Opportunities at the interface of science and tech for those with science degrees

We’re excited. We’re excited because the boundaries between science and tech are rapidly beginning to merge. It may not be immediately obvious but it is becoming possible to manipulate nature at a speed and scale never seen before. Far too many people emerge with a science based undergrad or postgrad and don’t know what to do with it and think it is completely useless for the world of start-ups, here we highlight a few of the emerging areas where your background means that you are perfectly placed to build something that matters.

Intelligent and personalised healthcare

Medicine is still surprisingly unsophisticated, it only happens after you are already really quite ill, it’s an inefficient system of pattern matching using incomplete data, typically a sledge hammer approach to destroy the offender and treats patients as homogeneous which we increasingly know isn’t the case.

There are a huge number of opportunities; pro-active preventative techniques, effective, non-intrusive diagnostics, personalising treatments (using genomics, microbiome etc.), improving the speed of discovery and trials, improving the effectiveness of drugs and developing computational methods to discover new treatments.

A couple of examples of fast moving high-tech start-ups in this space include; Moderna which was started by Flagship ventures with the question “how could RNA make an effective treatment by removing the immune response”. Within 2 years they had signed a $500m deal with AstraZeneca. Likewise the same group started Pronutria with the question of; what food groups could have pharmacological effects? Within 2 years they had candidates in trials. Stratified Medical is another great example which uses Machine learning to identify potential drugs candidates by automatically reading hundreds of academic papers and building new hypotheses.

Relevant skill-sets; include life-sciences but also chemistry, materials, electrical engineering, product design and computer science and maths.

Agriculture and food that work for 9.7 bn people

With the global population soon to reach a predicted 9.7 bn by 2015 and diets increasingly shifting towards western consumption profiles, the world is in urgent need of more efficient ways to grow food and prevent loss.

One way of achieving this is by using plant based alternatives or producing lab based meat, milk and other animal products using cellular agriculture. There is also huge potential value in making the land, crops themselves and growing processes more productive, especially in the developing world.

Indigo Agriculture is a great example here. They looked at how microbes influence growth and developed a seed coating that significantly improves growth. Similarly one of our previous spin-outs Fungi Alert prevents the loss of crop loss to fungus by combining chemo-attractants and connected device capabilities.

Relevant skill-sets; plant sciences, life sciences more broadly (many similar principles apply), chemistry, materials, mechanical engineering (a lot of equipment is involved), electrical engineering and computer science and maths.

The future of knowledge work

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the nature of knowledge work from humans processing small packets of data to humans orchestrating advanced algorithms manipulating huge amounts of data.

This opens up opportunities around how we engage with each other and new virtual worlds (virtual reality), how machines interact with the real world (sensors, robotics) and how we interact with machines (intuitive interfaces, bio-integration). Across this lie increasingly intelligent algorithms

Relevant skills sets; Electrical engineering, product design, visualisation, handling big data, maths, machine learning and computer science more broadly.

Future industry, production and logistics

Much of the journey from raw materials to products is incredibly dirty, energy intensive, and human capital dependent. There are a huge number of opportunities to completely change the way things are produced, particularity with synthetic biology, how they’re discovered, extracted and reused, how they’re assembled (robotics) and ultimately how they reach the end user (logistics, self driving vehicles, drones etc.).

Relevant skill sets: Synthetic biology, plant sciences, engineering, earth sciences, maths, computer science, mechanical engineering, materials and chemistry.

Next generation computing infrastructure

The shift towards digitisation of everything from healthcare to mining is driving new opportunities in next generation computing hardware and software. Telecommunications will need to squeeze a lot more bandwidth out of the existing spectrum and infrastructure, security concerns mount as physical devices (cars, factories) move online, quantum represents the potential for a step-change in problem solving and security, blockchain will change the way we handle trust around any type of transaction. We will always need new ways of storing even more data and achieving faster processing with less power in a smaller space, things like new materials, DNA storage and even in-cell computation could provide tantalising opportunities here.

Surely one of the best examples in this space is the recent collaboration between Twist Bioscience and Microsoft to store and retrieve an OK Go video on DNA.

Relevant skill sets: Materials, chemistry, synbio, machine learning and computer science more broadly, electrical engineering and maths.

Clean, cheap, distributed energy

The first clean-tech revolution involved giant energy production structures to capture wind and waves, the current revolution is more subtle. It’s about increasing the efficiency of existing infrastructure in quick, clever ways — from making solar cells more efficient to mitigating dirtier energy e.g. through advanced filtration and carbon capture, more efficient biomass and other energy sources, making use of redundancy, bio-inspired approaches to energy generation, use and storage, lower energy electronics and devices and producing energy from industrial waste on site.

One particularity great example out of Imperial College is Sweet Generator which turns dirty water with organic compounds in to electricity at a rate that can compete with coal.

Relevant skill sets: chemistry, materials, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, maths, computer science and life sciences.

Space

The key opportunities emerging in space-tech are around communication infrastructure, observation (and making sense of images), security and of course cheaper ways of getting things in to space. For the more adventurous some are even looking at how to mine asteroids, closed-loop ecosystems, terraforming and environmental re-engineering using genetically engineered machines, collection and removal of space debris, convergence of terrestrial and space technologies, re-application of space technologies to the everyday

Great examples coming out of London recently include OpenCosmos which builds nano-satellites (!) and Terrabotics which provides 3D analytics of ground structures such as mining heaps for analytical purposes.

Relevant skill sets: chemistry, materials, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, maths and computer science.

There are of course many more areas which are rapidly changing due to the convergence of science and engineering. If you would like to meet like minded people and build something that matters join us at deepscienceventures.com

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