Pesticides are always a compromise: if you kill the mosquitos, you end up killing the bees too. Pyrone discovered a rare natural compound that controls mosquitos and other pests not by killing them, but by temporarily stunning them. Already fast-tracked by the EPA and being tested by the USDA in Gainesville, Pyrone is now scaling this compound in their fermentation system with Agile Biofoundry. 

Conventional thinking is that synthetic chemistry is cheaper than biology. Pyrone focuses on compounds that biology can produce far cheaper than chemistry. From the same process used for the biopesticide, they can make 7 other products, accessing $40 billion in markets. 

In the field of liquid biopsy, the abundance of new technologies are mere screening tests. They can’t monitor patients’ progression and drive clinical decisions. The real money is in monitoring disease patients, for years. 

Atomic Force Microscopy scans the surface of cells at such high resolution that it can not only discriminate cancer cells from healthy cells, it can identify the stage and aggressiveness. The scientific community is so excited by Cellens’ work that grant funding is covering all the costs of their pre-clinical trials at Dana Farber, Dartmouth, and UW.

Solid Ox is building Range Extenders for commercial fleets of electric trucks and buses. These range extenders use liquid fuel, where the CO2 is captured on board, right back into the fuel tank. Emissions-free. 

Commercial fleets that need long range are very price sensitive to fueling costs. They also run day and night, so have short windows to refuel or recharge. Solid Ox allows fleets to refuel in half the time, at half the cost. 

Solid Ox has a partnership with Smith Electric Vehicles.

All  available  sunscreen  active  ingredients  absorb  through our  skin,  interfering  with  hormones  and  even  exacerbating UV damage. Meanwhile, SPFs in cosmetics,  washed down  the  drain at night,  accumulate  in  sensitive marine  environments,  where  even  the  “reef  safe”  versions threaten endangered corals and marine life.

Based on groundbreaking work in protein engineering at Princeton, Soliome has reinvented sunscreens and SPFs, an $18B global market. ​​It is totally safe, long-lasting and goes on clear without white residue.

Why now: In October of 2022, new FDA regulations on sunscreens take effect, dramatically reducing the cost and burden of approval.

Why it’s scalable: Because Soliome can make their SPFs from any protein. Even common plant proteins already used as food.

The market value of farmland is driven by yield. For example, increasing soy yield by 10 bushels an acre can double the value of the farmland.

Puna Bio repairs soil health using extremophiles – organisms 3.5 billion years old, sourced from La Puna, the highest and driest desert on Earth. These organisms grow where others can’t – and they sustain plant life, despite getting 1/5th the rainfall of Death Valley.

When an athlete trains at altitude, she is even stronger at sea level. So it is with Puna’s extremophiles. They work wonders on degraded, acidic, and salinated soil. In fertile soil, they boost yields 4x more than competitors, with far more consistent results.

Puna Bio is already at industrial scale, having treated +600 tonnes of seeds this season, and conducted over 20,000 acres of field trials.

Potassium controls every single heartbeat you have, but it’s the kidneys that control your potassium levels. You could say the kidneys are the gatekeeper to your heart.

Kidney care is going through dramatic market disruption. Home dialysis is displacing clinics. And patient care management companies are siphoning off patients. Nevertheless, these patients are still ending up in the hospital 2 to 3 times a year, because none of them have a way to remotely and continuously monitor patient potassium data. ProtonIntel will power this entire new ecosystem. 

CellCrine discovered an enzyme that transforms cell culture for the cell-based meats industry.

It’s made recombinantly, but can be used at such low concentration that only a tiny bit is needed.

The impact is dramatic — reducing the need for insulin, transferrin, FGF2, TGFb, and other expensive media ingredients. The cells grow nearly as fast as they do en vivo.

CellCrine’s enzyme works by stimulating cells to make their own growth factors; it also chaperones growth factors to receptors. With muscle cells, they also help myotube formation. 

The enzyme is food grade and natural.

Wayfinder has built a drug discovery platform for small molecules that modulate RNA targets. Their technology generates highly quantitative data on RNA-small molecules interactions at high-throughput. Combined with their AI/ML virtual screening models, they can search billions of molecules for RNA modulators in just 3 days.

And they do it way faster than anyone else in the world. Wayfinder is WAY faster.

A spinout from the Center for Synthetic Biology at the University of Washington, Wayfinder has internal programs in oncology and unique technologies to unlock RNA drugging.

Modern lifestyles are hard on our livers and kidneys, the organs that filter and break down metabolic waste products. But people don’t want to take drugs – they want to get healthy. Unlocked Labs unleashes the power of the microbiome to help out. 

Unlocked is a consumer probiotic company that unlocks silent genes – regaining the power to reduce toxins in our bodies.

Some gut microbes have the genes to eat our waste products as food, as a carbon source. These are dormant genes – they can be unlocked and activated. The company’s first products reduce uric acid and oxalic acid. High uric acid leads to gout, and high oxalic acid leads to kidney stones.

There’s two general concerns around molecular farming, where animal proteins are grown in field crops. First, the extraction and purification. Second, the regulatory landscape for transgenic crops amidst other farmland. 

Veloz Bio doesn’t use the farm. And the founders are experts at extraction and membrane purification. Without the need of bioreactors, they can develop and scale up new protein production in less than 6 months.

All over Europe, people know the best tasting seaweed comes from Ireland. Sea & Believe founder Jennifer O’Brien walked every beach in Ireland, tasting the seaweed for her alternative seafood. She found one beach where the seaweed was remarkably tastier than all others. “It just had that distinctive spray of the ocean,” said O’Brien. 

But this one beach cannot sustain an industry. Sea & Believe is cultivating this special strain for its filets and goujons. You’ll want seconds. 

For this new line of foods, Plantruption has partnerships with Wageningen University, Clextral, and the University of Limerick.

Photosynthesis wastes sunlight. Many scientific efforts are underway to reengineer photosynthesis to increase yields. Climate Crop – 5 years in the making at Weizmann Institute – will outgrow them all. 

It works in all vascular plants. It’s simple – downregulating one enzyme. During the day, plants increase their storage of transient starch; at night, they use this starch as building blocks for all cell matter. Climate Crop simply increases the storage of transient starch – then the plant takes it from there.

Climate Crop will power applications across agriculture and industrial markets. Higher yielding cotton. More affordable animal feed. Carbon-sucking poplars.  Aviation fuels from rapeseed.

There’s thousands of ways that cells become unhealthy. But until 2012, there were only two ways that cells actually die. That year, the cofounder of Prothegen, Dr. Scott Dixon, discovered a new way cells die, called ferroptosis, an iron-mediated failure of antioxidant defenses. Now Dixon has partnered with Roche alum Davide Zanchi and chemist Derek Pratt – one of the world’s specialists in free radical trapping – to develop drugs that stop cells from dying of ferroptosis. 

Ferroptosis is implicated in some of the main life threatening conditions of our time: stroke, ischemic injuries, neurodegeneration, cancer, NASH, and organ transplantation.