The Biofrontier: Expanded Human Health

“Human and planetary health” has emerged as common-speak in the venture world, referring to innovation that prolongs human health-span, improves lives, and enables a more sustainable use of planetary resources. This however, is a limited framing: the planet and its life forms comprise one system. Thinking about human health as separate from planetary health only further reinforces the false sense of separateness that has disabled humans from designing an industrial system that incorporates ourselves into the larger picture. We can’t have human health without planetary health, because humans are just one piece of a much larger, living, carbon-based system. At the macroscale, one need look no farther than the symbiotic relationships between photosynthetic plants and respiring humans to appreciate this. On the microscale, the explosion of microbiome and soil research is teaching us that we, and the world around us, are comprised of networks of even smaller living organisms.

While medicine is now understanding the human body as a complex system, viewing human beings as a single piece of a larger system is not yet reflected in market signals. While this makes the path to “sustainability” a rocky road, the more we internalize the existential threats of a changing climate, the more the market begins to rationalize this universal truth, making way for new solutions. An expanded view of what we are enables us to reimagine “human health” as something not just inside, but outside of us.

While historically biotech invention has predominantly been directed toward things that we ingest — medicines, foods, etc. — powerful new tools (multi-omics sequencing / editing, AI / ML, and more) are allowing us to imagine commercial applications outside of “us” that leverage and augment nature’s most elegant design templates.

We can use biology not only to treat and prevent disease (re-engineering ourselves), but as a platform for a new circular and sustainable industrial complex (re-engineering industry) and as a platform to mitigate the climate impact of an era of greenhouse gas emissions (re-engineering atmosphere).

We saw this with the promise of bio-based products that draw on atmospheric/biomass-based carbon sources. The first wave of venture-backed biofuels/bio-based chemicals innovation in the 2000s-2010s is replete with hard lessons learned by bold innovators seeking to pioneer a more sustainable industry. Great ideas and technologies summoned huge venture dollars, which were spent on scaling-up large, centralized facilities to produce commodity chemicals from decentralized sources of biomass feedstock. In addition to the underestimation of just how hard and expensive it would be to scale up these technologies, this era unfortunately coincided with the collapse in oil and gas prices, leaving many of these companies unable to compete, and ultimately unable to persevere.

There is reason to believe this time is different. Entrepreneurs are haunted by stories of the past, and attempting to avoid the same mistakes by: going after specialty chemicals versus commodity chemicals; launching their own direct to consumer brands; attempting to build smaller, decentralized facilities near-by to biomass feedstocks; designing around waste feedstocks like CO2 and agricultural waste versus biomass competing with food; and finally, by leveraging the exponential improvement in adjacent technologies (gene sequencing, gene editing, AI/ML).

Finding the right teams, right technology, and right go-to-market for these kinds of businesses and for the climate/health Biofrontier at large is not for the faint of heart. Reinventing industry in the necessary way is considered one of the greatest challenges that mankind has ever faced. But human imagination and inventiveness are allowing us to understand and de-code the biological fabric of life, and it will dictate our ability to engineer ourselves and the world around us. We can leverage a suite of evolving biotechnology tools to imagine solutions for the climate crisis — enabling a cleaner and more circular economy, collapsing and onshoring supply chains, driving more efficient agriculture, drawing down atmospheric carbon, adapting to a changing climate, and much more.

At Bison Ventures, we look at the landscape of innovation for expanded human health in terms of how we use biology. We call this approach, “Bio as X”

As far as we can imagine today, biology can serve us in three different ways:

• Biology as Factory: utilizing living organisms as factories to produce fuels, chemicals, and materials from non-fossil-based carbon resources (CO2 or biomass)
• Biology as Catalyst: using biology to catalyze a desired trait or production pathway (enabling higher crop yields, greater industrial efficiency, disease resistance)
• Biology as Product: using the elegance of biology for new applications (biosensing, data storage, cell-cultured meat)

Bison Ventures anticipates there will be significant opportunity over the coming decades to transform health, industry, and our climate by leveraging biology in these three ways, and by continuing to move to a systems-based view of human health, inside and outside of the body.

Central to Bison’s investment strategy in “Bio as X” is finding opportunities to not only match or lower cost and improve across metrics of sustainability, but to also generate higher performance relative to the incumbent product or technology. For example, in the cell cultivated food industry, we look for opportunities that can scale down the cost-curve, solve global problems of food security, greenhouse gas emissions, animal cruelty, and supply chain, while also delivering healthier and “higher performing” products to the end consumer. In bio-based fuels and chemicals, we look for new materials that not only avoid fossil fuels, but also exceed performance metrics of traditional petroleum-based polymers. Our core belief is that biology has the potential to eventually outperform across every metric.

In addition to “Bio as X”, we have a suite of technologies — created by the digital revolution — that enable these “Bio as X” categories. For example, there are companies using metagenomics to evaluate soil microbiomes and DNA and protein synthesis companies that are using digital technology to enable the production of biology. Here, you’re not using Biology as X, but you’re enabling Biology as X. Many of these platform technologies will straddle commercial applications across a variety of sectors.

The first wave of industrial and medical innovation (roads, buildings, small molecule drugs, clothing, plastics, food, literally everything) used feedstocks that we dug out of the ground to produce consumable products in a unidirectional fashion and used small molecules to act on targets. The next generation of innovation is smarter, more thoughtful, more sustainable, and more interesting. Here, we are creating things from scratch using human ingenuity, collapsing dirty supply chains, driving efficient use of resources, treating biology with biology, and creating a new paradigm for human health. A paradigm that is more integrated yet more personalized — that recognizes the uniqueness of every living being and acknowledges its place in a much larger system.

Old Paradigm

Exploitative: one way, linear, dispose after use

Reductive: siloed view of disease and climate, medicine, and industry

General: trial and error medicine

Static / Slow / Centralized: infrequent maintenance, once a year check up

Manage Symptoms / Manage Waste: small molecule drugs acting to treat symptoms of chronic disease; externalizing cost of waste treatment (CO2, air pollution, municipal solid waste)

New Paradigm

Sustainable: circular, waste-to-value

Systems view of disease and climate: integrated view of biology and industry

Personalized: precise and personalized medicine for different patient populations and disease subtypes

Adaptive / Rapid / Local: Sensors and wearables yielding real time feedback to medicine and industry at decentralized, local, individual, level

Treat / Prevent Disease and Reinvent Industry: source treatment and preventative medicine via biologics, gene therapy and editing, mRNA medicines; novel production processes that avoid waste or enable waste to value

We are discovering that Nature all around us is more connected through complex biological networks than we ever could have imagined. The coming era of the Biofrontier is an opportunity for humans to more consciously and technologically tap into this network and to become stewards and beneficiaries of it. We’ve always been a part of it. There’s no humans versus nature, there’s no such thing as a natural product versus a non-natural product. Instead, we are building awareness and tools to better communicate with nature. We are understanding our place in the broader system — learning how to leverage our human potential to co-operate with, rather than exploit our surroundings.

While many may think the changes we’ll be making over the coming decades will mark the “end of an era of abundance” and require sacrifice, we believe that a history of ignoring, destroying, and opposing Nature has only created limitation. The Biofrontier instead marks the very beginning of richer, more abundant life. A world where we can understand our place in a larger system — working with, rather than against, nature — is a world without limitation.