From Synlogic & Wyss Institute on the East Coast to Autodesk & UCSF on the West: A Look at Synthetic Biology in the US

The global synthetic biology market is supposed to reach $13.4 billion by 2019. A recent study from Transparency Market Research shows that Europe leads the world, while North America is the second largest market. Basically what synbio does is re-molds existing biological elements to create ones that do not exist in nature to make them cheaper, better or simply available to researchers for R&D when the real thing is not. You’ll see synthetic biology in biotech of course (the blog futurism.com actually says that “synthetic biology has become the backbone of biotechnology”), both in food production and healthcare; there are also uses for biosecurity, energy and the environment.

Synthetic biologists are often not biologists at all but can be chemists or computer scientists. In fact one of the industry’s biggest thought leaders, Andrew Hessel, is a Distinguished Researcher with software company Autodesk in their Bio/Nano Research Group, based out of San Francisco. With software companies such as Microsoft working to use DNA to store information, it would make sense that computer science also have a hand in designing and creating DNA. Hessel would like to push for a “new Human Genome Project based on synthetic biology” and feels that aiming for 2026 is a potential goal, if synthetic biology advances as quickly as the study of genomics has. (Andrew Hessel photo below from AndrewHessel.com)

Autodesk was also recently in the news for their work with Gen9 and Auburn University. A team of scientists comprised of these three organizations have synthesized sCAV2, an artificial virus that can "target and kill cancer cells while sparing healthy cells." Genetic Engineering News writes: "It’s important because it not only has immediate application in studies of canine cancer, it also promises to inform the development of human therapies."

Two of the places in the US where synthetic biology is hot are, not surprisingly San Francisco and the Boston/Cambridge biotech hub. University of California San Francisco was in science headlines a year ago “controlling stem cells with light” and this past September with their “cellbots” - engineered human immune cells that can locate diseased cells as well as deliver drugs. They are sure to continue to be at the epicenter of synthetic biology – as the National Science Foundation has just awarded them a $24 million dollar grant to create a new center called the Center for Cellular Construction. The UCSF website reports that: “researchers from San Francisco State University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and IBM Research, Almaden” (IBM Watson) will all be part of the center.

Speaking of Stanford University, a professor there named Christina Smolke has “developed a method for synthesizing opiates from yeast”. BigThink blog reports: “Smolke expects to achieve poppy-free, commercial-scale production of opiates in a few years, and is now casting her attention towards other synthetic medicines, as well as a few inventions of her own, mentioning a non-addictive form of opium as one dream drug she’d like to see.”

Cambridge based Wyss Institute describes their research as: “seeking to transform engineering, medicine and the environment by creating new materials and devices using Nature’s design”. Popular Science just gave them their “Best of What’s New” Award for their Zika diagnostic system that uses synthetic biology to diagnose a patient in the field in just a few hours. The Wyss website describes how it works: “They freeze-dry synthetic gene circuits onto paper discs. These biomolecular circuits are activated when the paper is rehydrated with a droplet of sample fluid; the disc changes color to indicate a positive result for Zika virus, similar to the visual readout of a home pregnancy test. To validate their rapid Zika test, the team successfully identified strain-specific Zika in blood samples from infected monkeys as well in laboratory cell cultures infected with the virus.”

Another recent achievement by Wyss, specifically from George Church’s team, is solving the issue of the high cost of reading DNA sequences from genomes. Their website reports that they’ve: “developed a new electronic DNA sequencing platform based on biologically engineered nanopores”.

This past week, MIT Technology Review reported that Cambridge-based Synlogic had created "smart bacteria". Synlogic is the first to patent the live E. Coli Nissle bacterium modified to assimilate ammonia. The conundrum is that the EPA may have to be brought in, along with the FDA, for approvals here - as "no one is quite sure how to regulate a GM pill whose contents are both alive and likely to end up in toilet bowls".

Don't forget to follow Biotech Week Boston on Twitter for news on innovation in biotech and medicine. Each year passionate scientists and innovators converge on Boston to share ground breaking data, research and ideas - don't miss our next event in September 2017!

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The Softer Machine: How Robots Are Filling Important Gaps in Global Healthcare and Biotech R&D

If you blink you will most likely miss some major design, invention or discovery in the robotics industry. The future is definitely here, and robots are becoming an inseparable (if sometimes unseen) part of our everyday lives, whether it’s in defense, manufacturing, biotechnology, caring directly for us, or used in and on our bodies.

