Category: Consumer

When we think of synthetic biology, we often think of synthetic DNA. However, the purpose of the DNA is often to make protein. Today we can order DNA overnight for cheap, but producing protein takes at least two weeks of lab work with various instruments and techniques. Liberum aims to free researchers from the tedious task of turning DNA into protein and make experiments faster and cheaper. I chatted with Liberum’s CEO, Aidan Tinafar.

How important is protein for biological research and production?

When most people hear the word protein, they immediately think of food. Proteins are far more than food. They are used as therapeutics, industrial catalysts, biomedical research tools, materials for manufacturing and additives in consumer goods just to name a few. Insulin is a protein. Chymosin, the enzyme that enables cheesemaking is a protein. Silk is two proteins combined.

Imagine if you could come up with a type of material that you could design with vastly diverse physical and chemical properties for a whole host of applications. Ideally, you would want this material to have three properties. First, you would want to be able to make the material from a small set of inputs that are readily available. Second, you would want to be able to control the properties of the material in a tunable or programmable fashion. And third, you would want the production process to be sustainable and capable of being integrated into pre-existing environmentally-friendly modes of production. Protein is that type of material.

Proteins are strings of building blocks called amino acids that are folded and held together such that they enable certain functions. Combinatorial combinations of 20 amino acids give rise to all the breathtaking diversity we see in nature. The type and order of amino acids are generally encoded within the DNA of an organism. A single cell such as an E. coli bacterium requires a couple thousand different proteins to carry out its biological activity. These proteins can act individually or in concert as networks.

One way to take advantage of proteins is to piggyback on an existing living organism. For example, we can use yeast to make beer without having to deal with its proteins on a granular level. We can also benefit from extracts, secretions or purified proteins from organisms found in nature.

In the 70s, we began gaining a grasp on being able to mix and match these wild-type proteins between organisms through somatic fusions and recombinant technologies. During the same decade, chemical synthesis of a complete gene was demonstrated for the first time. Shortly after, in the 80s, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was invented allowing us to make billions of identical copies of these chemically derived sequences. Together, these technologies enable us to go from a digital DNA sequence stored on a computer to a designer protein within weeks. At Liberum, we significantly speed up this process, so that we can create better products faster.

These breakthroughs have already brought about the synthetic biology revolution with a total market size worth hundreds of billions of dollars and rapidly growing. For example, the size of the recombinant therapeutics market alone is now over 100 billion dollars. There are two factors that have hidden this revolution in plain sight. Firstly, cultural taboos surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have incentivized many to categorize these products as natural rather than engineered ones. More importantly, the wide range of applications of these technologies make the market appear highly fragmented. End products include anything from extracts and purified proteins to small molecules, cell lines and other goods and services that use these as intermediates. While apps of the internet revolution came to most through their screens, proteins that lead the synthetic biology revolution touch people’s lives in so many ways that make them hard to categorize as a single class. Massive shifts are often harder to observe.

What are the bottlenecks in creating protein today and how is your technology solving those bottlenecks?

Making protein using biology is hard. For every idea, for every iteration, you have to re-engineer the genetics of living cells, grow them, break them open and purify. This process is very hands-on. You need to keep coming back to it over a week or two. The process also requires expertise and expensive equipment that take up a lot of space. Even if you outsource the work to a contract research organization, you are still bound by similar timelines, plus the duration of shipping. Liberum speeds up and automates the protein manufacturing process in a miniaturized device without having the need to re-engineer any living cells. We do it all in a cell-free system that contains the same powerful enzymatic machinery used by cells.

Now you may wonder, why can we not chemically synthesize these proteins; what is so special about using biology to accomplish protein manufacturing? The problem with chemical synthesis of proteins is really two-fold. First, the error rate for state-of-the-art chemical amino acid incorporation hovers around 1%. This means that for an average bacterial protein of 320 amino acids in length, only about 4% of the final mixture would contain the correct sequence. More importantly, proper folding of amino acid chains into functioning proteins tends to be trickier in chemical systems. A system that more closely resembles biological conditions, such as a cell-free protein expression system, can avoid these problems.

