that would be blue collars jobs but very well-paid meaningful jobs throughout the US. It won't be necessarily found 50 miles from the coast because you'll have to be where the biomass is being created.
EMILY LEPROUST: So why this is a challenge-- and I have a problem. My glass is always 3/4 full. But where there's the challenges, we saw a huge opportunity for companies to come into the gap, create leverage fluidics, chemical-- physical fluidics of scale and create a lot of great jobs.
EMILY LEPROUST: So I think there's also a lot of opportunities to be optimistic.
DEEPAK DUGAR: And I'll go back to some of the things which are driving this. As long as you are aligned with those kind of megatrends, be it climate change, be it environmental persistence and deterioration for a lot of the stuff which we make today, the aging population, which requires health and wellness, supply chain resilience, which has been really exposed in the last three years through a combination of COVID and inflation and everything else on shoring, look at from all of those lenses, synbio can tap into those opportunities opened up by these megatrends.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So and those mean great new technologies are needed. Trillions of dollars of investment in infrastructure is needed. Hundreds of billions of dollars is needed in retraining and having a workforce which can run that infrastructure and in the end, having a distribution network which is ready to rapidly absorb these new technologies and new products. All of those are very critical elements.
DEEPAK DUGAR: They could be considered challenges-- depends-- you can look at them as opportunities. So I think that's where we are. And as Emily mentioned, right now, as we speak today, infrastructure, scaling it up quite physically is some of the bottleneck that's been worked upon. Historically, one of the major challenges was just like, can you engineer a robust processor or microbe? Those, I think we have had enough learnings in the last decade in terms of how you engineer robust strains.
DEEPAK DUGAR: How do you engineer robust processes? And those challenges are very, very, very relevant challenges, where companies in the past have spent hundreds of millions of dollars making mistakes. And there's an opportunity to learn from those and not repeat those. And I think that is important to recognize. Like the investments that happened in the last 20 years in this space are of relevance in terms of the experience and the learnings we have gotten.
DEEPAK DUGAR: And we can translate them now into real world. A very simple example, like when you engineer a microbe or a strain in the lab and you'll get amazing results out of 1 liter reactors like, wow, I did it. You can extrapolate from the techno economics that this will be perfect. It will be whatever cheaper than xyz. But the moment you put the same strain in a 1,000-liter or a million liters or 100,000 liters in bioreactor, it doesn't behave the same.
DEEPAK DUGAR: And the reason is very, very simple. Its underlying substrate is biology, biology's core more fundamental directive principle, whatever you want to call it, is to replicate and reproduce, not to make the product you want. As long as your engineering your biology respecting that core principle, you will be fine. But if you don't respect that core principle, you're going to get in trouble because it will happen is as the microbe or the strain or whatever you're using duplicates and replicates, it will go back to its core directive of replicating more and not preserving the function you wanted to preserve, which is produce xyz, whatever you want.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So when you add a 1 liter benchtop scale, it might go through 10 generations or whatever you're doing for a microbe, for example. And the probability of it deviating away from its core challenge is lower because the more mutations you can get in that cycle is lower. If you go to 100 generations, which is more typical in a larger industrial scale facility, you're going to have a problem because of the accumulated mutations.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that is kind of-- in retrospect might seem obvious, but as what challenges should not addressed fundamentally in a lot of the early stage biotech companies. And even today, we see that kind of mistake being repeated. And it's important to recognize challenges like that as you're thinking of scaling processes and technologies. So to borrow a term from other industries, there is a concept of design for manufacturing.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that element of design for biomanufacturing is not taught anywhere. It's not learned anywhere. You just have to figure it out somehow. So I think that's an important element, which I think everyone is working on. And I know Eben has been nodding there, so I'll let Eben jump in there.
EBEN BAYER: Yeah, I just want to say, Deepak, I think that's such a great first principles analysis of some of the challenges you run into that are just fundamental to how life works. We fight that too. One of the ways we got-- tried to make that more of a strength for the way we're using mycelium biology is we use the entirety of the biomass. And so one of the ways we're leaning into that is we're trying to lean in to what the organism wants to do mostly, which is replicate as many of its cells as possible.
