Now It's Nothing But Flowers
Notes from Synbiobeta 2025 Day 1
Happy Friday! This post we have news to catch up on from Lori Garver on the Musk/Trump blow-up on space tech, Mary Meeker’s AI trends, the World Bank lifting its ban on funding nuclear power, and more. But first, this week’s deep focus thought piece: bioengineering trends from Synbiobeta 2025 Day 1
This Week’s Deep Focus: Synbiobeta 2025 Day 1
Last month I was in San Jose, CA and was able to attend Synbiobeta. Below are some of the exciting and inspiring trends in bioengineering from Day 1. All good things are coming up. It’s nothing but flowers!
Next Era of (Bio)Computing: Stanford’s Drew Endy and Microsoft’s Kevin Scott discussed where AI and bioengineering are headed by 2050. Drew points out that at the time of his talk that it was only 9006 days away. They both shared that the ability to produce things locally is a natural ally to democracy. Bioengineering revolutions are not only essential for the future but for emerging markets like India it is existential. They expect something like an Xbox for biology in your home as well as full AI models of a cell. Currently, our knowledge of the cell function is like having a software code base where nobody understood 33% of the code. The federal government needs to improve full-scale bio-manufacturing perhaps via national bio-bonds. Currently AI is bioengineering’s big sister but is rapidly progressing through high school. The world will become more bio-engineering enabled and more leaders need to go from “pre-biotic” to “pro-biotic.”
UK Policy for Bio-economy Growth: Lord David Willets spoke about regulatory innovation in the UK including regulatory revelation as a value add for startups. As I have heard from my friends at UK BioIndustry Association (BIA), the government wants to become pro-innovation and to regulate the product not the product. It includes procurement incentives after a startup makes it through a regulatory regime to help them commercialize. They see Estonia and Singapore as places to learn from and collaborate with. With the US, they see an opportunity to align regulatory regimes. For those in the US, you can work with them via a consulate they have on the West Coast.
Rewriting Life’s Code To Create New Materials: Renowned bio-engineer Jason Chin explained how he and Constructive Bio are building “new to nature molecules.” They have posed the question the central dogma that triplet codons of DNA determine the sequence of amino acids in a protein. They are trying to incorporate more than just 20 amino acids into genetic code. One example is the creation of Syn61, the first synthetically re-coded organism and is therefore genetically isolated from all of life’s organisms. Some of the benefits for bio-production include: resistance to bacteriophage (virus for bacteria), isolation from horizontal gene transfer, and introducing non-canonical amino acids. Combined these benefits translate to more sustainable and resilient production as well as biological molecules with completely new properties.
Designing Intelligence in Molecules: Jakob Uszkoreit at Inceptive was working on early transformer models at Google and wanted to use his skills in an area that might make more of a difference: AI + Bio. With the release of Alpha Fold 2, he saw how the swapping out of neural networks to transformers made a huge difference. Breakthroughs in AI and BIo will see models with training data across modalities like conditional activity, which are programmed into a molecule.
Psychedelic Science Meets Biotech: Steve Jurvetson, Gul Dolen, and Rick Doblin discussed the benefits of psychedelics for concussions and therapy for veterans. A key point was that micro-dosing doesn’t work and any usage is best in group therapy. Their hope is that US states legislative reform will continue to unlock benefits similar to patients in Rwanda, Beirut, and Ukraine.
Corporates Using Bioengineering: Lee Ellen Drechsler and Andy Weatherston at Proctor and Gamble (P&G) use bioengineering in many ways. For example, P&G has used chelating agents in their hair products to prevent the damage from accumulating metals in water. Similarly, they used enzymes to allow cleaning without hot water to reduce the carbon footprint of laundry since 80% of carbon is in the “use” phase. One area of interest are new materials for their products that can be made locally or from waste streams. In addition, they are working with the National Science Foundation (NSF) on digital design of biopolymers. Regardless of the technology, consumers only care that it works and is safe. For P&G, bioengineering supports their short-term goals as well as long-term corporate objectives.