Technical challenges of making proteins aside, there is a deeper conceptual issue at play. We can certainly make a protein of a specific function starting from a working DNA blueprint, but designing that blueprint is far from trivial. While rational and modular protein designs can be highly informative, they are rarely strictly prescriptive. One often needs to screen sizable libraries of designs to optimize for a specific function. Even if we take wild-type sequences from organisms in nature, there is still room for validation and screening of homologues. Unless and until we have computational means that can predictably design for functionality in silico, protein prototyping remains an indispensable tool for protein engineering.

How might your company change the way we produce protein?

We want to enable protein manufacturing at small scale with minimal time and capital investment on the part of our customers. The key insight for our business model is that we have separated the fermentation process from the act of protein production. This allows us to operate as a utility company that delivers protein production capacity to our clients on-demand. Our device and cartridges are merely the last mile. The infrastructure we build to enable this capacity is where much of the value we provide will be generated.

Once our customers have ordered and amplified their template DNA, they can simply place it inside one of our cartridges and produce their desired protein with a push of a button. Having the capacity in their own labs will allow them to optimize the desired conditions. It also provides control and rapid turnaround to enable more bright ideas to see the light of day.

What lessons have you learned transitioning from scientist to entrepreneur during the IndieBio program?

Put the customer first. Science is just the tool we use to serve our customers and the community at large. The value of our company is a function of the value we create for our customers and other stakeholders in the community.

What does the next year look like for Liberum?

Rapid iteration cycles to loop in customer feedback has been in our company’s DNA from the very early days. Our goal over the next year is to build our infrastructure such that we can bring the power of cell-free protein expression to thousands of labs around the world at very affordable prices. We will continue to build upon enhancing user experience through further iterations of the device and cartridges. Our goal is to wrap up alpha and beta testing as soon as possible so that we can launch our product within the next year.

Even though biotech has a huge impact on the lives of the general public, it is an intimidating and foreign space to many. The everyday person rarely feels like they can understand and play a role in this massive field.

Amino Labs is making science accessible to the masses by creating an easy to use biokit for the consumer home. I spoke with Julie, the CEO, about her unexpected path to biotech, approaching the field from design, and the impact of an at-home biokit. Check out her pitch live on February 4th on IndieBio’s Demo Day Livestream!

A: Tell me about your background, how did you get interested in the biotech space?

J: I never imagined I would become involved in the biotech space, to be quite honest. It seemed very foreign, complex and closed-off considering my background is in Design and Applied Arts. I’ve been focused on translating important technological advancement into understandable and desirable applications for the broader public – mainly in the field of wearables. I was actually inspired by synthetic biology when I came across the banana smell program from biobuilder in a microfluidics course I was taking to create a wearable. Long story short, I met Natalie Kuldell of Biobuilder and was amazed that a non-scientist like me could hack biology and create a living thing in a few days. A living thing that produced a smell or a pigment! I was inspired by what synthetic biology allowed me to create,  and amazed at how much a similarly simple three-day hands-on experience with bioengineering actually informed my opinion of it – I experienced the creative side of making with biology, and saw all that is possible to create currently and in the future.

A: What problem are you working to solve with your company, Amino?

J: Seeing the reaction of friends with no hands-on experience, and my struggle to recreate a hands-on bioengineering success outside of a workshop or lab, the idea of the Amino One platform came about. An easy playful way for anyone to have the workshop experience in their home or school. Stumbling on a fun and easy hands-on workshop for bioengineering is far from common, yet everyone is affected in one way or another by the products of bioengineering.

At the moment, the science is facing a difficult problem. There is an incredible lag between the importance of synbio and biotechnology in our daily lives and our general perception of it. The applications have tremendous benefits for us, yet society’s view of it is broadly negative.  This is always the case whenever science advances faster than our ability to comprehend it, simply think back to the early days of computers. In this societal context, I saw an opportunity for me to do important, significant work. With my design background and newfound friends in the science world, I was uniquely placed create a hands-on learning platform that could reach a broader audience. This first-hand experience allows individuals to feel entitled to partake in the difficult discussions about ethics, safety, and applications of biotech.

