>FASTA_10
Hudson River’s CRISPR-Protoplasts, Polari Labs’ Queer Biotech, Buy Cortical Labs' biocomputer, Based cell-based pet food?, Wanna make a virus with Generate Biomedicines' Chroma?
Hudson River’s CRISPR-Protoplasts
Protoplasts are plant cells that lack a cell wall. When editing other plant tissues, only surface cells may come into contact with the reagents, and the cell wall may block large molecules from diffusing evenly. In protoplasts, gene editing is completely uniform, highly efficient (>90% for Hudson), and homogeneous. Their morphology allows for the CRISPR complex to be delivered as an RNP, edit multiple alleles in one go, while keeping the plants non-transgenic (“DNA-free”).
Hudson River built an automated and protoplast-based plant editing platform that generates market-ready plants in only 24 months. One of their pieces of IP is a method for encapsulating individual protoplasts in hydrogel microcapsules made of BSA and WPH. Post-gene editing, the cells are put there to rebuild their cell walls until becoming a proto-callus. This is then put in solid media appropriate for shooting and rooting. Once a single plant is regenerated, it may be multiplied into many via clonal cropping or seeds.
Clients can either use the Hudson platform to enhance their own crops, or license Hudson’s proprietary crops. Their portfolio includes everything from pest-resistant strawberries to β-carotene-enhanced cauliflowers, pharma-optimized Benthys, and even cut flowers — If you’ve read my last few posts, you can tell I’m dying to know what they do to those… and what other pieces of IP may be behind the wide breadth of crops they may be able to regenerate from protoplasts…
Polari Labs’ Queer Biotech
Over 133 Million people across the UK, US, and Europe have anal sex. That amounts to over 5.3 Billion annual anal sex acts per year, many of which suffer from faecal accidents, or have to come only after douching, a 30-minute procedure that flows water through rectum and can cause gut issues — That’s not only unusual to read, it’s stats that support my Queer Biotech thesis: biotech products that serve the LGBTQ community.
Many of these topics are still taboo, even in the western world. Doctors avoid responsibility by suggesting abstinence altogether, and public funding isn’t enough to provide the answers to simple questions, like what the thrusting rate is during sex, whether peristalsis occurs during anal sex, and how to relax your anus during sex to prevent pain. It’s about time the biotech next-gen solves this.
Respectively, cofounders Henry and Anna previously studied sexually transmitted infection in Oxford, and biomedical engineering at EPFL & MIT. Since they started Polari in 2023, they’ve filed a patent for a $4-dollar, single-use hydrogel ball that anyone engaging in anal sex can insert in their rectum in less than 30 seconds for spontaneous, faecal-free sex. They’ve shown the device to work in ex-vivo models, raised a $500k pre-seed round, and will start distribution via sex-positive and LGBTQ communities later this year.
Buy a biocomputer made out of living neurons by Cortical Labs
The world’s first biological computer is here. It has a touch screen, USB port, and everything. You can buy it and use it on top of Mount Everest or some eccentric shit, it lives up to 6 months. You can, in fact, use a whole farm of them through the world’s first biological cloud, maybe to design the next GMO Neuralink, create a whole universe, or find the way to make my crush like me back… okayyy! That went toooo far!!!
Let’s go back where this started — Gordon Moore rests in peace, and with him, his law. Silicon computing performance has slowed since 2015, and at 10 nm, you can only shrink transistors so much more due to quantum effects. Each of these transistors uses 2E^-7 Joules, good luck computing if you destroy a couple. That brings us to… Matrix, of course!
Each mammalian synapse uses only 2E^-10 Joules. You can basically destroy half of the brain computer and it’ll still function. It’s near infinitely scalable, it’s small, and, no we’re not copying the movie and extracting their energy, because these neurons actually produce very little heat compared to silicon. Cortical’s patent covers iPSC-derived neurons or neurons extracted from rat brains so I’d love to see someone launch a competing startup using octopi brains.
At the moment, biocomputers like CL1 may be used as high-throughput models of brain disease that are physiologically similar to humans and don’t make whole animals suffer. The immediate ethical questions surround what ethnic populations will be considered when making these biocomputers, since that will impact who benefits from the results, as with any type of clinical trial. Of course, soon, we’ll have to define when these brains may be “physiologically conscious”.
Based cell-based pet food?
Forget about the “paw print” of pet food. Would feed your pet with food contaminated with heavy metals like lead, arsenic, or cadmium? In recent years, thanks in part to bored and rich and sometimes smart tech/longevity bros, we’ve just started to touch the tip of the iceberg of HUMAN food contamination. God and a handful of scientists know how bad the situation may be for cats and dogs!
As an investor and cofounder of Wild Earth, Ryan Bethencourt once thought cell-based meat would be the solution — Not as much of it required per kibble, fewer legal constraints, and final consumers that are easier to please were some of the arguments for — Wild technoeconomics pushed the wilders to launch as plant-based first, and even though they made $10.7M in revenue last year, they filled for bankruptcy a few months ago due to their $12.6M liabilities.
On the flipside, UK-based Meatly became the first company in the world to put cell-based pet food on the shelves in February of this year. Through a partnership with plant-based dog food brand THE PACK, their Chick Bites combine plant-based ingredients with Meatly Chicken, to provide an alternative to traditional dog treats.
Their CSO, Helder Cruz, spent a year at Mosa Meat, filing a patent for serum-free media formulation for cultured meat production. Similarly, he’s led Meatly to develop a £1/L culture medium and a process that uses suspension culture instead of traditional adherent cell culture methods — Let’s catch up with them later this year on their sales and marketing strategy!
Wanna make a virus using Generate Biomedicines’ Chroma?
Chroma creates new, extremely large proteins and protein complexes (30,000+ heavy atoms across 4,000+ residues), given geometric and functional constraints like symmetry, substructure, shape, and even natural-language prompts. Through new neural network architecture and a single commodity GPU, the tool can be conditioned on many different kinds of symmetry, from simple circular symmetries to the complex icosahedral symmetries often seen in nanoparticles.
A 3D backbone is synthesized before a sequence consistent with it is designed. Before testing it in the lab, protein folding software may be used to verify consistency. Since possible 3D protein structures are mapped in a continuous way, you can know what’s in between two different structures and morph between structurally similar proteins. Despite being trained on proteins from the PDB, Chroma has learned the principles of protein design, without overfitting or memorizing the proteins that have already been seen.
While traditional biosecurity tools like FAST-NA and ThreatSeq screen against known lists of pathogens and toxins, AI-generated sequences may not match anything in existing databases and still pose risks. Will motif detection and protein folding tools be enough to predict whether a sequence might act like a toxin and bind to human receptors? What new AI-designed biology might we be able to make in underground self-driving labs that we couldn’t before and how do we keep it there?
Biopunk is read by a select audience of biotech investors, researchers from the world’s most prestigious universities, industry talent, and startup founders. We help biotech companies translate their groundbreaking tech into a compelling story that connects them to their short and long term goals — We’d love to help, please reach out via LinkedIn.