
Biotech in the Garage - cindywu123
http://sethbannon.com/biotech-in-the-garage
======
searine
Yes there are "bio-hacker spaces" and yes, you can outsource a lot of the more
delicate methods, but we won't see software-level start-ups for biotech for
several decades for three reasons.

1\. Biology usually doesn't work. Even the simplest wet-lab reactions take
very exacting conditions to work. This requires precise, expensive, equipment
and endless optimization of protocols. The result is a tremendous drain on
resources to get what usually amounts to a negative result

2\. Bio is inherently perishable. You can't let a start-up project linger as
you chip away at it for 3 years. Reagents expire, lab-cultures will mutate,
equipment rusts/breakdowns/gets contaminated for stupid unforeseeable reasons.

3\. There is a stupidly large legal burden if you ever want to commercialize.
At every step of the process the USDA, EPA, FDA, and patent office have rules
and regulations to slow you down. It might take decades to take a product from
the lab to the store self, if it gets there at all.

Bio isn't computing. As a geneticist, I've seen it a hundred times where some
start-up know-it-all walks into the biotech field and thinks its "just like
software". It isn't, and never will be.

~~~
dnautics
Wait what?

> Biology usually doesn't work.

No. This is not true. Biology usually works, it's that the most interesting
academic things tend to be on the bleeding edge, and that's where things are
not robust.

Of course, I'm not saying that there isn't debugging to be done, but it's not
THAT hard. I'm doing something relatively difficult _literally in my garage_
right now (growing a strain with a doubling time of about 6 hours). I can
reproducibly make the anticancer compound in one of my strains and am working
on debugging and getting a second strain running.
([https://benchling.com/ityonemo/f/cHjBceoz-project-
marilyn/et...](https://benchling.com/ityonemo/f/cHjBceoz-project-marilyn/etr-
etHejg9x-culture-test-2/edit))

> Even the simplest wet-lab reactions take very exacting conditions to work.

Not true. For example I have done over 300 gibson assembly reactions and have
taught an intern to do this, he made 50 constructs in _2 months_ , with time
left over for him to biochemically test 25 of them. My procedure was
literally, take 1 microlitre of each DNA (don't even bother measuring), and
throw on top an equal volume of gibson mix, and then go. Worked nearly every
time.

It is quite true that equipment requires a high capital expenditure and it's
hard to start up, but those problems are able to be overcome. (e.g.
[http://blog.indysci.org/starting-a-lab-under-
budget/](http://blog.indysci.org/starting-a-lab-under-budget/)) For example, I
have bacterial growth incubator that was being thrown out by herbalife when
they upgraded their microbiological QC lab.

~~~
DaveWalk
> it's not THAT hard. I'm doing something relatively difficult literally in my
> garage right now

That's great for your cell-based experiments; and many of the greatest biology
discoveries were made with this toolset in the first half of the 20th century.

But what about in vivo experiments with mice and rats? What about X-ray
crystallography? What about high throughput screening and counterscreening in
the range of millions done _before_ a compound is even considered to be a drug
candidate?

This is hard stuff, and it's necessary stuff. Exacting conditions are
absolutely essential to achieve the highest chance of reproducibility. Even
so, it has been famously reported that somewhere around 11% of published
findings can be reproduced independently[0].

[0]
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html)

~~~
dnautics
A five armed mouse study for an anticancer drug runs in the 10-60k range (I
can't give my exact quote at the moment). This is inexpensive.

The expensive stuff is when you go into humans.

~~~
DaveWalk
I guess if you're outsourcing it? In my time in academia I knew labs that
burned through $25,000 per _month_ in mouse cage costs.

I can only guess what "five arms" you are referring to, but toxicity studies
and efficacy studies often require different animals. Not just mice but
transgenic mice, or nude mice with xenografts, etc. This has to be pricey to
get the statistical power you need for a drug candidate.

