The Bay Area’s IndieBio incubator will soon debut its fifteenth cohort of biotech startups. We paid particular attention to several of them that made serious, bordering on absurd claims that would repay big.
In recent years, biotechnology has begun to make inroads into adjoining industries as firms discover how much they rely on outdated processes and even organisms to attain their goals. So you may not be surprised that the latest batch includes a microbiome company — but you may be surprised to listen to that it’s a microbiome .
I talked to IndieBio’s Chief Science Officer, Wes Dang, about the firms I consider most promising or provocative, and he assured me that while they sound a bit outlandish, these are serious firms and the IndieBio program does a lot of the validation work.
“We are all technical, several PhDs, including me, we do all the work together. We all look at the documents, and some of us dig deep and check the numbers and assumptions,” he said.
Streaming Genomics is perhaps the easiest to grasp of the latest group: a genome sequencing method and device that is faster and cheaper than runaway market leader Illumina, and more importantly, reduces the need for wet lab preparation, which still requires a lot of time and expertise.
There are cheaper sequencers, but because Illumina is so deeply embedded, the cost of switching is high, especially if you are only saving on the sequencing step. Stream Genomics’ approach minimizes sample preparation and reagent use (sequencing is non-cyclical), while offloading much of the computational workload to the cloud. They say it’s an order of magnitude faster and cheaper.
“With Stream, you simply watch nucleotide incorporation in real time, look at the colors associated with As, T, G and C emerging, and do it without a lot of computational overhead,” Dang said. “It’s the equivalent of Blu-ray streaming and downloading.”
Illumina is too large to be moved outright, but smaller firms will likely appreciate a faster and less demanding sequencing option than sending it to a third party (which may take weeks or months) or building their very own sequencing lab (expensive).
Another company considering a potentially massive change is AquaLith, a battery technology startup that claims (we covered this last 12 months) that it has invented a silicon anode material that may withstand the long-term wear and tear it is typically subjected to. Details are actually murky, but the company plans to sell the material itself to battery makers that already have the means to provide this sort of battery, but need a silicon compound — “basically a slurry,” Dang said — produced exclusively by Aqualith.
Battery and alternative chemical startups have come and gone over the a long time, with only a small fraction remaining anything greater than a footnote; nonetheless, AquaLith clearly solves a very specific problem in an otherwise uncontroversial part of the domain. They also plan to provide a non-flammable battery cell soon. Let’s hope this works.
Minerals from the farm begins its journey with a bit of good old-fashioned stunt promoting: it’s giving freely the first million acres of its synthetic fertilizer for free. “They basically do it on flex,” Dang said. “It’s just incredibly cheap to make.”
Fertilizers are a huge expense in agriculture and you wish tons of them to cover a good-sized field. But ultimately, plants only need a small amount of minerals – that is why Farm Minerals encapsulates these minerals in a special carbon shell with excellent bioavailability. They say that 160 grams is enough for – he checks his notes – hectares?!
“As a scientist, I thought, there’s no fucking way,” Dang said when I offered a similarly blue assessment. But they looked into it and apparently yes. This also means they’re giving freely about a bowl’s value of cereal as part of this stunt. Suddenly this part doesn’t seem so wild anymore. This jug in the image above will probably be enough to cover the entire country. We can be contacting the company shortly to hunt independent verification of these claims.
Transitional biomeining is perhaps the most sci-fi of firms, attempting to, as they describe it, “squeeze the life out of a rock.” The problem is this: only a certain quantity of minerals from the raw ore could be easily harvested through the physical and chemical processes currently used (already quite extreme and corrosive). What’s higher than getting 95% copper from five gigatons of ore? Getting 98% of it. (I’m making these numbers up.) And if the Passage method works, another person will do the work: microbes.
The company’s goal is to check and understand a rock’s microbiome – the unique set of microbes that live in and around it – and modify it so that the microorganisms simply extract minerals. It won’t replace acid baths or other traditional methods, but it will possibly help increase mine efficiency.
There are many more of them in the party. Here’s a quick look at the rest:
- Able Sciences: A self-amplifying RNA that lowers cell therapy costs.
- Bryosphere: Treating age spots in a moss cell reactor.
- Hypercell: easy, rapid food safety testing in industrial packaging plants.
- Nutrition from water: Low-emission whey from aquaculture.
- SpiralWave: Plug-and-play cold plasma methanol reactor.
- Reactosome: gene delivery via an extra nucleus (!).
- Ribodyn: Finds and characterizes unknown proteins from the “dark proteome”.
- California Organic: supplier of organic ammonia by fermentation.
- Cereswaves: An “electron fertilizer” that stimulates the growth of plants and animals using an energy field (?).
- Oxyle: Mechanical (I think) removal of PFA from soil and wastewater.
We’ll want to have interaction with these firms as they share more information with us about their progress on these sometimes crazy-sounding ambitions. The San Francisco-based incubator’s demo day can be held in June, at which point firms can share more information.