Investing in Bioengineering: Jenny Rooke at Genoa Ventures discussed how industrial bioengineering is unlike food and agriculture given its 7-10 year time frame for returns. One process she has used when possible (and similar to what I have done over the years) is to develop a list of comparables and compare new investments to their capital raised. Selective competency instead of building platforms and a focus on products differentiates bioengineering from traditional biotech for pharma. Investors with a product background are highly valuable for founders instead of traditional biotech investors.
Investor Luncheon: The panel of Jenny Rooke at Genoa Ventures, Karl Handelsman at Codon Capital, and Josko Bobanovic at Sofinnova began their discussion with a focus on the difficulty of financing platforms. Capital efficiency is key while rapidly commercializing. Karl emphasized that business development is important and needs to start while raising funds. Jenny added that having contacts or a strategic investor who will buy from you is crucial. Without a Softbank, you need more modest, reasonable and cheaper fundraising rounds. Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) may be tough so mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is the most likely exit. Karl looks for a team doing something very hard that no one else can do and can sell its product in 18 months. Possible acquirers include corporates looking for bio-based chemical replacement for their business since customers are still asking for greening of the supply chain. Final tips for investor success are an examination of both wins and losses as well as building syndicates to connect to strategics.
Brain Technologies: The panel of Ed Boyden at Synlife, Jeanne Loring at Aspen Neuroscience, Jean Hebert at ARPA-H, Andrew Payne at E11 Bio, and Sumner Norman at Forest Neurotech began with discussion of how far are we from brain repair or augmentation. The consensus is that augmentation will come after repair is understood. Connectomics is possible if we can get on a Moore’s Law growth curve via expansion microscopy, single cell genomics in bioengineering, and bar coding in synthetic biology. The panel finished their discussion with some of the more philosophical aspects of their field like defining consciousness, brain technology related to the classic ship of Theseus paradox, and if we can build the brain interface before AI super intelligence arrives.
Computational Enzymes: Alexandre Zanghellini at Arzeda had me at better tasting Stevia made via bioengineering. It tasted much more like sugar than Stevia does. Arzeda uses AI to design enzymes and proteins to make better products and very cheaply due to these more efficient biological solutions. Enzymes have a lot of applications including breaking down plastics and other textiles for recycling like Birch Biosciences.
Caffeine and Chocolate Production: A great panel with a founder friend Alan Perlstein at California Cultured, Maricel Saenz at Compound Foods, Hanne Volpin at Celleste Bio, and Dario Breitel at Kokomodo discussed the ways bioengineering can solve the problems in these two industries. For example, chocolate production is hard labor and frequently uses child labor and its production draws heavy metals into chocolate with consumer health implications. With coffee, the work is also hard, a workforce over 55 years old with mega corporations clear cutting to take their place. Europe has made a rule that you can’t source coffee from a forest that was clear cut after 2020. Matcha tea and pistachios are also going to see a supply crunch in 2-3 years. In addition to all of these issues and supply shortfalls, we also have the macro trend of moving away from globalization via re-shoring manufacturing and tariffs. Cellular agriculture and other bioengineering processes can not only make these products local and sustainable but also better for us and our world.
Future of the US Bio-economy: The final panel for the day consisted of Carrie Wolinetz at Lewis-Burke Associates, Sylvia Wulf at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), and Ian Edvalson at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati. Carrie began with the US need for a national strategy. Like I mentioned many times to friends, we need to bring all the parts of the ecosystem together to raise these startups. Regulatory reform could bifurcate regulatory scrutiny to more novel work and less for incremental technology. Philanthropic organizations can create a regulatory sandbox. Public and private sides all need to be at the table for policy discussions to craft national strategy.
Next up Day 2 (of 3) from Synbiobeta 2025!