EBEN BAYER: Within that cell replication, we still can't tolerate too many mutations off course. But rather than really trying to get the cells to make a unique new thing they don't make, we're trying to get them to make lots of themselves in different structures, which they might make in nature but aren't usually comfortable making in large mats. And so just love how succinctly you describe that. And it's absolutely something we see in mycelium biology as well.
EBEN BAYER: It's totally conserved across life.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. OK, so that's enough of the challenges. I want to talk about successes in the field now. So I mean, it's-- everybody knows that the last 10 or even 20 years of the synthetic biology field have been successful. But if I were to ask you to point to some of those successes, what would you say? Emily, let's start with you.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yes, happy to do it. There's definitely lots of successes on the complete spectrum, just starting with some direct to consumer applications. I don't know if you're familiar with a company called ZBiotics. They very well thought out engineered probiotics that just the acetaldehyde-- oh, yeah, Eben is--
EBEN BAYER: I haven't opened it yet, but I love the concept. So I own it. Yeah.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yeah, I have a hundred pack in my-- all my friends they always want one when they come up. But you don't have any hangover the next day if you drink alcohol. So that's a great example. In the area of agbio, there's been some very successful field trials by using bacteria engineered-- engineer bacteria at the root of plants to deliver fertilizer to corn, wheat, and rice.
EMILY LEPROUST: So instead of fertilizer, which is very expensive, it's getting even more expensive with the war in Ukraine, which makes natural gas more expensive and fertilizer very expensive. That that's the way to improve food security. On the material side, there's a number of example of consumer product made by-- with spider silk, so very light, very strong.
EMILY LEPROUST: On the health side, of course, we've all-- almost most of us got the COVID vaccine. That COVID vaccine is a synbio product. And there are some companies like Neogene that are going after solid tumor, where the tumor of a patient is sequenced. And then DNA is read, so it's written to make the exact TCR that will create immuno-oncology response.
EMILY LEPROUST: And when that gets approved, that could change cancer treatment forever and make cancer a chronic disease instead of a painful and expensive disease to treat. So in my mind, the success stories are many and all exciting and just the beginning.
DEEPAK DUGAR: I can add to that from some of the chemicals and material space. And Emily did a fabulous job in terms of capturing a lot of the more recent interesting ones, I think, which are on the cutting edge. Historically, I think a lot of the companies in the industrial biotech space have drawn inspiration from success of chemicals like propanediol, which are used to make carpets, biocarpets, but also used now in skincare, cosmetics, and also in food applications.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that's one application which it took probably I think a decade plus to get to the first, let's say, 100,000 tons a year volume. And now, it continues to grow from there. Second one would be PLA, Polylactic Acid, which is used in everything which is disposable. If you go to a trendy cafe, you can always find that green kind of a cup for your favorite beverage. And it's made from PLA, which is biodegradable.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So that's another example again in the chemicals and material space which was enabled by synthetic biology. So those two come to mind. And more recently, there are many, many more I can talk about. Visolis recently launched one of the world's first carbon negative brands for skin care called AMEVA. So that's again a success story, in my opinion, where we have scaled up a technology to a point where it is commercially viable for a consumer product to use.
EBEN BAYER: I'm not going to add to that list. But I do want to up some of the ones that were discussed like Z Biotechs. I'm so interested in their product because I think it offers a tangible benefit to the consumer. And I think that is where there's tipping point between medicine like insulin, or it's like you die if you don't get it. So there's arbitrary pricing power.
EBEN BAYER: I say this is type I diabetic. And then starting to get to things that are optional but really can have a positive impact in folks life, and that can be in food. That can be in a probiotic you take, it being a skin care ingredient. But we're definitely in those examples you heard, starting to hit that tipping point, where people might-- will buy products because they are engineered and give them an exceptional experience.
EBEN BAYER: And in my belief, that's when the magic of capitalism starts to suck in-- starts to kick in and suck these things up to like total global scale. And that's where we get like a really cool profit impact flywheel.
EMILY LEPROUST: I really like what Eben said. It's about the not instant gratification but instant validation of the product feature. It's not like, oh, take this probiotic, and you live 30 years longer. No, you'll never know. But with that probiotic, you know the next day if it works or not. And so I think that that's the path to success, is that instant validation of the product features.
