Expanding realms: Synthetic biology meets therapeutics
Synthetic biology is a field that designs biological systems to make useful things. These products can be as varied as life itself, ranging from bio-based materials to flavors and fragrances, microbial fertilizers, and medicines.
Yet synthetic biology is more than a technical discipline—it’s a community of people
This community emerged in the early 2000s, passionate about the idea that biology is technology, and driven to create companies and products built with biology.
The synthetic biology community strives to rationally engineer biological systems, similar to how software is created. Instead of modeling themselves on traditional biotech companies, these founders took inspiration from the computer and software industry—companies like Intel and Microsoft and Google.
While traditional biotech, pioneered in the 1970s by Genentech and others, focused almost exclusively on human health, the synthetic biology community initially focused on other industries such as chemicals manufacturing, energy, agriculture, and food.
Synthetic biology is now integrating with the therapeutics industry
Human health remains one of the highest value and most natural applications of advanced bioengineering methods.
Over time, many synthetic biology companies have gravitated toward therapeutics, especially more biologically complex therapies such as biologics (proteins) or cell and gene therapy, where the advanced approaches of synthetic biology may have the highest impact.
There are dozens of examples of synthetic biology companies who have made forays into therapeutics, from Ginkgo Bioworks partnering with Boehringer Ingelheim and Novo Nordisk, to Mammoth Bio’s work on ultra compact CRISPR systems for therapeutics, GRO Bio’s synthetic amino acid platform, Caribou Biosciences CRISPR gene editing for off-the-shelf cancer cell therapies and many others.
People and ideas cross-fertilize to create new opportunities
Over the past couple decades, the workforce and people in the synthetic biology community have also intermingled with the traditional therapeutics community. This cross-fertilization creates new opportunities as people trained in synthetic biology get jobs in biopharma and see chances to apply synthetic biology methods to new problems, and vice versa.
As we advance into this new era of biotechnology, the synthetic biology community is leading the charge. Drawing inspiration from the software industry, synthetic biology is redefining the boundaries of what is possible, transforming industries from agriculture to therapeutics.