I've also heard that the FDA likes to see more than one animal, so either rats
or monkeys may be dosed as well. It all adds up.

~~~
dnautics
Well no one is going to get a drug approved for the FDA exclusively from the
garage, but there is a reasonable amount of initial stage research that you
could conceivably do from your garage. My project is to push that out to the
'xenograft' stage, which in my opinion is close to the limit, if not the
limit. Full disclosure, I'm doing the chemistry in a rented chemistry lab
space because I don't want to suffocate myself with chloroform.

Five arms, refers to an experiment with three dosages, a null control and a
positive control.

Yes, you can outsource things, which is exactly what I'm doing (it's cheaper
_and_ more ethical), but also the model has become really good where you don't
have to sack an animal for each time point. That cuts down on costs by a lot.

------
willholloway
> the cost of founding a biotech startup is dropping precipitously. If current
> trends continue, biotech companies will soon be founded in garages, funded
> off their founders’ credit cards.

> A smart software developer can build and launch a web or mobile app and get
> paying customers for under $2,000.

Trivial marginal cost to start a company is a disruptive triumph for sure,
financially supporting the founders basic human needs is now the primary
obstacle. And of course he that hath wife and children have given hostages to
great fortune.

Having no full time employment responsibilities on your horizon is the
greatest boost in cognitive and creative power I have ever experienced. I made
a mad dash to get a hardware product built and funded before my small savings
stash was depleted, but missed the mark.

I had to go back and get a job so that the mission could continue. Going back
to solving other peoples problems feels like a lobotomy.

The distraction of full time employment is immense and soul crushing. I was
living in a house of science and beautiful innovation, and I hit a brick wall.
But of course to paraphrase Russel Brand, god and a lack of liquidity is my
enemy, just obstacles to clamber over and damage to route around.

Luckily my product is something people want and get excited about and now that
I've proven it works seed funding is now on the way, but goddamn what a bummer
running out of runway is.

When the world wakes up and humans get over their miserly aversion to sharing,
and realize a guaranteed basic minimum income is in their own enlightened
self-interest we will really cross the threshold and reach the innovation
singularity.

~~~
digi_owl
Stuff like this is what makes one ponder citizen wage as something other than
a flight of fancy.

~~~
rezistik
I think culturally, and perhaps it's generational as a Millennial but I doubt
that[1], I think culturally we have to ask ourselves why people work? I don't
have enough information to state this factually, hopefully if someone does
they'll chime in but maybe the reasons we wake up and go to work are changing.

If we are moving towards a society where we look more for meaning than for
money we can very easily come to the conclusion that basic income wouldn't
break the economy, but bolster it. Instead of doing menial labor to pay bills
we'd try harder to find our way as artists, engineers and other specialized
trades that offer fulfillment. Certainly some people will use their basic
income to avoid work, but what is the percentage of that? I don't know many
people who embrace boredom. Most people want to do something of value, and
many people need to do something of value.

We are either approaching a reality we as humans have always wanted or
shifting our societies desires depending on historical information(that I
don't have).

Inching closer and closer to post-scarcity will be very interesting indeed.

[1]I don't think Millennial's are all that special even if we think we are.

~~~
dnautics
Because working ensures that you're doing something that is useful to someone
else.

"Most people want to do something of value."

A universal basic income is kind of this wierd bourgeois selfish projection
wrapped in this veneer of being altruistic: To be 'freed to do whatever one
prefers' is really saying "I want to do what I want, regardless of whether or
not it's socially beneficial".

The wierd thing about free markets is that although one can be selfish and
money-grubbing, even the most mendacious and stingy person must do _something_
in the service of another to accrue capital.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _The wierd thing about free markets is that although one can be selfish and
> money-grubbing, even the most mendacious and stingy person must do something
> in the service of another to accrue capital._

And the failure mode of that is people ending up doing things in service on
someone else that do a net damage to society, while other people do something
in service of someone else to undo the work of the first group. Not to mention
people stuck in positive feedback loops that waste increasing amount of
resources on cancelling each other out. See marketing for a good example.

Just because something is useful to someone, doesn't mean it should be done.

