Why Synthetic Biology is Necessary for Continued Human Prosperity

This is a first pass of my opinion on Synthetic Biology’s prospects based on my learning so far. At the end, I briefly mention some companies in the space I think are interesting as well. If you have a sec, I’d really appreciate any of your feedback here or in the comments (anything from points of disagreement to recommendations for further research are greatly appreciated).

Summary

Fossil fuels and mechanization gave every individual access to the work capacity equivalent of hundreds of people. With fossil fuels declining, the climate warming, and our population expanding, we will have to find ways to be more efficient at everything we do. I argue that biology will be a crucial lever in bringing that efficiency, especially in agriculture, health, and manufacturing. Additionally, these forces will drive automation and data infrastructure to improve, which will also help biotechnology scale. Finally, I will discuss some companies in this area and how changes in the synthetic biology community may make biotechnology display internet company economics in the future.

Influences

I feel context is always important in understanding how people see the future, so I wanted to briefly discuss my background, and some people/ideas I find persuasive.

I am a CS major, Coterming in EE, and have spent much of the last three years doing research in AI, Computer Networks, Hardware Acceleration, and Computer Systems. Silicon Valley techno-optimism certainly has had an impact on me: I believe innovation in computer systems/hardware will continue over the long-term as we demand ever more from our computers.

Below are also some experts that have influenced my thinking on other trends I’ve discussed in this article, along with references to learn more:

• Prof. Drew Endy on Engineering Biology [1]
• Vinod Khosla on Entrepreneurship [2]
• David Friedberg on Reinventing Supply Chains [3]
• Nadia Eghbal [4] on Open Source Software [5]
• Jeremy Grantham on Climate Change [6, 7] and Population Dynamics [8]

Finally, I don’t believe in forecasting specific outcomes. I find that such predictions are usually accurate because they are self-fulfilling prophecies (namely, the people predicting are involved in making it happen) or sheer luck (see Thinking Fast and Slow for a beautiful treatment, or this blog post). Instead, I hope to paint a large confidence interval of possible future we should prepare for and work towards.

Let’s get to it!

Thesis

“Biology has been able to … harness energy into vast abilities to transmute forms of matter…. which is just as crucial as the initial domestication of plants and animals thousands of years ago. Synthetic biology will impact chemicals and materials, energy, and human and animal editing,” — Vinod Khosla, paraphrasing George Church

The key risk for the development of Synthetic Biology (SynBio), especially startups, is the dependence on fundamental research. This creates indefinite time horizons for product development, which can be very risky. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the SynBio cornucopia will form over the next 10 to 30 years, and I want to tell you why.

Social Forces

To come up with a set of possible futures, let’s first constrain the options by looking at well established global trends.

The two we’ll consider here are population growth/aging and climate change. These will clearly drive new demand and large shifts in our economy, but they will also push us to get good at SynBio. As fundamental science progresses to meet this growing need, industry will follow soon after.

Population Growth and Aging

The UN estimates that the human population will grow to 9.7 billion in 2050. Demand for consumer goods will rise as a result, and inputs into the economy will likely stay the same or decline, as we’re already seeing. That means increased resource efficiency will be extremely important, and biological systems have evolved for exactly that purpose. New biomanufacturing techniques are already being used to produce medicines, food, plastics, and fake leather!

Furthermore, the developed world population is rapidly aging, which will result in global labor shocks if left unchecked. We can avoid this productivity glut by either outsourcing labor to new markets or by leveraging the boom in automation. Given the new desire (even Executive Order) for resilient domestic supply chains, we will likely go the automation route (China’s already doing this). This will further catalyze growth in AI, robotics, and datacenter/edge networks for data processing.

Finally, the aging population will require better care. Our health care system is already messed up, and with COVID eroding trust in flip-flopping government agencies (~10% decline), people will push for want more control over their health, leading to decentralization and personalization. SynBio/Biotech will provide exactly that, by tailoring medicine to your genome and debugging your health in real time.

Climate

The atmosphere is warming, and that will cause huge changes across the globe, especially for agriculture. Industrial farming is grossly inefficient and will be forced to end: our food’s nutrient density has been declining, farms are a huge emissions problem, and large swaths of farm land will become unusable due to temperature changes. There is no question that a better deployment of biology will be needed to feed humanity. There are already companies making supplements from algae, growing seafood and red meat, and fixing nitrogen in the soil, and all this requires the deep synthetic biology of tweaking organisms. Furthermore, the growing market for sustainable foods, already being pioneered by companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, demonstrates this vision’s feasibility.

This has established the necessity of developing our ability to engineer biology. But why will our ability to develop these technologies suddenly take off in response? Obviously crises have driven scientific progress in the past (the Manhattan Project is a very common example), but there are other structural barriers just as availability of tooling, cost of R&D, etc. So what is special about the current moment?

But Why Now?

1. Internet Economics

The alternative protein businesses mentioned above still have economics similar to traditional R&D-driven manufacturing operations. However, synthetic biology is currently decentralizing in ways similar to computer science in the 80s and 90s. There are two aspects to this democratization: interacting with physical biology and designing it.

