Biotech in the Garage

http://sethbannon.com/biotech-in-the-garage

by cindywu123 • 11 years ago

77 50 11 years ago

searine2• 11 years ago

Yes there are "bio-hacker spaces" and yes, you can outsource a lot of the more delicate methods, but we won't see software-level start-ups for biotech for several decades for three reasons.

1. Biology usually doesn't work. Even the simplest wet-lab reactions take very exacting conditions to work. This requires precise, expensive, equipment and endless optimization of protocols. The result is a tremendous drain on resources to get what usually amounts to a negative result

2. Bio is inherently perishable. You can't let a start-up project linger as you chip away at it for 3 years. Reagents expire, lab-cultures will mutate, equipment rusts/breakdowns/gets contaminated for stupid unforeseeable reasons.

3. There is a stupidly large legal burden if you ever want to commercialize. At every step of the process the USDA, EPA, FDA, and patent office have rules and regulations to slow you down. It might take decades to take a product from the lab to the store self, if it gets there at all.

Bio isn't computing. As a geneticist, I've seen it a hundred times where some start-up know-it-all walks into the biotech field and thinks its "just like software". It isn't, and never will be.

oldmanjay• 11 years ago

some start-up know-it-all walks into the biotech field and thinks its "just like software". It isn't,

Granted.

and never will be.

Famous last words.

jmasonherr• 11 years ago

Second this. This article is written by somebody who clearly has not done bench science. Hacker spaces like Biocurious are cool for making things glow poorly in controlled conditions but lack the tools required for actual research or progress. Even with Science Exchange and Transcriptic, the cost of doing biology is still insanely high and the timescales are tediously long.

digikata• 11 years ago

What's your feeling on how much CRISPR and techniques around it may lower the thresholds for #1 in genetic engineering?

DaveWalk8• 11 years ago

CRISPR/Cas9 is an invaluable tool at the bench, but it is just a tool. It makes things easier than before, but if you look to the past, you'll see that scientists are cynical people. Attitudes will change slowly (though there are 3 biotech companies jockeying for the ability to use it in clinic).

I think of siRNA and its revolution in biology -- it went from discovery to practical use everywhere in record time, just like CRISPR -- but the direction of research itself did not take that same radical shift. And medicine was improved too, but incrementally.

dnautics8• 11 years ago

Wait what?

Biology usually doesn't work.

No. This is not true. Biology usually works, it's that the most interesting academic things tend to be on the bleeding edge, and that's where things are not robust.

Of course, I'm not saying that there isn't debugging to be done, but it's not THAT hard. I'm doing something relatively difficult literally in my garage right now (growing a strain with a doubling time of about 6 hours). I can reproducibly make the anticancer compound in one of my strains and am working on debugging and getting a second strain running. (https://benchling.com/ityonemo/f/cHjBceoz-project-marilyn/et...)

Even the simplest wet-lab reactions take very exacting conditions to work.

Not true. For example I have done over 300 gibson assembly reactions and have taught an intern to do this, he made 50 constructs in 2 months, with time left over for him to biochemically test 25 of them. My procedure was literally, take 1 microlitre of each DNA (don't even bother measuring), and throw on top an equal volume of gibson mix, and then go. Worked nearly every time.

It is quite true that equipment requires a high capital expenditure and it's hard to start up, but those problems are able to be overcome. (e.g. http://blog.indysci.org/starting-a-lab-under-budget/) For example, I have bacterial growth incubator that was being thrown out by herbalife when they upgraded their microbiological QC lab.

searine2• 11 years ago

it's not THAT hard.

No, not hard, just crazy expensive.

Biology usually works

Under the most basic circumstances. Most startups won't have a business model based on doing PCRs with a master-mix.

For example I have done over 300 gibson assembly reactions and have taught an intern to do this, he made 50 constructs in 2 months, with time left over for him to biochemically test 25 of them.

Likely at a corporation with money to blow on facilities, equipment, and reagents.

We are talking bare-bones start-up here.

I'm doing something relatively difficult literally in my garage right now

If you want to make impure vitamins and cram them into pills, yeah I guess, but if we are talking even rudimentary biotech level work, then a garage just won't cut it.

bbgm• 11 years ago

All my experience working in and with biotech/pharma has taught me that your experiments will usually fail. The later they fail the more expensive. Biology is ridiculously hard and certainly not predictable. Aspects are reproducible and engineering-friendly, but most of it is not.