------
reasonattlm
The incentives here have been changing in favor of progress and the breaking
down of the life science academic priesthood for years, but this piece omits a
very important part of the landscape, which is regulation and the present
state of law.

People in the diybio community are justifiably very cautious about what they
say and do, as there is there very real threat of getting thrown in jail for
no real reason other than they have a lab. The war on drugs on one hand and
hysteria about terrorism on the other have done a great deal to make it risky
to do home life science work. Beyond that regulation makes it hard to
impossible to do near anything useful with animal tissues on a garage hacking
basis, and if you're not improving the state of medicine, what's the point,
really? Might as well build a cat webapp if your horizon is limited to glowing
plants.

So there is a lot of tension here between what is possible and what is
permitted. That has been an issue in early stage research for decades now, and
has cost uncounted lives and years of progress. This is just the stage in
which that becomes more apparent as more people could, in theory, participate.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _and if you 're not improving the state of medicine, what's the point,
> really?_

There are tons of applications not related to medicine in any way. Replace
"bio" with "nano" (the former being a particular implementation of the latter)
to see them.

------
roadnottaken
From someone who works in the biotech industry, this is utter rubbish. Most
good ideas in biopharma are wrong and don't work. You don't get to really test
them out in a meaningful way until you get into human clinical trials. It
costs 10's to 100's of millions of dollars to get there. No matter what you do
in your garage, it's going to take lots of capitol and hard work before
there's a glimmer of hope of a sale-able product... and even then it's just a
glimmer. Comparing biotech to IT is just stupid, despite a few superficial
similarities.

~~~
charlesdenault
With a formal education in biology, I've always thought the industry was much
like the computer industry a few decades ago. Jobs & Gates arguably took
something that was limited to corporations and Universities, and brought it to
the masses. It's a matter of time before there's a startup that revolutionizes
something from their garage. Just think where we were before PCR was around,
imagine what's next? With open source tools, OpenWetWare, etc, it's lowering
the barriers to entry. Who says it's restricted to pharma and human clinical
trials? There's plenty of room for innovation in many other areas (GMOs,
synthetic bio, methods, tools).

Plus, Bill Gates (loosely) agrees. [0]

[0]: [http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-
biolo...](http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-biology-
hackers/)

~~~
DaveWalk
I don't think you're the first person to have this vision, and most all bio-
entrepreneurs I've spoken too felt this way at some point. Right now there's
quite a gulf between the technology we have and the masses' utility for it.

While I have never gotten use out of OpenWetWare's wiki of loosely edited
protocols, I could see companies with the nonprofit mindset of Addgene paving
the way for that visionary future.

~~~
DaveWalk
But actually, the more I think about it, I enjoy your analogy. The missing
tools for sure in "DIYbio" are consumer-oriented lab technologies. Something
like a 3D printer for budding biologists to gather themselves around...but
nothing really comes to mind. Even a homebrew qPCR machine or sequencing
platform leaves out many cruicial components like incubators,
ultracentrifuges, etc. Can't even get started on mass spectrometers, flow
cytometers or other "Core" technologies that not even every lab can own.

To stretch the analogy more, though, I don't think there is a "Homebrew
Biotech Club" in the same groovy, sharing sense than that which Jobs and Gates
had way back when.

------
TeMPOraL
I think equating biotech with medicine is an error, made here both by the
article and by commenters. Yes, it's true that most ideas in biopharma don't
work, they require superexpensive trials to figure out which are worth
anything, that you have tons of expensive tests to pass and licenses to
acquire before anyone lets you give your product to people.

But biology is not just medicine. Life itself is an advanced nanotechnology
that was not build by us, and that we don't control _yet_. Replace "biotech"
with "nanotech" and suddenly, whole other fields of potential applications
appear, many of which may not (yet) require the amount of testing and care you
need when dealing with patients.

Obvious areas include manufacturing and chemistry. We already genetically
modify organisms to produce chemicals we need. There are people working on
reprogramming bacteria and viruses to fabricate nanostructures for better
batteries and solar panels. Recently on iGEM a team of students designed
bacteria that can extract rare earth metals from the soil. There are many
other potential fields - grown textiles, biofilters, materials that regenerate
(potentially cutting down infrastructure maintenance costs), computational
matter...

I wouldn't discard the DIYBio movement just like that. There are many areas in
which it could shine.

------
pcrh
What the author is describing is two separate trends.

One trend relates to the rapidly dropping cost of genetic studies -- this
leads to easier and cheaper identification of human mutations, novel microbial
species, comparative genomics, etc.

The other trend is for outsourcing of specific biological experiments to what
used to be called "contract research organizations" (CROs) and now are
"startups". The "silicon valley company" "Mousera" referred to seems to be one
of these re-branded CROs. This particular trend has been encouraged by the
flight of experienced scientists from the rapidly contracting amount of basic
research performed in Big Pharma (check the resumes of those involved).

While this combination makes it easier for a "virtual company" to get off the
ground, it does not really equate to the sort of startup that the software
industry is familiar with -- it might be more similar to hardware startups
(though that's not my field, so feel free to correct.)

As to costs, the cost of genetics will continue to drop, but the outsourcing
of experiments will not render them any cheaper than before (most likely), as
the neo-CROs also want to profit.