DeepTech News & More
AI
AI Trends: The famous investor Mary Meeker has put out her latest report on the AI market with themes of unprecedented growth and the capabilities of deep learning (shoutout to my friends at Atlas AI and Inception Labs on deep learning’s value). 340 page read
AI Arena: My friend Sara Hooker at Cohere recommends this video that touches on the work she has done at Cohere on the leaderboard arena problem in measuring AI performance. 27 min watch
Mamba LLM: Really interesting work out of Nvidia, Berkeley, and other universities on using a mamba state space to enrich token embeddings to reduce the amount of processing needed. 26 page read
AI Kontext: Black Forest Labs recent model does a great job of retaining context across images so artists can produce coherent stories with consistent characters. 7 min read
Energy
World Nuclear: The World Bank ended its longtime ban on funds for nuclear power. 4 min read
Nuclear Fuel: Standard Nuclear raised $42M to provide nuclear fuel to the US. 2 min read
Geothermal Utah: Fervo Energy announced $206M in additional investment via its novel way to drill horizontally for reservoirs of hot water. 5 min read
Solar Death: As I have said before, the current administration is killing any benefits for renewables and nuclear is the only clean energy getting any real love. 8 min read
Quantum
Quantum China: China ramps up photonic chip production in the race for AI and quantum computing dominance. 6 min read
Quantum Inflection: In a bit of turnabout from earlier this year, Nvidia CEO says quantum computing is reaching its inflection point. 2 min read
Quantum Acquire: IonQ bought Oxford Ionics for about $1B. 7 min read
Russian Quantum: It looks like Russian scientists have developed a method to shrink transistors to the scale of atoms via superconducting quantum coprocessors that could mean even faster computers in the future. 26 min read
Space
Space IPO: Voyager Technologies did well in their stock market debut and hopefully it’s the beginning of a wave of deep tech IPOs. 3 min read
Musk NASA: Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver discusses the Musk/Trump dust up as well as Jared Isaacman’s scuttled nomination for NASA administrator. 50 min listen
NASA Possibilities: Former candidate for NASA administrator Jared Isaacman discussed what he would have done as head of NASA and it’s pretty interesting. 7 min read
Quad Space: The US Congress is trying to get the QUAD (US, India, Australia, and Japan) back together for space cooperation. 3 min read
Dominant SpaceX: Here is a nice overview by Payload Space on why SpaceX dominates the launch market and that there is an opportunity for more providers. 4 min read
Synthetic Biology
AI Science: Straight from Synbiobeta 2025, FutureHouse launched their AI reasoning model for chemistry tasks that performs better than human researchers. 6 min read
Designer IVF: Peter Thiel backed a startup doing controversial work on optimizing embryos for intelligence. Yikes! 4 min read
Pill Stress: My friend Michael Koeris at DARPA wants to learn if modulating neurons in the intestine could help warfighters better handle stress. 4 min read
Bio Carolina: North Carolina is seeing a boom in biotech which is strategically important to the US according to the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NCSEB). 4 min read
Your Future Career: Communities and Resources
You do not have to be a scientist to work at any of these companies. They need all kinds of skills like any company, especially with regards to commercialization. So don’t exclude yourself from an exciting career. For an overview and a whole host of resources for each of the deep tech areas, see this post and this other post of mine.
Ignition News: Great easy to read resource for keeping up with what is going on in the nuclear industry.
Payload Space: It’s a great resource for space startups news in an easy to read format and they have events in different parts of the US.
Quantum Biology Speaker Series: Weekly speaker series hosted by my friend Prof Clarice Aiello on various topics in quantum biology.
Quantum Computing: My friend Marianna Bonanome at SandboxAQ has lots of resources from podcasts to explainers, including a new residency program for graduate students.
Space Ambition: Regular video office hours where they break down the business case for space tech for current and future founders and advisors.
Synbiobeta: One of a few of my favorite communities run by my friend John Cumbers for synthetic biology with tracks including space medicine and brain computer interfaces. Highly recommend it if you are a student, a founder, or investor.
TWiML: I attended one of the first events that This Week In Machine Learning (TWiML) ever ran and it was better than any other AI conference I had attended. Sam Charrington runs a wonderful podcast series as well as a community section with study groups on Slack.
Utility Dive: A nice summary of energy and utility news to keep in the loop.
XPrize Adventure Trip: My friends over at the XPrize have. a pretty cool deeptech adventure trip planned for Glasgow, Cambridge, and London. Very cool experience if you aren’t already a practitioner plus the people that participate in these trips are great to know.