We see the potential of the Amino One to enable millions more people to enter the field of bioengineering and make sure the next generation of problem-solvers is equipped with the right tools and knowledge to produce, create and solve.

A: If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be? In other words, what would be the single biggest indicator to you that you are doing the right thing?

J: I can’t imagine a world in which all the power, decision and creation offered through bioengineering rests in the hands of the few and the elite while it influencing our very way of living. Everyone has the basic right to understand where and how new food, fuels, medicines and materials come into existence, and experience the basic of this science first hands to enable them to make informed thoughtful decisions. Furthermore, anyone that desires it should have the chance to try and create safe and imaginative solutions, entertainment, and experiences for their own lives.

A: How do you think success can change your industry?

J: We really believe that throwing open the doors to the science will allow technological advancement in the field to advance significantly faster by allowing the public to partake in critical efforts, development and discussions. For example, the mainstream adoption of computers allowed us to take all the leaps and bounds that brought us us to where we are today: Most of what your phone and computers allow you to do, personally, professionally, socially and on the larger human-scale was made possible by this democratization of computer science. We know that opening up bioengineering in a similar way will allow us to go even further, faster.

A: How is your team uniquely able to tackle this? What’s the expertise?

J: Our expertise ranges from science, synthetic biology, and bioengineering, to mechanical and electrical engineers, software developers and data storytellers, to educators and designers. Having this broad range of skills really makes us uniquely positioned to understand the user experience, the servicing experience and the technical and scientific aspects of it. But mostly, I think it is everyone’s passion for different aspects of the Amino Labs Dream that makes us stand out.

A: Any big lessons learned transitioning to startup entrepreneurship?

J: Considering I had never planned on founding a startup and it all happened organically, the first lesson is be ready for anything!  When my thesis research on Amino ended as I was graduating, it was clear to me that I had to bring the Amino One platform into real people’s hands. Though I still resisted the idea of having a startup, I brought some friends together and, as a team, we rebuilt the prototype from an academic demo into a consumer-ready (almost ready) product. Even though I still am not very comfortable with the idea of having a “startup”, it really is a great experience and sense of achievement to bring your research from some theoretical, somewhat working prototype into something real-world people care about and are willing to have in their house!  

The lesson I learned which applies perhaps mostly to the designers out there is that even though you know compromises will be necessary along the way they will still be difficult. Between usability, function, user experience, aesthetics, price, sustainability, focus, and funding, there are so many things to consider that lead to hard decisions. So trust your instinct, trust your team, but more importantly, trust your actual, real-life users. And keep user-testing! Remember the long term goals… I can’t imagine not having any Amino One, Two or Threes out there in the wild, and if it means compromising on that lush material I had my eye on for the shell, well, so be it.

A: What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered so far?

J: Actually, I don’t believe we have faced a major challenge so far. We have been very very fortunate in that way. We do, however, foresee our biggest challenge coming up quickly – we  have the need to scale up production of the Amino One much quicker than expected (which is a good problem to have, but still)! This means entering the large scale manufacturing world. We have a few leads and ideas on how to proceed, but this will definitely be a new experience for most of us.

A: What are the big goals and milestones you’re looking to hit in the short term? Long term?

J: In the short term, we will be shipping out the fifty Amino Ones sold on Indiegogo, all hand-assembled by us in wintery Canada! Following this, we are starting our “workshop series” where we will be visiting schools, museums, fablabs all around the world for 3+ day workshops using Amino One to spread open bioengineering and refine our curriculum and product. The longer term will see us going into larger scale production and shipping out products to schools at the district level before entering the home market in the coming years as we develop more home-centric apps like the ones for brewing and baking.

Get in touch with Julie at julie@amino.bio