The dominance of private-sector funding for research and development means large-scale foundational investment in biotechnology has not happened to the same extent that it did in information technology and other fields four or five decades ago, the Fiduciary Investors Symposium at Stanford University has heard.
Private equity and venture capital investors invariably demand a return on capital over timeframes that are too short to commit to the kind of research that lays the groundwork for practical applications. For that reason, the almost unimaginable potential of synthetic biology remains largely unavailable as a general-purpose technology.
The symposium has heard that few private sector investors have worked out how to profitably fund foundational research and development, and that private capital is unlikely to replace a national commitment to funding R&D.
Stanford University Martin Family Fellow in Undergraduate Education for Bioengineering Drew Endy said that foundational research requires patient capital – such as the type stewarded by the global pension fund organisations attending the symposium.
“When you have an emerging technology, there’s very early work in foundational engineering that I would argue private capital is not patient enough for, or not well suited for,” Endy said.
Endy said in other fields, such as electronics and networking, it was public funding that “took the risk, and then things went differently”.
“We just haven’t been doing that in this country, at least for biotech,” he said.
Endy cited large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence systems that are being trained on genome sequences and are starting to show some promising results in designing new molecules. They may have potential in designing new genome sequences, but this has yet to be proven.
“The bottleneck there is not the computational power to train the model, it’s the low throughput, high expense, building and testing of the biology itself to give feedback to the model,” Endy said.
“I haven’t seen anybody organise an effort to scale that up. In my view, that should be something that in a high-functioning nation state we’d have national labs doing. We don’t have that.”
For humanity to flourish
Endy said that although he and his colleagues are academics, “I don’t think of this topic as an academic”.
“I think of this as a topic where I’d like to…get humanity to a flourishing planet by or before the year 2050, and what that means, among other things, is we have to deploy significant amounts of capital smartly, soon enough to matter,” he said.
Endy said that he just happens to be working as a bioengineer “at a point in time where we’re putting the word ‘synthesis’ in front of the word ‘biology’, which means we’re working to compose biology”.
“Anything we can encode in DNA, we can grow when and where we need to,” he said.
“If we can pull that off, then we can get to flourishing. We’ve never had the sustained investments in the foundational research to unlock biology as a general-purpose technology.
“I’d get lots of money to work on diseases, or fixing carbon, right now. But if you say, ‘I want to make a better operating system for a cell’, even my Dad goes, ‘what disease is that curing?’. I don’t know, Dad. [Then] it’s like, ‘No money for you!’.”
Endy said the potential applications of synthetic biology are immense and wide-ranging, including, for example, creating novelty pot plants bioengineered to glow in the dark as night lights; reprogramming yeast so that instead of producing alcohol it produces specific medicines or drugs; growing modified mushrooms to create an alternative to leather; and “growing” computers. This last potential application sounds outlandish and is not currently technologically possible, Endy said, but serious research organisations are giving it thought and one, Semiconductor Research Corporation, has set out a five-step roadmap.
Step one is to use DNA “not for biotechnology, but use it to store data, as if you’re an archivist”, Endy said.
“Step two, figure out how to make energy efficient computation systems inspired by biology,” he said.
“Step three, figure out how to connect cells and hardware. Step four, create electronic design automation.
“And then finally, get to step five, we’re going to use biology to do bottom-up templating of inorganic materials as a type of living scaffold that then puts atoms where they need to be to make a piece of hardware.”
All of this is “a pretty big leap”, Endy said, but “I love this roadmap because I can imagine it like it feels like it physically might just be barely possible”.
“I also like it because technically, [it’s] totally impossible,” he said.
“There’s no chance we can do this today. And the reason I love that is because it might be possible this star in the sky could motivate decades of investment in foundational engineering research that would unlock biology as a general-purpose technology.”
