We're here with our next talk. Our next speaker is a science director at IndieBio, the world's
largest biotech accelerator. She has a PhD in chemical biology and is passionate about using
the intersection of biology, tech, and design to increasing human health spend. Now here to
present her talk on the brave new world of bioentrepreneurship, ladies and gentlemen, June
Aksa. Thank you so much and thank you for the organizers for having me. So I'm going to talk
about bioentrepreneurship. And of course, when we think of entrepreneurship today, a lot of times
we think of our Facebooks and Googles and Ubers. And we think of tech entrepreneurship. And we
haven't seen a lot of biology startups coming out of kind of garage labs yet. And a lot of that,
there's a bunch of reasons for that. But let's take a look a little bit, step back,
and take a look. Even in the tech sector in the last couple of years, or decades, we've seen
that it actually came out of academia with ARPA and a conglomerate of different academic labs.
And the first companies that came out were actually corporations. A lot of these companies
were infrastructural companies, you know, your IBMs, your CISCOs that built up the hardware and
the communication pipeline for that. And then of course, we started entering kind of the hacker
space where code has started to become open source. The technology is becoming cheaper and cheaper.
And that really drove people to start companies. You have your, you know, kids in a garage who are
now coding and the software and hardware is so cheap that they can start making and testing their
ideas. And we actually do see this similar route in biotech entrepreneurship. Although even
today, the majority of what we see is heavily in academia. And so, you know, we're seeing a lot of
academia still. And of course, we know all our big corporations, your big pharma companies, your
Genentechs, your Pfizers, those have been traditionally what we think of biotech. And those
usually come out of academic labs with lots and lots of money and lots of VC backing in order to
even get started because biotechnology is so expensive. But as we know, in the last couple of
years, we also started seeing biohackers. So we have community labs like BioCurious, CounterCars,
Culture Labs. And of course, you know, the interest of biohacking is increasing. And people are
starting to think about how do we open source a lot of the methods that we've learned? How do we
make equipment cheaper? How do we find reagents and things cheaper as well? And that really kind
of leveraged, leveraging on that, we've started seeing entrepreneurship happening in
biotechnology, which is really exciting. And we're still in very, very early days.
However, there are some differences between biotech startup entrepreneurship and tech
entrepreneurship, is that in tech, we had the microchip, which with this one chip, we were able
to read, write code, we're able to copy, cut, paste, do all these different functions on this
one chip. And this chip, of course, with Moore's Law over time has gone ridiculous, ridiculously
cheap now that everyone has one in their, in their pockets. And that has not been the case for
biotech. Biotech, each little bit of function took many, many years to put together. So in, you
know, 1950s, we started to even figure out how to visualize DNA on a gel. And then 1967, we learned
how we can glue two pieces of DNA together. And then how do we cut? And then how do we start
reading? So it took over 50 years to get to where we are now, where now we only just started with
that basic set of instructions. And that's what we're doing now. And that's what we're doing now.
So we're building on the instructions that we could have done, that a microchip could do. And
this is definitely on the DNA level. And from the DNA level, we can start building on new
functionalities and technologies. So the beauty of now is that we can start thinking of biology as a
technology, right? A lot of people have talked about using DNA, it's similar to code, and mixing
and matching that so that we can actually build technologies out of biology. And instead of just
thinking about medical devices and therapeutics, biology can actually be used to do things like
that. And that can be a technology for all different sectors of society, such as food and
agriculture is a big one, consumer biotech, neurotech, bio data, industrial tech, and then of
course, our medical devices and biopharma. And the interesting thing is that there's so many more
applications yet to be discovered, and we're really excited to learn about what those could be.
So there's some driving forces that cause biotech to be a technology, and biotech to be a
biotechnology entrepreneurship to actually start in these last few decades, or in the last few
years. One of the forces is actually called the post-docalypse, if you've heard of this. This is
where basically there's not enough professorship positions, and the grant money is very limited,
that PhDs who are well-trained end up going for post-doc after post-doc after post-doc, and there
seems to be no end to that.
This gives us a huge amount of talented people who don't know what to do with themselves, and so it
would be great if we can redirect their efforts into starting their own companies. There's faster
science being done. Of course, with Moore's Law and all the technological innovations, we now have
bioinformatics. We can sequence DNA, write DNA much, much faster. And then coupled with that is
experiments are becoming cheaper. Equipment is becoming cheaper, reality is becoming cheaper,
biosecurity is becoming cheaper, the agents are more accessible. There are contract research
organizations that you can send out your work, such as Cloud Labs that you can do your work on. So
that all really ‑‑ all of these three factors is really driving why right now is a great
opportunity to start a biotech company.
And so, that was the thesis on which IndieBio was founded on. We had a hypothesis about two and a
half years ago to build a accelerated biotech innovation, and the one that we found was the best
program to help train scientists into entrepreneurs and teach them about how
to start companies and so that's what the basis of what we do and we have four
we do a four month startup accelerator program it comes with 250k in funding
which we take equity in and we have a fully equipped biotech lab and
this is one of the most important parts because in biotech if you don't have a
lab oftentimes you don't have the resources to start your company so then
it becomes a chicken-and-egg thing because everyone request wants you to
have a prototype but you can't build your prototype until you have some money
to start your lab so this really helps by using a shared lab to have these
companies work through and develop their their initial prototypes our program
also has over 200 mentors and we're located in downtown San Francisco so at
the heart of Silicon Valley and that is you know following a lot of the
research that's going on in Silicon Valley and that is you know following a lot of the
research that's going on in Silicon Valley and that is you know following a lot of the
the tech entrepreneurs and the tech VCS were kind of redirecting a lot of those
efforts into into biotech so I mentioned kind of the different segments that we've
invested in and that we're very excited about I'm gonna go through some of the
companies that we've we've done in these different categories so one of the
probably most noted one is called Memphis meats this meatball here is
actually made from stem cells so this company has done the
this for pork beef chicken and duck so far and so this movement is called
cellular agriculture or clean meat because not only is it a humanitarian
thing or animal rights thing where we're not slaughtering animals and you're
moving away from factory farming but also it's clean because there's no
antibiotics there's no contamination in our food so while currently it is still
very very expensive to do this in the lab over the next few years we should
see this being really important and I think it's going to be really important for us to do this in the lab over the next few years we should see this being
relatively similar to what you would buy from a restaurant so that's very
exciting for meat and potentially vegetarians another really interesting
area in the food sector is actually breaking down foods to their molecular
level so this company Ava wineries was started by two guys who went to Napa and
saw a really really expensive bottle of wine and said to themselves we're never
going to be rich enough to drink that wine and it's like but wait a second
wine is just a bunch of molecules so why can't we recreate that wine so that's
exactly what they do they take wines they throw it in a mass spectrometer and
analyze the different components and their concentrations and now they're
putting them back in their their correct compositions right so now this is like
pennies on the dime and they can make essentially whatever varietal or
whatever wine you would want and the fascinating thing about
this is we're now looking at food from not just the the you know the food
itself but we're looking at it on the molecular level and that when we change
small the molecules we can have different properties we can you know in
the case of wine we can eliminate sulfide so that you don't have hangovers
as much so this has a lot of promise in the future of developing new types of
foods that we can work with going into consumer biotech this
leather here is made from mushrooms mycelium actually create this collagenous
fiber and you can grow them into sheets and it's really nice because you can
also grow patterns so you can't grow cow with with different kinds of
patterns but you can do this with with the mushrooms this this particular
mushroom and this that this particular company micro works that's made it feels
amazing just like real leather and they've shown that with a full cow's
high
piece of leather which normally takes two years to grow because you have to
feed the cow and the growth of the cow has to grow up they can make that in two
weeks so think of the fraction of the cost and the environmental impact that
that saves for having these kind of new leather products available in neuro tech
one of the companies that's that's kind of far out there but I'm extremely
interesting is neuro computation this company near Hanukkah has a chip where
they embed a chip in a machine and they embed a chip in a machine and they embed
the neurons in different formations so that the connectivity can essentially you
can do computation on that so this company is yeah going ahead and hopefully
in the next few years making the first brain the first bio brain computer from
a data side this company called catalog is storing archival data digital data
into DNA and why would you do this well for one
DNA is actually a million times more dense than flash drives which is the
currently most dense form of storage and of course when you're talking about
archival you right now it's done with magnetic tapes and they're in large
facilities that have to be cooled and actually every 20 years you'll have to
recopy the magnetic tapes because they go bad well with DNA you if you freeze
it and dry it down we know that we can store it for pretty much infinite
infinitely there's actually
a case where there was a 60,000 year old mammoth that was uncovered and they
uncovered the DNA from that so it's very likely that we can store the DNA for a
long long time and the lastly DNA can be copied very very easily with a well
known technique called polymerase chain reaction so within two hours you can
essentially copy your entire petabytes of data over so this is very exciting
for the future of storage
another company in the kind of a bio data space is called scaled so you can
imagine entire laboratory work worth of work done in a micro fluidic chip and
this chip houses 80,000 different experiments running at the same time it
uses different combinations of molecules to test the different
conditions and what you can use this for is for stem cell differentiation stem
cells differentiate at a very specific condition and by using the screen this
company has actually shown that they can make a kidney organoid so basically a
small set of cells and actually 27 different types of cells as a kidney and
and using this technology so this the kidney of course can then eventually be
made potentially into full kidneys but can also be used for drug development
drug screening etc going on to industrial biotech we have company
called Yuba biologics which is reclaiming coal mining and
gold mining water so the obviously the runoff from these processes is very
toxic there's high amounts of sulfide in it and they've found a cocktail of
microbes that can purify the water and put it back into the lake and medical
devices this one is called Knox medical and it's a spirometer for for measuring
your breathing for kids with asthma so the idea is the kid would blow a
needle into this every single day and you would be able to see the changes in
their lung capacity and this way you can actually predict when a asthma attack
might happen days before it happens so that the parents can help medicate the
kid and then last but not least I want to mention we have a lot of
pharmaceutical biopharma companies a lot of them in cancer this particular one
actually works with snake venom if you guys don't know how snake that's anti
venoms are currently done you actually have people
going and milking a snake and then this then they take the snake venom inject it
into a horse and then they they lyophilize they dry up that horse serum
so if you got bit by a snake you get rushed to the hospital you hope that
that hospital has that venom you hope that you remember which snake bit you
because it's very specific and then if they had this anti venom they inject
horse serum into you so this is a very kind of archaic practice
horse by horse there's no QC there so it can vary and and also you are
injected with a whole bunch of horse blood so oftentimes people have
anaphylactic shock to the horse blood itself and of course this is this is an
area where you know kind of the developing world hasn't paid a lot of
attention to because we don't have that many snakes and but of course in
Southeast Asia and Africa that's it's a huge problem lots of lots of people have
to you know cut off limbs because of the young the snake venoms starting to get in there.
So what this company is doing is using more pharmacological advancements in the
development of antibodies to address this issue and so one thing they did is
they mapped out well what are all those different kinds of snakes snake venom
antivenoms or the molecules in a region and they have a cocktail solution so
that you have 99% coverage of a snake bite so it like 99% of different
species will be covered in this one.
shot and furthermore the shot instead of rushing to a hospital you can actually
bring the shot with you so you can imagine if you were going to Southeast
Asia you're gonna go into the jungles you can bring the shot with you and if
you accident accidentally get bitten by a snake then you can inject yourself
immediately and stop that the progression of that anti that
degradation of your limbs. So so how do you get involved in bioentrepreneurship
if you're thinking about starting a startup in the future or you're just you know early
and thinking and dabbling in the space some suggestions is engaging in communities.
Obviously this biohacking village is an amazing community DEF CON is an amazing community
there are a lot of biohacker spaces around the country and around the world now that
you can engage in and furthermore you should engage with scientists and talk to people
in the particular fields that you're interested in see what their pain points are see what
what kind of novel ideas come out of that. Definitely find a co-founder. Sometimes in
software you can get along with just being your own founder, but in biotech you definitely
cannot because usually we advise that you have one scientific and technical lead and
one business person. There's just way too much to do that you definitely need some co-founders
to help you in the process. In general, with the maker ethos, tinker, make, try, I don't
advise trying things on yourself, but do try on other experiments, other organisms first
in an ethical manner. And then don't be afraid of failure, of course. Biology is an extra
level of difficulty where sometimes nature doesn't allow things. So things will fail,
definitely.
But keep persisting. And that's why Ph.D. programs are like seven years now. So if you
continue to progress and learn from mistakes and try and pivot, there will be ways to make
a successful startup. And then if you are thinking about venture funding, which not all
companies have to be venture funded, some of the things to consider is that you do need some
kind of technical insight that gives you an unfair advantage. So often this is called the
IPA.
Often times you don't have to start off with an IP in order to apply for venture funding, but you
have to at least have a road map to how you would gain IP. How do you make that insight and that IP
into a product? Obviously science by itself is not a product. So you have to figure out what the
product is, who's going to use it, who would actually buy it. And then furthermore, how do you
turn that product into a sustainable business, whether that be you're selling a razor blade model
or you have one product that follows with multiple products. So you have to figure out how to
use multiple other products later. So figuring out that dynamic and how you would grow your
business. And then lastly, with venture capital, we always think of how it has to have a big
impact on the world. So how would your business potentially touch a billion people in the world?
And that's ultimately what we really want to do is we think that biotechnology is so impactful.
It is one of the technologies that can scale relatively easily because it is grown.
And so we want to make an impact in the world. So if you have any questions, I can take them now.
But you should check out our website. And I'm happy to answer any questions.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.