>FASTA_19
PET-based drugs; China to shorten clinical trials, bipaternal offspring, snake venom, £10M for synthetic genomes; $140M for DraigTx; Neuralink updates; Cyborg tadpoles & Axoft; creators biotech
>FASTA: weekly short reads of the biotech ecosystem | Papers and patents, acquisitions and bankruptcies, biotech philosophy | Read in under 5 min | Emails every Wednesday | Follow on LinkedIn and X.
1/10 - PET-based drugs
“Plastic-eating enzymes” is the basic example both tiktokers and boring professors use when they try to explain why biotech will change the world. Several startups have come along and some have collaborated with big brands like On, PUMA, and L’OCCITANE en Provence… is it actually profitable1 though?
“Turn the freaking bottle into something more expensive” — “Paracetamol!” Replied the Edinburgh researchers who engineered two E. coli strains to break down PET and convert it into paracetamol. At room temperature, with virtually no carbon emissions, and at a max yield of 92%.
2/10 - China to shorten clinical trials
Biomanufacturing industries like the above are to become sexy again because the US needs to find a way to beat China in biotech. Not just in manufacturing, but innovation. Last year, for example, large pharma licensed 31% of their external molecules from China, compared with 6% in 2020.
On the regulations front, China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) has proposed to cut the clinical trial review waiting period for novel medicines to 30 working days (down from 60), for key medicines like pediatric drugs for cancers and rare diseases. This would match the FDA’s timeline.
3/10 - Bipaternal offspring
Forget about launching drugs to the market or rockets to the moon. What country can birth the first baby from a gay couple? I’m talking two biological dads or moms having a baby that is only theirs in DNA. Sam Altman, both gay and wealthy (haha), is an investor in Conception, a biotech co making human oocytes from female blood.
This year in China, researchers created the first-ever fully grown mammal from two dads. As shown in the figure below, they injected sperm into oocytes without a nucleus, derived embryonic stem cells from those, gene-edited 20 key loci to make up for missing maternal imprinting, combined the two sperm-derived cells into an embryo, and implanted them into a surrogate.
4/10 - Venom: new medicine or snake oil???
Despite their bad fame as deadly agents, snake venoms are actually complex libraries of hundreds of peptides, enzymes and other pharmacologically active compounds, of which <0.01% have been identified, characterized, and FDA-approved as medicine (see chart below).
Of course, Chinese traditional medicine already knew this!!! But I became aware of the space through a Wired note on a “longevity bros” conference where someone talked about venom microdosing. Now, while I don’t think that precisely is the way to go, I do see the opportunity for more drug discovery in the venom of a lot more species.
5/10 - £10M for whole genome synthesis
Wellcome, a charitable biomedical research foundation in the UK, is funding the “new” Synthetic Human Genome Project with £10 million to develop the foundational tech so that, one day, they can synthesize whole genomes. In the next 5-10 years, they’re set out to build a full synthetic human chromosome.
While the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project has been successfully completed, it’s been nearly a decade since the announcement of the (original) Human Genome Project-Write, and not much has been said since their partnership with IndieBio and SOSV in 2022 — Will this new synthetic human genome project trigger a new race?2 Does China have their own? Just asking… 😅
6/10 - $140M for Draig Tx
Draig is for the Welsh dragon that aims to burn psychiatric disorders down, using allosteric modulators of glutamate and GABAA receptors. The new funds will enable Draig to advance its lead candidate, DT-101, into Phase 2 trials for Major Depressive Disorder.
Honestly, I find small-molecule drugs quite boring, so I usually don’t feature this type of news. Sharing this time just in case somebody finds this useful.
7/10 - Neuralink updates
The pictures below speak more than a million words. The seven Neuralink participants are now able to move all kinds of electronic objects in their homes, play video games, and even draw like they once used to. No eye movement sensors, just their brains. Cursor calibration time has gone down from hours and the help of lots of engineers, to a seamless 15-min experience. Users averaging 50 hours per week.
Next stop is Blindsight, a system that basically integrates RayBan-Meta-type glasses that see the world through a camera, with a Neuralink device that receives them and writes the signals into the visual cortex of blind people, to help them see again.
In the next couple of years, Neuralink expects to reach deeper brain regions to help psychiatric patients, and by 2028, they will begin integration with AI. Elon added that, even though we will have a weird future with mind-controlled Optimus robots (see third picture), the ideal is obviously to refunctionalize the body through neural stimulation in other parts of the nervous system.
8/10 - Cyborg tadpoles and Axoft Co
Harvard bioengineers developed a soft, thin, and stretchable neural recording device to track brain embryonic development in tadpoles. It was able to record data from single brain cells with millisecond precision without causing any damage.
Under the premise of using this technology to study the early stage of diseases like autism and schizophrenia, the researchers built a similar device out of fluorinated elastomers and founded Axoft, a company developing scalable, soft bioelectronics for BCI applications.
9/10 - 776 fellows
Think “Thiel Fellowship for climate”, started and backed by Reddit cofounder, Alexis Ohanian: USD $100k grant for 20 climate entrepreneurs, researchers, and activists under 25 years old to keep building.
Some of this year’s fellows building with biotech: Michael Hla’s LLM-optimized enzymes for carbon capture, Sophia Xu’s Carbon Bridge (carbon-to-gas reactors), and Anna Cornell’s Acorn Genetics (low-cost genetic testing tech).
10/10 - Creators biotech
Ozempic is not even the beginning of what some people call “consumer biotech” — V2 may get you shredded without stepping a foot in the gym, and soon, other products may give you all sorts of superpowers: skip sleep, take your libido to unknown levels… grow wings, breathe under the ocean… who knows?
Who knows indeed! People didn’t explicitly ask for cars or iPhones. The best products are often those that people don’t know they want yet. But those who listen carefully, those who read between the lines, know the world is dying for them.
This first gen of consumer biotech is coming from big pharma. I wonder what new products and whole new markets will arise when we transition to the creators era of biotech. When those who discover secret desires can meet them with biotech. Comment your craziest ideas below!
Lots of interesting comments in this LinkedIn post