
Synthetic biology and yeast can help fix the drug supply chain - apsec112
https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/16/synthetic-biology-yeast-help-fix-broken-drug-supply-chain/
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untilHellbanned
> By CHRISTINA SMOLKE JULY 16, 2020

{ article }

> Christina Smolke is the CEO and co-founder of Antheia, a synthetic biology
> company based in Menlo Park, Calif.

This is an ad.

~~~
toufka
Yes? But you also left off the rest of her bio: ", professor of bioengineering
at Stanford University, and a member of the National Academies’ Committee on
Science and Innovation Leadership for the 21st Century."

She is an accomplished academic scientist who is now putting her effort into a
technology where her science portends value. And she's explaining that
technology here.

The idea is actually a very strong idea with hints towards an even more
interesting future. Bionengineering these pathways into an organism (even
yourself) gets you a lot of significant benefits:

\- dropping the reliance on petrochemical precursors for manufacturing

\- a large number of biosimilar compounds for the cost of a few rounds of
evolution

\- manufacturing is constant across many different drugs and involves 3
ingredients: water, light & sugar

\- manufacturing is much easier and can be transported "in house" eventually
into smaller and smaller scales (think yogurt or a shot of espresso)

\- etc.

~~~
untilHellbanned
I didn't say anything about the strength of the idea. Her Stanford credentials
are irrelevant. It's still an ad.

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obblekk
This is a great idea. Since this technology has been available since the 80s
according to the article, why isn’t this already the default way of producing
drugs? Why do companies rely on fragile long term supply chains instead of a
scalable faster process under their control?

In other words there must be some reason the market hasn’t adopted this - what
is it?

~~~
vikramkr
They tried with artemisinin and it was a very notable failure. The science
worked but the economics didn't add up. The main reason is because chemical
drugs are pretty easy to synthesize (even from plants) and that synthetic bio
doesnt give you any advantage over traditional methods- if anything you get
lower throughput. You cant solve a human supply chain problem with new
technology if the same humans are making the same decisions about their
operations. Synbio has been overhyped to hell and back as a silver bullet.
Tech VCs have eaten it up and donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the
cause because the biologists running these companies have gone out of their
way to convince people that they can program biology like computers, whatever
that means.the big synbio drug manufacturing company is gone, the big biofuel
companies are gone, that's hundreds of millions of dollars from the market
trying to adopt this. I'm saying all this as the founder of a synbio company
by the way- in the past few years we've finally started coming down the hype
curve with Joule's implosion and it's wonderful. 10 million dollars invested
in promising new approaches and markets will help the field out a lot more
than 100 million invested in an overhyped company blowing it all on rent in
cambridge and promising to produce more fuel per acre than physically possible
with the amount of sunlight available.

~~~
martythemaniak
What really happened with Joule? I remember reading about it in Church's book,
but nothing outside that.

~~~
vikramkr
They couldn't deliver on their promises and got tangled up in the 2016 Hillary
email/podesta/Russia debacle as well as the Volkswagen diesel scandal and
imploded soon after. They just couldn't compete with cheap gasoline, and their
claims about how much they could produce per acre of land were dubious .

[https://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2017/07/18/heat-
death...](https://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2017/07/18/heat-death-joule-
unlimited-collapses-as-oil-prices-fall-time-passes-pressure-mounts/)

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/09/01/how-
biofuel-...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/09/01/how-biofuel-
dream-turned-into-nightmare/rt5ve7mE4YUZUOrqdaTqWK/story.html?outputType=amp)

------
refurb
This article is not very informative. The author is vaguely describing a
couple technologies (that are already being pursued) and saying how it can be
helpful with our drug supply and address shortages (which have been an issue
for at least a decade).

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im3w1l
I like this but I worry about what happens when they inevitably leak out into
the natural environment.

~~~
maxerickson
Mostly they get out-competed by organisms that aren't expending energy
producing chemicals they don't need.

The world is covered in "green goo" already.

~~~
thechao
There is a definite energy advantage to being very small. When I was working
in the _proper_ nanobot space it became quickly apparent that "gray goo" was
nonsense. Bacteria are grandmasters at throwing away things they don't need.
In fact, due to epigenetics, many bacteria don't even contain all the genes
they need to survive in their own environment — the cost of maintaining the
complete set of genes is distributed through the local population. The
corollary is that anything that's small is limited to doing things "like a
bacteria would". The only way around the energy barrier is to pump energy in
from an outside source; y'know, like _plants_. Notice that plants don't get
around very much because their energy source is pretty scant. Just "dumping
more energy in" doesn't really work because the energy scales cause (what we
called) 'spontaneous disassociativity of functioning parts'.

Personally, I think the real breakthrough was LBL-silicon turing complete
silicon nanoparticles. They combine the best parts of nature (proteins) with
the best thing we've though of (computers) to provide a pre-defined _library_
of additional capabilities to the host organism.

~~~
im3w1l
While nature is creative, and deserves a lot of credit, we know that it
doesn't always find the "best" solutions. If we can build jet planes faster
than birds, and solar panels more efficient than plants, why not greyer goo
than natural bacteria?

~~~
thechao
We can! That's my point: we can build these computational silicon
nanoparticles (the lab I worked at was doing this in this right at the turn of
the century). It just looks different than tiny little robots: just the way
the propulsion system of a jet looks nothing like the flapping of wings.

