The challenges of SynBio

Transcript below

So some of the challenges in SynBio, you know, number one is the cost. Number two would probably be the timelines. The cost is not insignificant to a lot of these companies who have multiple products in their portfolio that they're going after, and they need quick, efficient, you know, commercially viable solutions to produce these targets.

And then timeline-wise, it takes a while to engineer and sell. The DBTL cycles can be anywhere from months to years for that process to take place. And I've seen that firsthand. I've been in that industry for years and years and years.

And I've seen, you know, companies have certain goals, have certain targets. And during that project, those goals and those targets evolve and they change, and now that's no longer relevant. So you need solutions that are, you know, not only cost-efficient, so they're commercially viable, you know, economically, but you need them to be on a certain timeline that they meet the goals and the demands of the industry at that specific moment in time because those are going to constantly evolve ever, you know, so rapidly as we move along in our journey to find, you know, better medicines, better target molecules for various industries.

So even though I am in a business development role here at eXoZymes, I do have a technical background in nature. I hold a PhD from Purdue University where we studied a certain termite. But we were studying the biochemical pathways within that termite and trying to tease out those pathways to produce various target molecules for various industries.

And so that's where my fascination with enzymes really started and trying to utilize enzymes in an industrially relevant manner to produce things that industry needs, right, various industries need. Within that time that I was at Ginkgo, you know, I saw some of the positives of the cell-based side of things, but also a lot of the negatives as well, right? The timelines and the cost associated and whatnot with those processes were somewhat inhibitory to making any, any sort of any sort of impactful dent, you know, any sort of impactful dent, you know, with those partners, you know, with those partners. Just because, again, the costs associated, you know, were not, you know, commercially viable, you know, especially if those partners had a whole portfolio of target molecules they were going after.

But also, you know, the timelines were so long in terms of engineering those organisms, the DBTL cycles to see if they worked or not, that a lot of those targets that a lot of those targets that the partners were going after were relevant, you know, halfway through the project, right? And so when eXoZymes reached out to me and I saw that there was a company that was not only utilizing a cell-free route in terms of producing, you know, the enzyme pathways outside of the cell, but they had also figured out all of the intricacies needed to be able to make that work in terms of the properties needed to be able to make that work in a commercially viable manner.

I jumped at the opportunity, right? You know, because you still, these enzymes still want to be in the environment of a cell to work as efficiently as possible, but we want to get rid of the cell to get rid of a lot of those complexities and a lot of those inhibitory, inherently inhibitory aspects of what the cell brings with it.

And so they were able to figure out, you know, how to, you know, balance all of the energy that's needed to have those enzymes work as efficiently as possible outside of the cell and the enzyme pathways.

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