EMILY LEPROUST: And you know what Eben is doing, who is still using Styrofoam in packaging? I mean, it should be-- there should be legislation on that because it's going to have a huge impact. Some people are-- they love meat, but they are vegetarian because they know that it's better for the environment. Well, you could have a much bigger impact by getting rid of all the Styrofoam tomorrow.
EMILY LEPROUST: So there's a lot of things that if you did at scale, it will improve the health and sustainability of humans in the planet.
EBEN BAYER: And that I think is the fundamental value proposition of synbio, which is biology is the technology that's lived on Earth for billions of years. We've lived with it. It's like self-repairing for the planet. We got everything we could out of first generation biology 2000 years ago with farming and agriculture. Now, we're entering the second S-curve. And the cool thing is capitalism takes S-curves and with extreme benefit and scales them.
EBEN BAYER: This will be the first technology-- the Industrial Revolution was amazing, but we released all this carbon. This will be the first technology that as it scales can actually do global good on the planet while also unlocking new things that consumers really want. And so it'll be the first time in my belief that capitalism is a want or need fulfillment. Machine will be coupled with the technology that intrinsically can do good by scaling, and that's what gets me excited about synthetic biology.
DEEPAK DUGAR: At Visolis, we just call it regenerative capitalism. So you're going to not just extract from the environment but help it. And in doing so, you delight the consumers and delight the planet at the same time.
EMILY LEPROUST: Hey, there is nothing wrong with carbon. Carbon is just in the wrong place. That could be mycelium instead of being in the air. Carbon should be MyBacon mycelium.
DEEPAK DUGAR: Carbon should be everywhere else apart from the atmosphere.
EBEN BAYER: We'll get to where it needs to go.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: And what about consumer adoption? What do you think it will take for customers to buy synthetic biology products?
EMILY LEPROUST: In my mind, yeah, the consumer-- in my mind, consumers are not going to change their behavior just based on morality. I mean, it's just not going to happen. And you, you're going to change a fraction, but the vast majority won't. And so if you ask people to make sacrifices, it's not going to work. And so you have to create solutions where that get adopted at scale, and that creates 1 plus 1, which is, it's great for the lifestyle of what that person wants to do.
EMILY LEPROUST: And at the same time is great for the health of the planet. And that's the power of synthetic biology, is that you get an improved lifestyle, and you get improvements sustainability for free. And therefore, whatever product you sell, it has to be better for the person, better for the environment, and most likely also has to be cheaper. And technology will deliver that.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: So moving on to talk a little bit about synbio business, what impact has the downturn in the biotech sector, at least in public markets had on your business and growth plans, if any?
EBEN BAYER: I'm happy to talk to that. So we're full steam ahead in this growth-- in this environment. We've brought a bunch of plants online this summer for end use products. So we built the world's largest aerial mycelium farm in the world this summer. That allows us to produce upwards of $20 million of our MyBacon product and similar amounts of hides for the leather industry.
EBEN BAYER: And we see incredible demand. We're in 10 different locations now in our-- for our bacon product. We still sell out weekly at four or five times the sales velocity. And so I do think the funding environment has changed drastically, which happens. People are either manic or depressive in terms of these markets.
EBEN BAYER: But what we're not seeing is consumer pull changing. We're still seeing the same demand for the products we're creating and the same long-term cultural trends around those. And so I do think accessing capital is going to be more expensive for everyone in the coming years. But I haven't seen anything change in the fundamental reasons why we're in the field, both the strengths that synbio bring, the things that people want to buy, and then what we're actually able to now create at scale.
EBEN BAYER: And so prepared for higher cost of capital but buoyed by the fact that consumers want what we want. And ultimately, that's what's going to decide what goes.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, so in our last couple of minutes, I just want to ask each of you, why are we even talking about this today? It seems like people who are at the forefront of synthetic biology are willing and incredibly motivated to take on sometimes huge headaches in order to forge these new paths in all the different areas that we've been discussing. So why is that?
DEEPAK DUGAR: I think it's still such a new industry. If you think of it from the context of what's up ahead for us to build, there are still massive amounts of products to be made, services to be delivered in the space. And none of that exists today. And we are the very, very, very beginnings of creating those technologies, scaling those technologies. It's not something where you can just go to someone and like, I want to license a technology to build a mycelium farm.