DaveWalk8• 11 years ago

it's not THAT hard. I'm doing something relatively difficult literally in my garage right now

That's great for your cell-based experiments; and many of the greatest biology discoveries were made with this toolset in the first half of the 20th century.

But what about in vivo experiments with mice and rats? What about X-ray crystallography? What about high throughput screening and counterscreening in the range of millions done before a compound is even considered to be a drug candidate?

This is hard stuff, and it's necessary stuff. Exacting conditions are absolutely essential to achieve the highest chance of reproducibility. Even so, it has been famously reported that somewhere around 11% of published findings can be reproduced independently[0].

[0] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...

timr3• 11 years ago

No offense, but nothing you've described is what I'd characterize as "difficult". I looked at your benchling link, and it's stuff that most labs give to undergrad work-study kids to get their feet wet with labs. Mostly it's about having access to the right equipment. Ligation reactions are trivial if -- as you've noted -- you use a (relatively expensive) kit. It's just a matter of time and labor costs, and with these new tools, you can trade some money for time/labor. That much is true, but it's never really been the limiting factor in biology. It's the constant on the algorithmic complexity of research.

When the parent says that "even the simplest wet-lab reactions take very exacting conditions to work", they're not really talking about transforming cells with plasmids and autoclaving plates. The conditions are exacting, but the equipment to provide those conditions is not exotic.

The hard, expensive part of biology is the part where someone spends weeks/months/years using those tools to make a new construct that should work, but then doesn't work, because unknown. Then you spend months trying to figure out what factor you're not accounting for, then you give up and start over from a new angle. Then you repeat for 5-7 years, and someone gives you a doctorate.

Saying that biology mostly works is like saying that self-driving cars are easy because we can reliably attach computers to the steering wheel and the gas pedal. It's the parts we don't know about that cost the money.

reasonattlm• 11 years ago

The incentives here have been changing in favor of progress and the breaking down of the life science academic priesthood for years, but this piece omits a very important part of the landscape, which is regulation and the present state of law.

People in the diybio community are justifiably very cautious about what they say and do, as there is there very real threat of getting thrown in jail for no real reason other than they have a lab. The war on drugs on one hand and hysteria about terrorism on the other have done a great deal to make it risky to do home life science work. Beyond that regulation makes it hard to impossible to do near anything useful with animal tissues on a garage hacking basis, and if you're not improving the state of medicine, what's the point, really? Might as well build a cat webapp if your horizon is limited to glowing plants.

So there is a lot of tension here between what is possible and what is permitted. That has been an issue in early stage research for decades now, and has cost uncounted lives and years of progress. This is just the stage in which that becomes more apparent as more people could, in theory, participate.

TeMPOraL3• 11 years ago

and if you're not improving the state of medicine, what's the point, really?

There are tons of applications not related to medicine in any way. Replace "bio" with "nano" (the former being a particular implementation of the latter) to see them.

toufka• 11 years ago

Bolt Threads [1] just received $30m in funding. There is nothing therapeutic about their business.

[1] http://boltthreads.com/

willholloway• 11 years ago

the cost of founding a biotech startup is dropping precipitously. If current trends continue, biotech companies will soon be founded in garages, funded off their founders’ credit cards.
A smart software developer can build and launch a web or mobile app and get paying customers for under $2,000.

Trivial marginal cost to start a company is a disruptive triumph for sure, financially supporting the founders basic human needs is now the primary obstacle. And of course he that hath wife and children have given hostages to great fortune.

Having no full time employment responsibilities on your horizon is the greatest boost in cognitive and creative power I have ever experienced. I made a mad dash to get a hardware product built and funded before my small savings stash was depleted, but missed the mark.

I had to go back and get a job so that the mission could continue. Going back to solving other peoples problems feels like a lobotomy.

The distraction of full time employment is immense and soul crushing. I was living in a house of science and beautiful innovation, and I hit a brick wall. But of course to paraphrase Russel Brand, god and a lack of liquidity is my enemy, just obstacles to clamber over and damage to route around.

Luckily my product is something people want and get excited about and now that I've proven it works seed funding is now on the way, but goddamn what a bummer running out of runway is.

When the world wakes up and humans get over their miserly aversion to sharing, and realize a guaranteed basic minimum income is in their own enlightened self-interest we will really cross the threshold and reach the innovation singularity.

digi_owl• 11 years ago

Stuff like this is what makes one ponder citizen wage as something other than a flight of fancy.

rezistik2• 11 years ago

I think culturally, and perhaps it's generational as a Millennial but I doubt that[1], I think culturally we have to ask ourselves why people work? I don't have enough information to state this factually, hopefully if someone does they'll chime in but maybe the reasons we wake up and go to work are changing.