For interaction with biology:

DNA sequencing (reading DNA) has been dropping in cost (far) faster than Moore’s law over the last 15+ years. Synthesis (writing DNA) did slow down, but new technologies are putting the industry back on an exponential cost reduction. There isn’t yet a great way for hobbyists to do biomanufacturing in their backyard, yet, but I would speculate that this may be solved eventually as well.

On the design side, the SynBio community has had strong roots in open source. There are educational competitions like iGEM, open repositories of proteins, and catalogs of modular biological components. These can be composed and replicated under open-source licenses, just like Python packages! With this environment, I think we will see a new hacker culture of biologists collaborating to design new, interesting life-forms on their portable DNA readers and fermenters.

With code-bases that compose over time, open-source fueling common infrastructure, and cheap iteration costs to develop new products, SynBio will be just like the internet.

2. Correlation with Tech

As with any science, your conclusions are as good as your data accuracy and experimental design. There have been rapid advances in imaging, biometric data collection, and even the ability to track gene expression at a cellular level (seriously this stuff is bonkers) so these look to be evolving rapidly. Therefore, as our analysis methods catch up, we’d expect research to accelerate.

As with other sorts of complex data, especially in production, AI looks to be a key tool for extracting meaningful insights in biology. On the experiment side, robots can similarly be used to accelerate scientific investigation by automating lab work. If Silicon Valley continues to get better at machine learning and robotic automation, we will automate the most time (and capital)-consuming bottlenecks in bio-sciences. With labor needs poised to incentivize further improvement in AI and robotics, this looks to be an inevitability.

Finally, our ability to do low-power edge data processing (pioneered by smart devices, phone electronics, and health wearables) will allow us to collect copious amounts of user data. As Tesla has shown with developing autonomous driving through sheer power of training data, SynBio consumer devices will pipe huge amounts of user data to the modern data-centers and help us churn out better science and products as a result.

3. Exponential Growth

Paying homage to Amazon’s famous diagram, I want to summarize these two factors in a virtuous cycle of growth for the industry:

As any company grows, and even the industry itself, costs go down, which allows even greater use of specialized computing technologies, deployment of larger AI systems, and bigger robot labs. As a result scientific development speeds up.

This is used to make better products, which has an important role is sparking the public imagination, and increasing cultural acceptance for consumer synthetic biology. I imagine that, just like computers, such excitement will inspire hobbyists and tinkers to create, publish, and share their work on the Internet (and maybe XR metaverse). These public good turn around and become a support network for further developments in the science, driving growth once more.

Risks

It is possible that government regulations drastically slow down the development timelines we currently see. Although, with so many startups popping up, that doesn’t seem like an issue so far. Additionally, there is a risk of this technology causing unforeseen health problems or even being used fo bioterror attacks. However, I like many others see this problem like the issue of cybersecurity: as long as we stay aware of the potential risks and are mindful about our investment in security, we will be okay. Anyways, just because we stop working on biology, doesn’t mean bad actors will, so at the least, this is more of a reason to continue engineering organisms.

Example Companies

During a gold rush, you should make sure to sell mining equipment right?

Emerald Cloud Lab is exactly that sort of firm. They are a Series C company with $55.8 M raised, 105 employees, and founded in 2010.

They manage a cloud platform for bio-science lab experiments. The key here is that all trials are scalable and measurements about everything — ambient temperature, machine settings/model, time to insertion — are tracked automatically so all experiments are fully reproducible by anyone across the globe. Furthermore, this produces the same abstraction as AWS did for internet companies: you no longer need a highly trained lab technician or PhD students slaving away to run tests. Scientists can focus on the questions and their research can be fully operationalized by others. They have even made their own environment for “coding” experiments and doing analysis and comparisons of experiment data.

Another super cool company is DNA Script. They are a Series B company with $102.2 M raised, 88 employees, and founded in 2014.

This is the startup mentioned earlier which which has made commercially viable Enzymatic DNA Synthesis (EDS) as a faster, cheaper alternative to conventional DNA synthesis methods. This service is essential to the continuing development of the field. Anyone working in synthetic biology needs DNA synthesis, and although labs can do it themselves right now, it can take a long time and mistakes can be costly. DNA Script’s “benchtop DNA printer” sounds like a far more convenient solution. They have 10x’ed their revenue from 2018 to 2019 at a doubling of operating expenses. As they grow and use scale to build their product for even cheaper, this should only continue.

Two other companies with similar theses to the ones above are Culture Biosciences and Twist Bioscience. I would highly recommend checking them out as well.

Conclusion

Our bodies, our biology are vitally important to every second of our lives as human beings. I think there is nothing more natural than for us to gain mastery over these systems, just as we did with fire, steam engines, or electronics. Equipped with the ability to directly debug diseases and to engineer life in the environment, we will be able to reinvent all aspects of our lives and usher decades (if not longer) of sustained health and prosperity.