DEEPAK DUGAR: You cannot do that. Eben has to build it himself. For example, for us, we'd love to just have that off shelf and just build that. Even that does not exist today. So we're at this very, very early stage and a lot of the things we're talking about is how do we make sure that we can deliver on that promise? Make sure that all the work we are doing goes towards building something which is lasting and impactful.
DEEPAK DUGAR: So I think it's very topical to be talking about this at this stage.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: Emily.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yeah, to begin on what Deepak said, indeed we are at the beginning. And what that means is it's like the semiconductor in 1960s. Coming out now and trying to compete with NVIDIA and Intel and AMD is like just so-- it would be so difficult. But it's just nascent and industry. There is massive wide space. And yeah, it's just an amazing amount of opportunities for people that are smart and they're willing to take risk and entrepreneurial.
EMILY LEPROUST: And I think it will attract a lot of great minds, and it will have just an amazing positive impact on the planet. We hire a lot of people. And some of the science software engineers we are hiring, they have a choice of working for Google, working on the autofill or work at Twist to build tools that are going to help customers cure cancer and remove carbon from the air.
EMILY LEPROUST: It's just so much more exciting. And so I think it will suck in and appeal to a lot of really smart people that want to have a positive impact on the planet and create economic value. And I can't wait to see what happens in the next few decades. But I think it's going to be great.
EBEN BAYER: Yeah, I'd build on that. I think more and more, we see folks that want to work with purpose and not just folks coming out of college but people have been in big corporate for 20 years. They're like, I'd love to work-- I'm worried about the world. I'm worried about my children or my friends children's lives. They want to work with purpose. And so biology is really at that scaling point.
EBEN BAYER: I love the semiconductor in the 1960s. I agree with the placement. I mean, nylon is synthesized, and the program started in 1928. It was on the market in '38. You could argue at the end of 100 year optimization cycle. We are still so early in this, and during this, we just talked about tangible things you can get now that actually work in capitalism that are starting to scale up.
EBEN BAYER: And so just so much opportunity in this space, again build great businesses, get paid, have a good life, and leave the world better than you found it. It's the first time in the past 200 years in an economic system like capitalism, you can have that value proposition for the world. That gets me out of bed in the morning.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, terrific. I mean, is there one thing-- this will be my last question. Is there one thing that you wish people knew about synthetic biology that you think is either misunderstood or which people don't know? Eben.
EBEN BAYER: I would just say synthetic biology always sounds like synthetic. But most of biology is around-- has always been around moving genes around, either through breeding, horizontal gene transfer. And my view is we're taking this beautiful technology that's always been here, always been working to make a Spaceship Earth a habitable place. And we're finally getting to be stewards of this technology and use it in ways that support life on Earth without damaging the planet.
EBEN BAYER: So I just want people to feel like it's not this new scary concept that humans have brought into the world but instead a toolkit that was always there. It's always been part of nature. And now we're just tuning it as we have many other things over the years.
DEEPAK DUGAR: Yeah, it's just biology, as Eben said. No one is cared about biology. But I think people get scared about things they don't understand or believe they don't understand or might have a big negative consequence. So I think to me, as a student of this piece, it's just biology. We have gone through multiple terms. It used to be called recombinant DNA technology. And I don't know if people recognize today, but back in the day, there were three flavors of biotech.
DEEPAK DUGAR: There was a white biotech. There was a green biotech. There was a red biotech, each defining the application, which is funny to think of today. But these are just terms we utilize, and they generally emerge in academia, where people want to know what's new, what's different than what was done previously? So the origins of these terms has historically been academic, trying to pin down what is new and different from the previous 5, 10 years.
DEEPAK DUGAR: But that may not be very amenable when you're trying to communicate with the broader general public. So I think it's just biology from that perspective.
EMILY LEPROUST: Yeah, totally agree. I think talking about synthetic biology was important at the beginning to rally the science around. But now I think we're probably moving into more needing to talk about applications about products. And the other great products that the customer will use, be delighted with, enable them to have wonderful lives, and at the same time doing great for the planet.
JULIANNA LEMIEUX: OK, great. Well, thank you, Emily. Thank you, Eben and Deepak for this terrific conversation. We look forward to following Twist, Ecovative, and Visolis in the future here at GEN. And to our audience, please stay tuned for some closing remarks for all of GEN's editorial staff.
EMILY LEPROUST: Thank you.
DEEPAK DUGAR: Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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