If we are moving towards a society where we look more for meaning than for money we can very easily come to the conclusion that basic income wouldn't break the economy, but bolster it. Instead of doing menial labor to pay bills we'd try harder to find our way as artists, engineers and other specialized trades that offer fulfillment. Certainly some people will use their basic income to avoid work, but what is the percentage of that? I don't know many people who embrace boredom. Most people want to do something of value, and many people need to do something of value.

We are either approaching a reality we as humans have always wanted or shifting our societies desires depending on historical information(that I don't have).

Inching closer and closer to post-scarcity will be very interesting indeed.

[1]I don't think Millennial's are all that special even if we think we are.

patcon• 11 years ago

And of course he that hath wife and children have given hostages to great fortune.

Applies a little less than usual to biochem PhD students ;)

DaveWalk8• 11 years ago

I love that line! But I think a PhD student has it bad, if not worse -- the entrepreneur can watch her venture go under, and then rejoin the labor force with valuable experience and better compensation. The PhD student is locked into finishing her degree at the least, possibly aiming for a postdoc. That's a different kind of hostage to great fortune: your current wealth.

mindcrime• 11 years ago

Going back to solving other peoples problems feels like a lobotomy.

I've never heard it put quite so eloquently before! You really hit the nail on the head there. Hope you don't mind if I "borrow" that phrase...

jqm• 11 years ago

Biohackers were among the first hackers. In thatched stables and open fields. Thousands of years ago. (Although it's true the potential scope has grown considerably...)

roadnottaken• 11 years ago

From someone who works in the biotech industry, this is utter rubbish. Most good ideas in biopharma are wrong and don't work. You don't get to really test them out in a meaningful way until you get into human clinical trials. It costs 10's to 100's of millions of dollars to get there. No matter what you do in your garage, it's going to take lots of capitol and hard work before there's a glimmer of hope of a sale-able product... and even then it's just a glimmer. Comparing biotech to IT is just stupid, despite a few superficial similarities.

pcrh4• 11 years ago

While I agree with you with health-related biotech, not all biotech is in this area. There are quite a number of industrial uses for biotech that would not require the extensive testing and validation required for drugs.

Examples might be isolating novel enzymes for biocatalysis from the vast microbiome that remains to be explored, novelty decorative plants, etc...

DaveWalk8• 11 years ago

Your examples are intriguing, but I wonder precisely how much they would cost. "Enzyme isolation" means a suite of biology tools, which you could store in a garage, but aren't cheap like a laptop, server, internet connection or AWS might be.

Thinking to the most basic biology research I know, that's got to be at least $25,000 to get started. And as a scientist I don't know how much I'd trust results from someone's unregulated garage.

That said, I once heard a legent that the founder of New England Biolabs sold the first restriction enzymes out of a cooler in the trunk of his car in the 70s. I wonder if they were produced in a garage, too?

charlesdenault• 11 years ago

With a formal education in biology, I've always thought the industry was much like the computer industry a few decades ago. Jobs & Gates arguably took something that was limited to corporations and Universities, and brought it to the masses. It's a matter of time before there's a startup that revolutionizes something from their garage. Just think where we were before PCR was around, imagine what's next? With open source tools, OpenWetWare, etc, it's lowering the barriers to entry. Who says it's restricted to pharma and human clinical trials? There's plenty of room for innovation in many other areas (GMOs, synthetic bio, methods, tools).

Plus, Bill Gates (loosely) agrees. [0]

[0] http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-biolo...

atmosx• 11 years ago

The difference in biotech is that you have very little room for mistakes. In most cases (at least the ones that really matter) you have patients to deal with, not users which is a different target group. It bears a different kind of responsibility.

DaveWalk8• 11 years ago

I don't think you're the first person to have this vision, and most all bio-entrepreneurs I've spoken too felt this way at some point. Right now there's quite a gulf between the technology we have and the masses' utility for it.

While I have never gotten use out of OpenWetWare's wiki of loosely edited protocols, I could see companies with the nonprofit mindset of Addgene paving the way for that visionary future.

VLM• 11 years ago

A negative area to avoid in the discussion would be the computing analogy that having computing as a hobby is a complete waste of time because a brand new CPU fab line costs in the billions and uses all kinds of non-garage compatible toxic chemicals, or the standard automotive analogy that no one can or should be a gearhead because so few living rooms have space for a supercomputer cluster to do finite element analysis and fluid dynamics simulations.

