SynBioBeta @SynBioBeta

🔥 Week 43! 40 Bay Area Bio-economy events, Oct 19-25 🔥 🔗 docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d… 🔗 New this week: the sheet has two tabs. 📅 By Day runs in calendar order, so you can plan your week. 🗂️ By Topic groups every event by field, so you can jump straight to yours. 𝗕𝗬 𝗧𝗢𝗣𝗜𝗖 11 💊 Drug Discovery & Trials 9 🧬 Genomics, Proteins & Omics 7 🚀 Capital & Dealmaking 5 🌱 Industrial & Environmental Bio 3 🏥 Clinical & Care Delivery 3 🧠 Neuro & BCI 1 💪 Human Performance & Wellness 1 🌸 Women's Health & Fertility 𝗕𝗬 𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗠𝗔𝗧 11 Seminar / Lecture 6 Webinar 5 Workshop / Hands-on 4 Mixer / Social / Outdoor 4 Panel / Salon 4 Vendor Lunch & Learn 3 Conference / Symposium 2 Pitch / Demo Day 1 Info Session 𝗕𝗬 𝗟𝗢𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 12 Virtual 11 San Francisco 5 Berkeley 4 San Carlos 3 South San Francisco 3 Stanford 1 Fremont 1 Oakland 𝗕𝗬 𝗗𝗔𝗬 7 Mon Oct 19 7 Tue Oct 20 13 Wed Oct 21 10 Thu Oct 22 2 Fri Oct 23 1 Sun Oct 25

100+ people signed up for tonight's Laptop and Learn in Walnut Creek. For a Thursday night event east of the tunnel, that's kind of wild. The format is simple. People in bio show each other how they actually use AI at work. One-minute pitch to the room, then 15-minute demos around laptops. No slides. Here's who's demoing tonight: Rupert Yip and Sarosh Naseem of Mithrl will show Mithrl-1, their biomedical world model. Frederik Schulz of @jgi is bringing an AI scientist benchmark and next-generation bioinformatics tools. Jim Dickey of Agentis will walk through their AI approach to designing antibodies and nanobodies against cancer neoantigens, on a timeline of weeks after biopsy. Sean Jungbluth of BioKEA is demoing a workflow that goes from a prompt to a 3D-printed biological tool prototype. Robin Green, founding scientist at a stealth startup, will show data pipelines built in Claude and how wet lab scientists with no coding background can build their own tools. Erika Trauzzi of @Agilent will show how to pitch a product idea in one step. Dion Whitehead of metapages is bringing open source AI artifacts that let you build with any AI while keeping control of your data. Ahmad Salehi of Donor Network West will talk through organ donation in Northern California. Flavius Miron of Human Squared will show AI creators producing short-form video for brands. Plus demos from Zack Zheng of Vazyme, Haotian Guo of Ailurus Bio, and a Saint Francis High School student who built a de novo protein design pipeline targeting avian flu. 5:00 drinks and networking 6:00 demos, three rounds 7:00 more drinks, more networking Free, thanks to our friends at @Acrisure and @humaninterest. Steps from Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre BART. Request a spot: luma.com/xioobrw7 See you at 1350 Treat Blvd tonight. @SynBioBeta #AI #biotech #synbio

