Building the Innovation Engine for Biology
Lowering the barriers of bio-innovation + why I joined Opentrons.
I’m excited to announce that, as of last Monday, I have joined the team at Opentrons, an open-sourced robotics company developing the platform for biological innovation!
As we are exit the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, my time as Head of Product at Canid has come to an end. As a vaccine management company for pediatricians, my goal was to create a framework for educating both physicians and parents how to communicate the need for vaccines - a central building block for ensuring society survives the next pandemic. I’m proud of the progress we made, and am excited to see how the team continues to develop the product.
Joining Opentrons feels like a good opportunity to recap how I got here and where the future of biology is going next.
Becoming the BioOptimist
In 2019, I launched BioOptimist as a platform - a meme, really - to champion the simple idea that biology is the technology of our future.
This is the world of bio-as-tech. Out with the old school of biotech where technology “fixes” biology. In with the revolution of bio-as-tech, where biology is the technology stack that improves biology as much as our daily lives.
At a very young age, I became enamored by the biology that surrounded me. Growing up in the Florida Keys (no not Key West), I was surrounded by an incredibly diverse biological environment. From the coral reefs of the Atlantic Ocean to the coastal flats of the Gulf of Mexico, diversity of environments was minutes not hours apart. I was a natural explorer and experimentalist, constantly asking “why?” and wondering “what if…”
Naturally, my experiments found a local maximum when I received my PhD after 4 years of researching and publishing about neural appetite signaling (1). Unsatisfied by the lack of patient feedback in research, I zoomed in to focus on my end-user (patients) by entering medical school. Three years into medical school, I realized I overcorrected. While academic research left me too removed from patients, healthcare delivery in the U.S. is too removed from empathy.
It was time to leave the ivory tower, and begin exploring scaling bio with startups.
Biology as a Technology
Biochips.
My first startup job was at Koniku, a company driven by the vision of biological computation. I met the founder at one of my first meetups in San Francisco; I caught him off guard when I interrupted his 60 second pitch with specific questions about his biggest pain points. I got a job offer when I proved that I understood the challenges of the product as clearly as the value proposition. I got the role I wanted when I outlined how business challenges were manifesting alongside the technical challenges (2).
Weeks later I joined the team and spent the next two years developing a device that combined the power and flexibility of biosensors with the computation of modern silicone chips. At the core of the device - and value proposition - is a living biochip. Our first application? A device that could “smell” better than canines while being faster and cheaper than employing dogs and their trainers. Spending my time translating between our clients, biologists, hardware engineers, and software developers, I was hooked on bio-as-a-technology.
Insulin.
In 2019, I was approached by two friends, Len Kozhukh and Parm Gill, about adapting their kombucha and beer brewing system to locally brew and deliver cheap insulin across the U.S. You see, insulin technology is old and it’s actually pretty cheap to make. But… a few choice decision-makers a**holes in Big Pharma have continued to increase insulin prices for years, and it’s devastatingly profitable for them to do so.
Insulin is required to stay alive → people are willing to make sacrifices to afford insulin
Meds for chronic diseases are like the SaaS products of pharmaceuticals → even small changes in prices have huge impacts on the “lifetime value” of each customer
So, despite the first patent for insulin being famously sold for $1 because “Insulin belongs to the world,” thousands of people die every year because insulin is a cash cow for pharma companies. It’s disgusting 🖕.
I joined the team and co-founded what became known as Banting PBC, named after Sir Frederick Banting himself. After all, we agree that insulin belongs to the world. Building out our lab for less than $20,000 we were excited to bring affordable insulin to those in need.
“Insulin manufacturing is too risky to fund,” said a VC who knew nothing about how easy it is to make insulin but everything about the fight we were facing. We know how to cheaply scale bio-manufactured products (ever brewed beer at home?), but that wasn’t the point. We weren’t fixing a mistake in the system, the entire system has developed around entrenching and reinforcing these barriers. We were fighting entrenched competitors, distributors, and complicit regulatory stakeholders within a political system that values votes over human lives.