~~~
technotony
there's a reason these companies are startups not CRO's, because they are
applying technology to solve problems and that means they can grow fast.
Outsourcing costs are falling fast for the same reasons that hardware startups
costs are falling: software eating the world. In this case a convergence of
automation/internet of things technologies with lab technologies means lower
cost experiments, more leverage from researchers (code once and anyone can
reuse your code) etc.

~~~
pcrh
You're correct that specific technologies can drive a small company (Heptares
in the UK [0] -- springs to mind). Mostly, though they are business-to-
business, rather than the typical view of startups.

[0][http://www.heptares.com/](http://www.heptares.com/)

------
jqm
Biohackers were among the first hackers. In thatched stables and open fields.
Thousands of years ago. (Although it's true the potential scope has grown
considerably...)

------
akehrer
It's great that the tools and services the article mentions are out there but
I think the author misses the wide gulf there is between limits of what can be
done in a garage or shared lab and the resources, time and capital to do
things like synthetic biology and drug discovery.

It would be interesting to see where the DIY biotech movement could apply the
biotech research tools and methods to where people are already doing home
"biohacking". Could home brewers and fermenters gain insight into what's going
on inside their jars? Maybe small scale farmers would be interested in
quantifying the bacteria in their soil. Larger brewers are already using PCR
to check for spoilers in their beer, could this be turned in to BaaS (Biology
as a Service) and expanded, or trickled down to the home brewer?

~~~
DaveWalk
BaaS, hah! The rest of the world calls 'em CROs :)

In theory, one could develop a CRO for DIY biologists, but I just wonder how
many of them there actually are. We've made comments downpage about releasing
biology to the masses like Jobs and Gates did with their PCs and operating
systems...but it really feels like something is missing. The passion of the
Homebrew Computing Club? The public's aversion to science, or maybe its short
attention span for failed experiments?

~~~
akehrer
Yeah, BaaS :-), but what CRO would take on those type of jobs when they can't
charge what they do for clinical trials or drug discovery.

I'm not sure how much interest there is either and I agree that something is
missing. Maybe affordable kits similar to how PCs became more accessible to
the masses as IC prices came down. Maybe bringing modern scientific equipment
in to school biology classes to expand public knowledge beyond test tubes and
bunsen burners.

------
VLM
A negative area to avoid in the discussion would be the computing analogy that
having computing as a hobby is a complete waste of time because a brand new
CPU fab line costs in the billions and uses all kinds of non-garage compatible
toxic chemicals, or the standard automotive analogy that no one can or should
be a gearhead because so few living rooms have space for a supercomputer
cluster to do finite element analysis and fluid dynamics simulations.

I predict long term that bio will be much like electronics or ham radio where
the population drops by maybe half at each tier or level, but there sure are a
lot of people at lower levels of the hobby...

