IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to unveil its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of some, who were making important, almost ridiculous claims, that could bear great fruit.
In recent years, biotechnology has been creeping into adjacent industries, as companies discover how much they rely on outdated processes or even organisms to get things done. So you may not be surprised that there is a microbiome company in the latest batch, but you will be surprised to learn that it is the microbiome of copper mine.
I spoke with IndieBio’s chief scientific officer, Wes Dang, about the companies I found most promising or provocative, and he assured me that, despite sounding a little outlandish, these companies are serious and the IndieBio program does a lot of verification work.
“We are all technicians by experience, several PhDs, including me, do the diligence together. “We all looked at the documents and some of us dug deeper and checked the numbers and assumptions,” he said.
Transmit genomics is perhaps the easiest to understand of the new bunch: a genome sequencing method and device that is faster and cheaper than the market leader Illumina, and more importantly, reduces the need for wet lab preparation that still It requires a lot of time and experience.
There are cheaper sequencers out there, but because Illumina is so deeply integrated, the cost of switching is high, especially if you’re just saving money on the sequencing step. Stream Genomics’ approach minimizes sample preparation and reagents used (sequencing is not cyclical) while shifting much of the computational load to the cloud. They say it’s much faster and cheaper.
“With Stream, you’re simply watching nucleotides being incorporated in real time, watching the colors associated with the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs that appear, and doing it without a lot of computational burden,” Dang said. “It’s the equivalent of streaming versus downloading a Blu-ray.”
Illumina is too large to be displaced outright, but smaller operations will likely appreciate a faster, less complicated sequencing option than sending it to a third party (which can take weeks or months) or building their own sequencing lab (which is expensive ).
Another company looking for a potentially huge change is AquaLith, a battery technology startup that claims (we covered them last year) to have discovered a silicon anode material that resists the kind of long-term wear and tear it is often subjected to. The details are certainly in the weeds, but the company plans to sell only the material to battery makers who already have the means to make such batteries but need the silicon mix (“Basically a slurry,” Dang said) that makes Aqualith. exclusively.
Battery startups and alternative chemistries have come and gone for decades, and only a small portion end up being more than a footnote; However, AquaLith is apparently solving a very specific problem in an otherwise uncontroversial part of the domain. They also have plans to make a non-flammable battery cell soon. We hope it works.
farm minerals is starting its journey with some old-fashioned advertising: It’s giving away the first million acres of its synthetic fertilizer. “They basically do it as a kind of flexibility,” Dang said. “It’s incredibly cheap to make.”
Fertilizer is a huge expense for farming and it takes tons to cover a good sized field. But ultimately, crops only need a small amount of minerals, so Farm Minerals is encapsulating those minerals in a special casing of super bioavailable carbon. They say that 160 grams is enough for — checks notes — 2 millions hectares?!
“As a scientist, I thought, there’s no way this works,” Dang said after he offered a similarly dismal assessment. But they investigated it and apparently that’s how it is. Plus, that means they’re giving away the product’s worth of a bowl of cereal for the gimmick. Suddenly that part doesn’t seem so wild. That jar in the picture above is probably enough to cover the entire country. We will be contacting the company soon to see independent validation of these claims.
Transition biomeining It may be the most science-fiction of companies, trying, as they themselves describe it, to “squeeze life out of a rock.” The problem is this: only a certain amount of the minerals in the raw ore can be easily harvested using the (already quite extreme and caustic) physical and chemical processes currently used. What’s better than getting 95% of the copper from five gigatonnes of ore? Getting 98% of it. (I’m making these numbers up.) And if Transition’s method works, someone else will do the job: microbes.
The company aims to test and understand the rock’s microbiome, that is, the unique set of microbes that live in and around it, and modify it so that those microbes extract minerals simply by doing their thing. It won’t replace acid baths or other traditional methods, but it could help make mines more efficient.
There are many more in the lot. Here’s a brief summary of the others:
- Able Sciences: Self-amplifying RNA that reduces the cost of cell therapy.
- Bryosphere: Treatment for age spots made in a moss cell reactor.
- Hypercell: Fast and easy food safety testing for industrial packaging facilities.
- Water nutrition: low carbon whey from aquaculture.
- SpiralWave: Plug-and-play cold plasma methanol reactor.
- Reactosome: Gene delivery through an additional nucleus (!).
- Rybodyn: Finds and characterizes unknown proteins from the “dark proteome.”
- California Organic: Supplier of organic ammonia through fermentation.
- Cereswaves: “Electrofertilizer” that stimulates the growth of crops and animals with an energy field (?).
- Oxyle: Mechanical removal (more or less) of PFA from soil and wastewater.
We’ll want to follow up with these companies as they share more about their progress toward these sometimes-far-fetched ambitions. The San Francisco-based incubator’s demo day will be in June, at which time companies may have more information to share.
