Biology can save the world (and offer great returns in the process)

Isabel Fox
Nov 4 · 3 min read

Having recently returned from SynBioBeta 2019 in San Francisco, I’ve been reflecting on the explosion of creativity and idealism, offering an optimistic view of technology’s potential focused on biology.

In Eric Schmidt’s, former Google CEO, keynote he said: “Biology will undoubtedly fuel computing in the coming years, and turning biology into something that can be digitally manipulated, is an enormous accelerator”.

At Luminous Ventures, we’ve been backing computer aided biology for some time with our investment in Synthace in 2016. At the time, Synthace had very few investment options left — few UK funds were willing to take the risk — and our own investment decision was based on the quality of the team and its thesis that sounded much needed in the world. Since then we’ve been learning from people far smarter than us on the space—— Tim Fell, Markus Gershater and Peter Crane at Synthace; leading VCs Josko Bobanovic, Partner at Sofinnova Partners; Antoine Nivard, Principal at Inovia Capital and Rik Wehbring and Rob Carlson, managing partners at Bioeconomy Capital.

The possibilities of Synthetic biology are endless. As Harvard geneticist George Church puts it; “much of engineering is about reordering matter into other structures in a reliable and affordable way. But life already makes atomically precise objects at large scale, and it does so inexpensively.”

This amazing video invites us to see a universe where manufacturing, transportation, entertainment and more have all been radically transformed through the power of synthetic biology.

Through billions of years of evolution, biology has programmed the most intricate, efficient and the precisely balanced system — a system we call life. Human ingenuity is enabling us to harness this immense power to help solve the world’s biggest problem.

We are learning to design and construct new biological parts, devices, and systems, as well as re-design existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes. The applications of synthetic biology are numerous. It is no coincidence that this exciting space is one of the fastest growing and most funded areas of commercial biotechnology. The first synthetic biology unicorns have landed — Ginkgo Bioworks with a post-money valuation of over $4B. The synthetic biology market is expected to hit $55 billion by 2025.

Last week, a16z announced the beginning of a new era with the manifesto “Biology is eating the world.” (Note this is merely 8 years after Marc Andreessen penned his famous “Why Software Is Eating the World” essay.) Our future will be shaped by our increasing ability to create living machines built to our design specifications.

This future may arrive quicker than we think. We have already made huge leaps. In the early 1980s, we gained the ability of inserting human genes into bacteria — recombinant DNA technology gave rise to the mass-production of human insulin. Today, synthetic biology has applications in many verticals. Yeast is engineered for fermenting sugar into real milk proteins to produce animal-free milk; “living medicines” in the form of new microbes are being created to treat devastating diseases; spider silk jackets made from proteins that are produced by engineered microbes have appeared.

But we believe the promise goes much further beyond. The magic of biological system lies in its complexity. Biology today is transforming from an empirical science to an engineering discipline. To fully unlock its power, biology is learning from other industries such as semiconductor and automotive, where digital technology is integrated across the design, build, test and track product lifecycle. We believe that computer-aided biology is the way forward. With an ecosystem of digital research tools, we can really accelerate and transform biology; and biology will one day become a part of every industry.

Isabel Fox

Written by

Managing Partner Luminous Ventures and Adviser to The Cannabis Fund. Mother, wellness coach, Peloton enthusiast and horse lover.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade