Why the First YC-Backed Biotech Company May Just Be the Future of Pharma | Hacker News Reader

Why the First YC-Backed Biotech Company May Just Be the Future of Pharma

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69 pointskatm19 comments

The combination of speculative hype in the headline ("May Just Be") and the fact that this is YC-backed made me laugh out loud. Sometimes I forget that Hacker News is sponsored and run by YCombinator. The tone is always so rigorous and skeptical, until something made by YC comes along. Keep it joyful.

Yeah, seems to me like this article is just advertising for YC. The only real content is the suggestion that biotech is now viable for accelerators/VCs but with no citations that point is weak. Not that I mind reading about YC's investments, it's just that Hacker News articles generally contain at least SOME useful/interesting content.

Biotech needs a serious kick in the pants. It has always been remarkable to me just how little automation is used in the field of molecular biology. There is a huge amount of work that involves humans doing repetitive tasks and then waiting for something to happen. This increases cycle times, limits the number of hypotheses you can test, and is rate-limiting for the whole field. You already have the problem that you are working on living things which need time to grow, reproduce, eat, etc...

Not saying any of it is easy to automate by a long shot. But that kind of innovation is going to be what is needed to propel the field forward.

I've done a lot of work on this @ https://www.teselagen.com/

More specifically, we are able to automate combinatorial gene assembly straight from a web app interfacing with a TECAN microfluidic liquid handling robot.

Here's a proof of concept with a simulator, but I've tested this in a live enviornment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWA1O0DHEh8

Teselagen is cool design software but there's a whole other side of the equation.

I don't see any microfluidics in that video, unless one of those reservoir blocks or plates is actually something else?

You know that's pretty far from really automating combinatorial gene assembly :p You need a lot more than a Tecan to do that kind of cloning; even just the assembly reaction (Gibson?), which is the simplest part is going to be better off in a thermocycler or incubator compared to a warmed deck block. Tecans are pretty unusable at volumes below 2-3 ul, too, so setting up the reaction isn't always straight forward, especially if you need to e.g., PCR fragments out for the assembly.

Transcriptic's API covers the rest of the devices: https://www.transcriptic.com/platform

It's disappointing that more biotech isn't ultimately funded by YC. I'm sure it's just due to the cost of starting and running a pre-revenue biotech is much higher than a company starting a pure software product.

That said, YC funding science is fantastic. Even if it is just 1 company, thus far. Biotech should be a nice hedge in the portfolio.

According to the article, it's one of five biotech startups in this batch.

but it's the only one publicly listed in their portfolio at this date.

It will be interesting to see what gets funded. Actually getting a drug to market is a far different beast than get a tech product to market.

However, there are a ton of non-drug biotech plays that one could pursue. Lower risk and lower capital requirements. I wonder if that is what YC is looking to fund.

Considering that Ginkgo Bioworks is a non-drug biotech company, I'd say that the answer to your question is yes.

We'll have to wait until the other 4 companies debut before confirming that.

I remember meeting and hanging out with Jason Kelly in Cambridge (several times, I think the first one was at a Grey Thumb meetup, an artificial life themed group), the work on refactoring the T7 bacteriophage really sparked my interest in bioengineering and got me involved with DIYbio. Soon after Jason co-founded Ginkgo Bioworks.

Both as an amateur biologist and as a YC alumnus I'm really happy to see Ginkgo survive and grow. Just as one of the goals of DIYbio are to be to biotech what the Homebrew Computer Club was to personal computing, Ginko's systematizing and modularizing of biotech can be the Altair 8080 of life sciences.

(Edit: well, perhaps targeting truly amateur kit users is early right now, and it's more about modularizing aspects of biotech, I like the spirit I expressed in the previous paragraph :>)

Biotechs on the level that YC would fund don't have much incentive to ask for this money. The government has this one covered with the SBIR grants, which come with very few strings attached. While these are clearly not perfect, they don't leave too much room for low level investment.

For those wondering about "using designer microbes to convert CO2 emissions into fuel", take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel.

Basically the algae takes in CO2 and then the algae itself is turned into fuel. Another method is where algae takes in CO2 and "exhales" fuel which removes the need to "kill" the algae. Very cool stuff. On a large enough, and efficient enough, scale this kind of technology could become highly important. These methods are somewhat carbon neutral since the CO2 emitted from using the fuel is recaptured by algae again.

Isn't "designer organism" just another word for GMO(Genetically Modified Organism)? We have seen lots of regulatory troubles regarding GMOs, even for some of the most clearly beneficial ones.

it could also be an organism that was simply invented rather than modified from an existing one.

In theory, yes, but do we even know how to do such a thing?

Not yet, but it's one of the most actively pursued questions in modern biology. Some of the smartest biologists of our time, including Jack Szostak (2009 Nobel Laureate) and Craig Venter are working on it: http://www.economist.com/node/16163006

Am I the only one for whom the opening scene of "I am Legend" came immediately to mind?

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