We pivoted to regulatory arbitrage. Banting.co became the place for U.S. patients to purchase affordable insulin from Canada pharmacies who listed through Banting. We were not the first to come up this idea - and so long as it was clearly for personal use the FDA had been turning a blind eye to U.S. patients importing cheap prescriptions for personal use for years. While we were delivering up to 70% savings to users, we faced a different type of barrier: finding early champions and adopters. No one wanted to Uber our way through this problem.
COVID-19 + Vaccines.
Entering 2021, I was approached by my friend, Pedro, about joining Canid. Preparing to launch their vaccine management software for pediatricians, I joined the effort. In the midst of the launch, the Pfizer-BionTech COVID-19 vaccine was approved for kids 12 years and older. We were off to the races.
While most kids recieve upwards of 20 vaccines distributed across 50+ doses by the time they are 18, the COVID-19 vaccine is the vaccine of our generation. COVID-19 vaccines are not the vaccine of our generation because of a huge technological leap - although mRNA vaccines are a leap. The COVID-19 vaccine is the vaccine of our generation because COVID-19 represented the ultimate failure of communication on how biology works at all levels of our society: government, schools, and media all failed to communicate effectively. Addressing diseases through vaccination has an education problem, not a technology problem.
The result of our relationship-based approach? Candid’s practices have vaccinated thousands of kids for COVID-19 and other preventable illnesses vaccinated as well. Our software guides both doctors and parents in a youth cycle of vaccines, when they are recommended, when parents agree to updated plans for vaccinations, what vaccines are completed, and why each vaccine matters in the first place.
Today, I’m proud to say the software manages scheduling and vaccine inventory very well. But Canid’s best value proposition is in how it can redirect vaccine communication and education - something that is baked into the Canid’s team ethos.
Up Next: An Open Platform for Bio Innovation.
As much human value as vaccines deliver, it was time for me to re-focus my attention more directly on bio. We have a massive opportunity in the bio-as-tech space, but innovation is stifled by high capital requirements, significant technical expertise, and long timelines. Innovation in bio is held back by time, money, and information sharing.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and sure enough progress is being made. Companies like Dupla.Bio (a sort of WeWork for bio labs) to Emerald Cloud Lab (a sort of robotics-enabled contract research organization) are providing alternative forms of laboratory infrastructure. Meanwhile, companies like Ginkgo Bioworks and Twist Biosciences have developed their platforms to drastically cut the cost and timeline of organism engineering and synthesizing genetic materials, respectively.
Joining this legion of industry enablers for bio-innovation is Opentrons. In their own words, here’s the mission statement:
We make open source, flexible, user-friendly robots for life scientists. Our mission is to provide the scientific community with a common platform to easily share protocols and reproduce each other's results. Our robots automate experiments that would otherwise be done by hand, allowing them to spend more time pursuing answers to some of the 21st century’s most important questions.
This is a solution that is addressing time, money, and information sharing. This is a BioOptimist’s dream. Here are some examples of users leveraging the OT-2 to push the boundaries:
This is why I’m so excited to join the Opentrons team. It’s not just about bringing the best of all technologies to drive innovation forward. It’s not just about accessibility, so that the best and brightest from all over the world can have access. It’s not even just about providing tooling so that scientists can program the robot without any coding knowledge. It’s about doing all of these things and sharing it.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” - Sir Isaac Newton
The idea of standing on the shoulders of giants is infamous in science. It is a reminder that we can only extend the frontiers of knowledge if we share our discoveries so other can peer further still. Opentrons is fully open source, giving users maximum flexibility with the robots but, more importantly, making all of the work performed on the robot fully transferable to other labs. Access to this ecosystem is further democratized by tooling that eliminates the need for coding skills, meaning biologists don’t need to hire engineers to operate the robots.
The start is strong, but much remains to be done to truly enable frictionless sharing and collaboration. That’s why I’m here, to build the products that enable our global community of users to unblock themselves and each other, enabling an unprecedented rate of bio-innovation.
Thoughts, suggestions, complaints, corrections? Follow me on twitter @BioOptimist and send me a DM if you want to chat.
Patents and publications are at the bottom of the page here.