Boston lab space is 28.9% empty. The Bay Area is at 30.7%. Houston is at 26.3%. The XBI is up more than 20% this year. So why is no one moving back into these labs? Honestly, it shouldn't surprise anyone. Back in 2021 and 2022, the whole game was cramming as many researchers and benches into a building as you could. A few things changed that pretty fast. - AI-native biotechs lease about a third less space per person. - Pharma is licensing molecules and sending manufacturing overseas. When we ran a talk at MBC Biolabs, we heard that close to 80% of the companies there outsource some or all of their manufacturing to Chinese firms. - Later-stage companies want office, not lab. They're managing assets already in trials. The lab of 2026 just looks different. Teams are smaller. The science is AI-native. And a lot of the actual work isn't happening in Boston or SF anymore. It's happening in Shanghai and Suzhou. The R&D that does happen here is smaller, leaner, and set up to scale out somewhere else. Those teams don't need rows of benches. They need machines. If your building has 500 benches but not a single mass spec, liquid handler, or flow cytometer, nobody's going to want it. The equipment is the real bottleneck for early-stage work. The few groups that still want big footprints are building them around robots and power. @LilaSciences grabbed about 244,000 sq ft at Alewife Park in Cambridge for autonomous labs. @medra_ai put hundreds of robots into a concrete industrial building in SF. So here's the uncomfortable part. These buildings were built for a tenant that doesn't exist anymore. That tenant isn't coming back. Leaving the space empty and hoping 2021 returns isn't a plan. You have to rebuild it for who actually needs space now. - Deep tech and hard tech. I've been talking with groups here in SF, and a lot of robotics and hardware teams are looking for exactly this kind of space. Strong floors, real power, good ventilation. Retrofitting a lab is way faster than building new. - Incubators built around machines, not benches. Rip out the bench rows and put in the instruments early-stage companies can't afford on their own. MBC Biolabs is already doing this. Shared instruments, shared equipment, small teams that don't need 50,000 sq ft. Landlords who follow that blueprint will fill their buildings. The ones waiting on 2021 are going to keep sitting empty.

@sensible_bio secured $47M in combined financing to scale cell-based mRNA design, screening and clinical-grade manufacturing. dealroom.co/news/159939-se… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

When the hen is the bioreactor, flock health is process control. Neion Bio engineers hens to make biologic drugs in their eggs. Now it is bringing in Barnwell Bio, whose founders come from COVID wastewater surveillance, to watch the health of its flocks. Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&… "Neion uses chickens to manufacture recombinant proteins. Barnwell provides the intelligence needed to understand and protect the health environment in which those chickens live," says Dimi Kellari, cofounder and CEO of Neion Bio Two #Manhattan biotechs, one unusual partnership. Visit the #SynBioBeta website to read the full article. synbiobeta.com/read/neion-bio…

@bigideaventures is accepting applications for its food-innovation accelerator and direct-investment pathways across food, agtech and sustainable materials. bigideaventures.com/apply-now/ Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

@SuntheticsML , @scrippsresearch and @UCLA are using a $19.5M NSF award to build an open-access, closed-loop autonomous chemistry lab. sunthetics.io/blog-posts/nsf… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

Deisseroth, Hegemann and Nagel won the 2026 Nobel Medicine Prize for the discoveries behind light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. apnews.com/article/nobel-… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

Xaira reports that X-Design produced progressable antibody leads in weeks, including an antagonist for a GPCR target that resisted prior discovery methods. xaira.com/news/de-novo-d… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

@CochranLab at @Stanford went looking for a peptide against one cancer target and found one that binds five. Its spinout @TwoStep has now raised $71.2 million and has FDA IND clearance to begin human trials TwoStep Therapeutics grew out of the Stanford labs of #NobelPrize laureate Carolyn Bertozzi and Jennifer Cochran, with oncologist Ronald Levy as a co-founder. Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&… Its targeting molecule, PIP, is 33 amino acids long. The lab was screening for a binder to one integrin. The peptide that kept winning binds five. "It was a serendipitous discovery." @CaitlynBioE , CEO and co-founder, TwoStep That breadth matters. A tumor needs to express only one of the five for the drug to find it. TwoStep just raised a $62.5M Series A and won FDA IND clearance for TS-104. Visit the SynBioBeta website to read the full article: synbiobeta.com/read/nobel-lau…

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@theEVERYcompany is expanding OvoPro with Huvepharma and ADM as precision fermentation moves from pilot capacity toward commercial manufacturing. linkedin.com/pulse/what-yea… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

PreferCo appointed Shakthi M. Nagappan as CMD as it builds an integrated precision-fermentation platform spanning strain engineering through scale-up. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

@LonzaGroup and @AsimovBio are combining LV Edge stable producer cells with process development and GMP manufacturing for scalable in vivo lentiviral vectors. asimov.com/news/lonza-and… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

