>FASTA_29
Vitropep's peptide patches; Swimclub's sperm performance supplement; Lyndra's long-release pills; Arc's bridge recombinases; AlterEgo's telepathy BCI; Renewal Bio stem cell embryos; Genomines' metals
>FASTA: weekly short reads of the global biotech ecosystem | Papers and patents, acquisitions and bankruptcies, biotech philosophy | Read in under 5 min | Follow on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and Instagram | Versión en Español
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1. Vitropep 🙅♀️ 💉
From weight loss to wound healing applications, peptides are perhaps the hottest biotech these days. Vitropep stabilizes peptides as microneedles that can be administered topically through a painless patch (no more needles!) that carries up to 90% of the API and is stable at room temperature (no cold chain).
Founder Christophe Tarabout, a biophysicist, has proven in vitro and in vivo efficiency for two known commercial peptides used in the IVF process and for bowel diseases. He’s running promising tests for GLP-1 and has filed two patents. The 3-year-old company is part of Genopole and currently fundraising.
2. Swimclub 🩲
Swimclub is the first clinically formulated sperm performance supplement. A combination of vitamin D3, lycopene, spermidine, zinc and 11 other branded ingredients are formulated to target sperm count, motility, morphology, and DNA fragmentation for improved fertility in males who are trying to get pregnant.
While the decline in sperm count is in the zeitgeist, fertility is still more often associated with women, who unlike their counterparts, are expected to take prenatal vitamins as part of the pregnancy or conception efforts. Squared Circles, the venture studio behind swimclub, was challenged with turning Dr. Michael Eisenberg’s science into a desirable brand.
The capsules are made in FDA-registered, cGMP-certified US facilities, and start at $380 for a 90-day subscription, which is recommended as sperm takes at least 72 days to generate.
3. Until, the hibernation company ❄️
A little over a year ago, longevity investor and scientist Laura Deming announced the recovery of electrical activity from cryopreserved rodent neural tissue at Until, her new Interstellar-esque new company. So far, they’ve raised US$100M+ to preserve whole human organs for transplants, and one day, whole bodies.
The very interdisciplinary challenge they’re working to solve is how to protect the tissue when cooling and rewarming. They need to change the temperature fast enough to prevent ice formation, but not too fast so there are no thermal gradients across the whole volume of the tissue.
Instead of moonshot Disney-like tech for billionaires, it seems sensible to target the demand for the thousands of organ transplants which are actually lost each year to logistical delays or lack of a timely match by developing better cryo-tech.
4. Long-release pills 💊
A once-a-week pill was tested in a phase 3 trial in schizophrenia patients. The study was conducted by Lyndra Therapeutics, a spinout from Giovani Traverso’s lab at MIT that has been developing new drug delivery methods for over a decade.
Schizophrenia patients who are under treatment and miss a pill, for a variety of reasons, are more prone to skip it again. While some opt for weekly injections, they require administration by a health care provider, and well, not everyone likes injections.
While this brings good memories from the time I emailed Dr. Traverso and got the files to 3D print the pill myself, today I’m worried about drug release — Even though levels were “within optimal range”, there was a spike on the day the pill was taken, followed by a slow decline over the next week, and it’s very clear to me that this could be detrimental to many patients.
5. Bridge recombinase demo 🧬
Arc Institute researchers demonstrated therapeutic proof of concept of their new genome engineering tool, bridge recombinases, by correcting DNA repeats that cause Friedreich’s ataxia. They also achieved inversion up to 0.92 Mb, excision of up to 0.13 Mb, and up to 20% insertion efficiency.
While CRISPR relies on cellular mechanisms to make the desired edit, and more precise versions of CRISPR only edit less than 100 bases, most diseases are polygenically spread across our 3 billion bp genome. Bridge RNAs can insert, cut out, or flip long sequences within up to 1 million bp in a genome.
Question from former biotech VC Nicole Marino: “If 10 years in the future gene editing still hasn’t transformed human health, what reason you’d guess was responsible for it then? Would you still say it’s the editing technology that’s the problem?”.
6. Telepathy by AlterEgo 🧠
The Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab built a non-invasive neural interface that allows humans to communicate with other people and AIs without emitting any sound, without opening their mouth, and without externally observable movements.
They’re now a company called AlterEgo, backed by MIT’s E14 fund and others. In a recent demo, they demonstrated how their device (US10878818B2) can integrate with AI to enable coding (nearly) at the speed of thought, language translation, and answering questions about your environment without having to touch your phone or well, say a word.
While early adopters may be people with speech disorders (like ALS or MS patients), it’s impossible not to imagine AlterEgo integrating with Meta’s AR glasses, and with that, a bunch of privacy questions. Even if v1 cannot “read your thoughts”, what guarantees that nothing will get “lost in translation”? And, how will poetry, music, and communication change once everything becomes “needless to say”?
7. Renewal Bio’s embryos 🧫
Forget about stem-cell derived eggs or sperm for IVF. Renewal Bio can grow mouse embryos with beating hearts and proto-brains derived only from genetically unmodified mouse naive pluripotent stem cells using small-molecule modulators.
Jacob Hanna, the lead scientist behind the company, says these embryos are the ultimate organ bioprinter — Imagine using them to grow gonads that can later be matured in-vitro or in-vivo to produce youthful eggs… or genetically directing the growth of particular organs of interest, not the whole organism.
The Israeli company has also developed a mechanical womb to keep the embryos suspended while enhancing gas and nutrient exchange. They are backed by NFX.
8. Gates, Wellcome, and Novo 🥩
The three foundations have committed USD $100 million each to advance solutions for climate change, infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance, and the interplay between them that are accessible and affordable to people in low- and middle-income countries.
The climate and food part of that initiative has developed microbial strains that contain over 40% protein and feed entirely from CO2-derived acetate, removing the need for sugar as feedstock. The new funds will allow for optimization, scaling, and testing food prototypes made from this technology.
9. Plant-based metals?
Genomines engineers plants to increase their speed and capacity to store battery-grade nickel which soaked up from the ground. According to their CEO, Fabien Koutchekian, this process is “40% below the total cost of the median in the mining industry”.
Apparently, the French startup’s strategy has been to identify 35 million hectares worldwide that are too rich in nickel to be arable but too poor in ore to be profitable for the mining industry. They’re exploring projects with Hyundai Motor Group, Jaguar Land Rover, and battery manufacturers.
Poets 🍀
10. Four-leaf clover: You are not a lottery ticket.
“The precise genotype of the iconic four-leaf clovers plants, however, remains a mystery. After all, who wants to invest tax dollars to figure St. Patrick out? This is not a science project. It is an artistic quest on how the cultural meaning of an organism changes as it morphs from a rare gift of nature into an engineered product”
