The Bay Area’s IndieBio incubator will soon debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We paid particular attention to several of them that made stern, bordering on absurd claims that could pay off large.
In recent years, biotechnology has begun to make inroads into adjacent industries as companies discover how much they rely on obsolete processes and even organisms to achieve their goals. So it might not surprise you that the latest batch includes a microbiome company — but it might when you hear it’s microbiome Copper ore.
I talked to IndieBio’s Chief Science Officer, Wes Dang, about the companies I consider most promising or provocative, and he assured me that while it sounds a bit outlandish, these are stern companies and the IndieBio program does a lot of the validation work.
“We all have technical education, several PhDs, including me, we do 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 probably the easiest to understand of the modern group: a genome sequencing method and device that is faster and cheaper than runaway market leader Illumina, and more importantly, reduces the need for damp 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’re only saving on the sequencing step. Stream Genomics’ approach minimizes sample preparation and reagent exploit (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 immense to move outright, but smaller companies will likely appreciate a faster and less demanding sequencing option than sending it to a third party (which can take weeks or months) or building their own sequencing lab (steep).
Another company considering a potentially massive change is Aqualith, a battery technology startup that claims (we covered this last year) that it has developed a silicon anode material that can withstand the long-term wear and tear that this type of battery typically endures. . Details are certainly murky, but the company plans to sell the material itself to battery makers that already have the means to produce this type 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 decades, with only a compact fraction ending up as anything other than a footnote, but Aqualith clearly solves a very specific problem in an otherwise uncontroversial part of the domain. They also plan to produce 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 advertising: it’s giving away the first million acres of synthetic fertilizer for free. “They basically do it on flex,” Dang said. “It’s just incredibly low-cost to make.”
Fertilizer is a huge expense in agriculture, and it’s also huge in general: it takes tons of it to cover a good-sized field. But ultimately, plants only need a very compact amount of minerals, so Farm encloses these minerals in a special casing of super bioavailable carbon. They say 160 grams is enough for… (checks notes) wait, two million hectares?!
“As a scientist, I thought, there’s no fucking way,” Dang said after I offered a similarly blue assessment. But they looked into it and apparently yes. This also means they’re giving away about a bowl’s worth of cereal as part of the stunt… suddenly that part doesn’t seem so wild anymore. There are probably enough jugs up there to cover the entire country. We will be contacting the company shortly to seek independent verification of these claims.
Transitional biomining is perhaps the most sci-fi of companies, trying to, as they describe it, “squeeze the life out of a rock.” The problem is this: only a certain amount of minerals from the raw ore can be easily harvested through the physical and chemical processes currently used (already quite extreme and corrosive). What’s better 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, someone else will do the work: microbes.
The company’s goal is to test 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 established methods, but it can lend a hand augment mine efficiency.
There’s a lot more to this batch; here is a very brief overview of the rest:
- Able Sciences: A self-amplifying RNA that lowers cell therapy costs
- Bryosphere: Treating age spots in a moss cell reactor
- Hypercell: elementary, rapid food safety testing in industrial packaging plants
- Nutrition from water: Low-emission whey from aquaculture
- Spiralwave: Plug-and-play chilly plasma methanol reactor
- Reactosome: gene delivery via an extra nucleus (!)
- Ribodyn: Finds and characterizes unknown proteins from the ‘gloomy proteome’
- California Organic: Supplier of organic ammonia through 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
I’m sure we’ll want to engage with these companies as they can share more about their progress towards achieving these sometimes quite crazy ambitions. The SF-based incubator’s demo day will be held in June, at which time companies will be able to share more information.