Biomay and @Synthego are linking cGMP mRNA, Cas9, plasmid, LNP and sgRNA capabilities to simplify manufacturing for CRISPR programs. contractpharma.com/breaking-news/… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

@ARPA_H is betting it can stop neurodegeneration at the first misfolded protein. Post Translational Medicines is part of one of the teams. The San Francisco startup is one of 7 industry partners on a team that won up to $51.7 million from ARPA-H's BIOGAMI program. It will use its Surveyor platform to measure protein states directly inside cells. Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&… Visit the SynBioBeta website to read the full article synbiobeta.com/read/post-tran…

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If you're building in biomanufacturing and looking for someone to lead your round, look no further than Jonathan Mercado. He drives the thesis at @FirstBight Ventures, a fund that leads seed through Series A, takes board seats, and is about as founder friendly as investors get. First Bight is a Houston fund that invests at the hardest point in industrial biotech: right after proof of concept, right before commercial scale. That's the stretch where great science runs out of runway. It writes checks from $100K to $5M, and its first fund backed seven biomanufacturing companies across chemicals, materials, food ingredients, agriculture, and energy. The thesis is built on studying failure. First Bight's "Industrial Biomanufacturing Graveyard" report looked at 30 failed biomanufacturing ventures and found that more than 80% didn't fail on the technology. They picked the wrong market, underestimated what it costs to sell, or assumed customers would switch. Jonathan's version is simple: in this space, the science is rarely the bottleneck. Asset selection and go-to-market strategy are. In 2027 he joins us at @SynBioBeta as a speaker. What the First Bight portfolio has been up to: - Led the $5M seed round for @Algenesis_, which makes plant-based, biodegradable materials - Backing @Visolis3, @iMicrobesInc, @CapraBio, @PersephoneBio, @r2dio, and VIA Biofuels - Three portfolio companies, Visolis, Industrial Microbes, and Algenesis, landed a combined $5.25M from the Department of Defense's Distributed Bioindustrial Manufacturing Program - Launched BioWell, a Houston bioindustrial accelerator, which took over a 33,000 square foot pilot plant in Richmond, Texas, to give startups real fermentation capacity Jonathan came to venture the long way, through the bench and the tools business: - @bcmhouston, where he earned his PhD in molecular and cell biology (2015-2020), after undergrad at @UTAustin - IsoPlexis (2021-2023), the single-cell proteomics company whose platform measured what individual immune cells secrete. He was its "single-cell evangelist," working with researchers and partners on translational projects, through IsoPlexis' 2023 merger with Berkeley Lights - @brukercellular (2023), after Bruker acquired the combined company, managing scientific alliances - First Bight Ventures (2023-present), starting as an associate and now a principal, sourcing, evaluating, and supporting early-stage biomanufacturing companies This year he wants to talk about something founders rarely hear from investors: how to fund early biomanufacturing through revenue-generating partner projects instead of another dilutive round. He wants to be the investor a founder calls last, after the decks are done, when the question is what to build and who will actually buy it. If you're building in chemicals, materials, ingredients, or ag and trying to cross the gap from pilot to plant, Jonathan is the person to find. Come find him in San Jose, May 3-6th.

@Ginkgo details an enzyme-engineering stack spanning ~6B genes, AI + physics design and autonomous labs, with reported >80x activity gains in one program. ginkgo.bio/press-releases… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

@SPRIND is offering up to €4.3M per team in a 38-month challenge to build AI-controlled microbial consortia for circular biomanufacturing. sprind.org/en/actions/cha… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

@GoogleDeepMind introduced SynthID Bio, a proof-of-concept watermark designed to remain detectable in AI-generated protein sequences and structures. deepmind.google/blog/introduci… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…

An @IDTechEx -backed analysis argues that bio-based feedstocks and biomanufacturing are not the same — and their economics and carbon profiles can differ sharply. plasticstoday.com/materials/bio-… Want to stay ahead in biotech? Subscribe to our newsletter for more 🧬syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=x&…