IndieBio's Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th group of biotech startups. We specifically focused on a few companies that were making serious claims that bordered on the ridiculous, with the potential for big profits.
Biotechnology has begun to influence adjacent industries in recent years, showing how companies rely on outdated processes and even organisms to get things done. So while it may come as no surprise that the latest batch includes a microbiome company, you might be surprised to hear that it's a copper ore microbiome.
I spoke with Wes Dang, chief scientific officer at IndieBio, about the companies I found most promising or provocative. He assured me that although it may sound a little strange, these companies are serious and the IndieBio program has done a lot of validation work.
“We all have technical backgrounds, several of us have PhDs, including myself, and we work diligently together. We all read papers and Some people dig deeper and look at numbers and assumptions,” he said.
Stream Genomics is probably the easiest of the new group to understand. Genome sequencing methods and equipment are faster and cheaper than runaway market leader Illumina, and more importantly, they still eliminate the need for wet lab preparation, which still requires a lot of time and expertise. It will be reduced. .
Image credit: Stream Genomics
Cheaper sequencers exist, but Illumina is so deeply integrated that the cost of switching is high, especially if you only want to save money on the sequencing step. Stream Genomics' approach shifts much of the computational load to the cloud while minimizing sample preparation and reagents used (sequencing is not circular). They say it's orders of magnitude faster and cheaper.
“With Stream, we can do that without a huge computational burden by simply watching nucleotides incorporate in real time and seeing the colors associated with the As, T, G, and C that appear. ” said Dang. “This is the equivalent of streaming and downloading Blu-ray.”
Illumina is too big to completely replace, but smaller operations may want to send it to a third party (which can take weeks or months) or build their own sequencing lab (expensive) You're likely to appreciate a quick, hassle-free sequencing option.
Another company considering potentially big changes is battery technology startup AquaLith. The company claims to have discovered a silicon anode material that can withstand the long-term wear and tear it typically undergoes (which we covered last year). Although the details are certainly in the weeds, the company already has the means to make this type of battery, but the silicone mixture (“basically a slurry,” Dunn said) that Aquaris makes. The company plans to sell only the materials to battery manufacturers that need them. Exclusively.
As you can see, the AquaLith one (right) is smoother. Image credit: Aqualith
Battery startups and alternative chemistries have come and gone for decades, with only a few remaining as little more than footnotes. AquaLith, however, appears to be solving a very specific problem in an uncontroversial part of the domain. They also plan to soon make non-flammable battery cells. Here's hoping this works.
Farm Minerals started its journey with a bit of good old stunt advertising. The first million acres worth of synthetic fertilizer will be distributed free of charge. “They're basically doing it as a kind of flex,” Dunn said. “It's incredibly cheap to make.”
Electron microscopy image of the high surface area structure of a mineral additive.Image credit: Farm Minerals
Fertilizer is a huge expense for agriculture, and large amounts of fertilizer are required to cover a field of sufficient size. But in the end, only small amounts of the minerals in the crop are needed. So Farm Minerals encapsulates these minerals in a special bioavailable carbon casing. They say 160 grams is enough for 2 million hectares.
“As a scientist, I thought, “There's no way this is going to work,'' Dunn said after I gave him a similarly lugubrious assessment. But they looked into it and apparently it was. Also, that means they give out about a bowl of cereal for this stunt. Suddenly that part wasn't so wild. That jug in the image above is probably enough to cover the entire country. We will be contacting the company for independent verification of these claims in the near future.
Image credit: Transition Biomining
Transition Biomining may be the most sci-fi of all the companies trying to, in the company's words, “squeeze life out of rock.” The problem is that only a certain amount of minerals in the raw ore can be easily collected through the physical and chemical processes currently used (already quite extreme and corrosive processes). What's better than getting 95% copper from 5 gigatons of ore? We're getting 98%. (These numbers are made up by me.) And if the transition method works, someone else will do the job: microbes.
The company tests and understands a rock's microbiome, the unique population of microorganisms that live in and around the rock, and modifies it so that minerals are extracted only when those microorganisms are doing what they're supposed to do. That's what I'm aiming for. Although it is not a replacement for acid baths and other traditional methods, it may help increase mine efficiency.
There are more places to choose from in the Bach area. Others are briefly summarized below.
Able Sciences: Self-amplifying RNA reduces the cost of cell therapy. Bryosphere: A stain treatment made with a moss cell reactor. Hypercell: Simple and fast food safety testing for industrial packaging facilities. Nutrition from water: Low carbon whey from aquaculture. SpiralWave: Plug-and-play cold plasma methanol reactor. Reactosome: Gene transfer via accessory nucleus (!). Rybodyn: Finding and characterizing unknown proteins from the “dark proteome.” California Organic: Supplier of organic ammonia by fermentation. Ceres Wave: “Electric fertilizer” that promotes the growth of crops and animals with an energy field (?). Oxyl: Mechanical(ish) PFA removal from ground and wastewater.
We look forward to following up with these companies to share more details about their progress towards their sometimes far-fetched ambitions. The San Francisco-based incubator's demo day is scheduled for June, when the two companies could share more information.