BioCoder #5

Chapter 9. How to Culture Biotech Startups in 100 Days

Sarah Choukah

Smells of yeast and E. coli incubating aside, something very pungent was in the air at University College Cork’s microbiology lab this past summer. Synbio Axlr8r, the world’s first completed synthetic biology accelerator, provided lab space, resources, and funding to six teams. The deal was simple: bootstrap a biotech company, build a working prototype, and do everything in between to have the startup take off in 100 days. The participants had all flown in from different countries—Austria, Canada, the United States, and France—with neat ideas and open minds. What they came up with in the end were not only amazing products, but a whole array of intriguing smells, uncommon flavors, changing colors, and novel textures and materials.

Ten or even five years ago, these projects would have been very difficult to develop for commercial applications in such short time frames. I’d like to offer some thoughts on what made this state of affairs possible in the case of Synbio Axlr8r: not a set of necessary conditions in particular, but a careful alignment of the right ones for the right teams. As more accelerator programs like Synbio Axlr8r pop up, expectations of what biotech and synbio startups can do are also going to change. The road from idea to final product will be much shorter, something that’ll help the synbio consumer market establish itself, just like IT and software companies created consumer markets in the ’80s ...