I predict long term that bio will be much like electronics or ham radio where the population drops by maybe half at each tier or level, but there sure are a lot of people at lower levels of the hobby...

TeMPOraL3• 11 years ago

I think equating biotech with medicine is an error, made here both by the article and by commenters. Yes, it's true that most ideas in biopharma don't work, they require superexpensive trials to figure out which are worth anything, that you have tons of expensive tests to pass and licenses to acquire before anyone lets you give your product to people.

But biology is not just medicine. Life itself is an advanced nanotechnology that was not build by us, and that we don't control yet. Replace "biotech" with "nanotech" and suddenly, whole other fields of potential applications appear, many of which may not (yet) require the amount of testing and care you need when dealing with patients.

Obvious areas include manufacturing and chemistry. We already genetically modify organisms to produce chemicals we need. There are people working on reprogramming bacteria and viruses to fabricate nanostructures for better batteries and solar panels. Recently on iGEM a team of students designed bacteria that can extract rare earth metals from the soil. There are many other potential fields - grown textiles, biofilters, materials that regenerate (potentially cutting down infrastructure maintenance costs), computational matter...

I wouldn't discard the DIYBio movement just like that. There are many areas in which it could shine.

pcrh4• 11 years ago

What the author is describing is two separate trends.

One trend relates to the rapidly dropping cost of genetic studies -- this leads to easier and cheaper identification of human mutations, novel microbial species, comparative genomics, etc.

The other trend is for outsourcing of specific biological experiments to what used to be called "contract research organizations" (CROs) and now are "startups". The "silicon valley company" "Mousera" referred to seems to be one of these re-branded CROs. This particular trend has been encouraged by the flight of experienced scientists from the rapidly contracting amount of basic research performed in Big Pharma (check the resumes of those involved).

While this combination makes it easier for a "virtual company" to get off the ground, it does not really equate to the sort of startup that the software industry is familiar with -- it might be more similar to hardware startups (though that's not my field, so feel free to correct.)

As to costs, the cost of genetics will continue to drop, but the outsourcing of experiments will not render them any cheaper than before (most likely), as the neo-CROs also want to profit.

technotony• 11 years ago

there's a reason these companies are startups not CRO's, because they are applying technology to solve problems and that means they can grow fast. Outsourcing costs are falling fast for the same reasons that hardware startups costs are falling: software eating the world. In this case a convergence of automation/internet of things technologies with lab technologies means lower cost experiments, more leverage from researchers (code once and anyone can reuse your code) etc.

HarryHirsch• 11 years ago

Software eating the world? In pharma??? At the end of the day it's still chemists in labs preparing compounds that are then put through assays and clinical trials.

It's Wall Street eating science, that's all.

pcrh4• 11 years ago

You're correct that specific technologies can drive a small company (Heptares in the UK [0] -- springs to mind). Mostly, though they are business-to-business, rather than the typical view of startups.

[0]http://www.heptares.com/

akehrer2• 11 years ago

It's great that the tools and services the article mentions are out there but I think the author misses the wide gulf there is between limits of what can be done in a garage or shared lab and the resources, time and capital to do things like synthetic biology and drug discovery.

It would be interesting to see where the DIY biotech movement could apply the biotech research tools and methods to where people are already doing home "biohacking". Could home brewers and fermenters gain insight into what's going on inside their jars? Maybe small scale farmers would be interested in quantifying the bacteria in their soil. Larger brewers are already using PCR to check for spoilers in their beer, could this be turned in to BaaS (Biology as a Service) and expanded, or trickled down to the home brewer?

DaveWalk8• 11 years ago

BaaS, hah! The rest of the world calls 'em CROs :)

In theory, one could develop a CRO for DIY biologists, but I just wonder how many of them there actually are. We've made comments downpage about releasing biology to the masses like Jobs and Gates did with their PCs and operating systems...but it really feels like something is missing. The passion of the Homebrew Computing Club? The public's aversion to science, or maybe its short attention span for failed experiments?

akehrer2• 11 years ago

Yeah, BaaS :-), but what CRO would take on those type of jobs when they can't charge what they do for clinical trials or drug discovery.

I'm not sure how much interest there is either and I agree that something is missing. Maybe affordable kits similar to how PCs became more accessible to the masses as IC prices came down. Maybe bringing modern scientific equipment in to school biology classes to expand public knowledge beyond test tubes and bunsen burners.

Biotech in the Garage

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