The Co-bots are coming, and they're here to help
Robotics is set to be a $226 billion dollar industry by 2021, just 5 years from now. There are no statistics on exactly how much of that industry is healthcare related but there is some scattered research out there. For example, Medgadget tells us that surgical robotics systems will be a $6.4 billion dollar industry by 2020, and the exoskeleton robot market is to reach over $2 billion by 2021. Robotics and Automation News reports that “half of all surgeries in some countries are now done with robots.” Other aspects of healthcare using robotics include nursing and assistance to the elderly and those with disabilities. Biotech manufacturing uses robotics (IFR reports that by 2019, more than 1.4 million new industrial robots will be installed in factories around the world) and even biotech R&D has begun trying them out. The Financial Times reports how GlaxoSmithKline in the UK is using “co-bots to work side by side with scientists at research facilities.”

Robotics Looks to the Deep Sea for Biotech R&D
This past September MedTechPulse compiled a great slideshow “9 Ways Robots Are Getting So Much Better”. I recognized a few of these robots, as they had come out of the Boston/Cambridge biotech cluster – no surprise here. Research institutes such as The Wyss Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts are creating their own robots, but they're not the kind that will clean your house. Instead, these robots have been created to stretch the limits of what we can accomplish in surgery, internal medicine and tissue engineering.

What Does an Octopus-Inspired Robot Do (And Why Create It)? 
This past summer Harvard University’s Wyss Institute created one of the cutest robots you’ll ever see, in the shape of an octopus. Their inspiration to create a robot using this shape was due to an octopus’ “ability to perform great feats of strength and flexibility, despite lacking an internal skeletal system”. The team at Wyss did a 180 on how robots are thought of (as made of hard components). What a soft robot can do is utilize "fuel" in a very different way. Softness also promises these benefits: “Soft robotic grippers are already being used to handle undersea structures in scientific research. One can easily envision soft robots being used to handle fragile objects such as crops, or even living beings. Internal medicine and wearable devices are also likely areas for future soft robots.” And did I mention that this robot was 3-D Printed?

Rat + Robot = Stingray
Wyss Institute’s Kevin Kit Parker, in his quest to eventually build a human heart, was inspired by the jellyfish and stringrays that he and his daughter saw at the New England Aquarium. Parker thought understanding more about the way they moved could give us a better understanding of the human heart. Parker mimicked the stringrays’ anatomy to create a soft robot (“gold skeleton sandwiched between two silicone layers”) with a difference. This robot incorporated 200,000 heart cells (from rat embryos). The plan was for these cardiac cells to do the work of skeletal muscles (which they did) powered by a virus and optogenetics. In their report, Science magazine joked that the stringray’s speed is ”quite pathetic by real stingray standards” but quoted Princeton engineer Alexander Smits to make a final point “we’re getting to the point where there really is a fusion between biology and engineering”.

Robot Doctors, Robot Nurses and “Carebots”
Nurses at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston are using a humanoid robot designed by SoftBank robotics to help them with scheduling - which even for humans is a pretty daunting and complex task. Researchers at MIT showed the robot exactly how nurses were doing the scheduling, which involved complex, highly coordinated actions, and after training the robot succeeded in the tasks 90% of the time. Humber River Hospital in Toronto has taken it several steps further as North America’s first fully digital hospital; SiliconANGLE describes the scene at Humber River: “In the hospital, you will find robots mingling amongst human staff, with robots responsible for mixing the correct dosage of chemotherapy drugs, to transporting meals, medications, and linen”.

The Atlantic reports that doctors as well as nurses are being replaced by robots in countries where doctors are hard to come by. “In Brazil and India, machines are already starting to do primary care, because there’s no labor to do it,” says Robert Kocher, an internist, a veteran of McKinsey consulting, and a former adviser to the Obama administration. “They may be better than doctors. Mathematically, they will follow evidence—and they’re much more likely to be right.”

By 2025, Japan will have a shortage of 1 million caregivers for their aging population; to solve this issue Japanese companies are leading the world in the production of carebots. Emerging tech thought leader Alec Ross described the state of Japan’s carebots industry in a LinkedIn Pulse post earlier this year: “Japan already leads the world in robotics, operating 310,000 of the 1.4 million industrial robots in existence across the world…In 2013, the Japanese government granted $24.6 million to companies focusing on eldercare robotics. Japan’s prominent Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry chose 24 companies in May 2013 to receive subsidies covering one-half to two-thirds of the R&D costs for nursing care robots.”

Boston as Robotics Hub
Along with the incredible 3-D printed and bioengineered robots that The Wyss Institute has given us this year, there is evidence that biotech hub Boston is also growing as a robotics hub. Tom Ryden, executive Director of Mass Robotics, describes the current vibe in Boston Business Journal earlier this month: “(Massachusetts robotics companies are) very open in sharing so they want to see all companies grow,” he said. “They realize it’s a ‘rising tide floats all boats’ type of thought…Not not only do we have some of the early companies like iRobot that really started this kind of revolution, but there are so many universities that have robotics programs or are doing robotics research in the Greater Boston area. That makes for a great idea generator, so it just kind of snowballed and built a great community.”

Last year CNBC reported that in Massachusetts: “more than 3,200 people (were) employed in the robotics industry. More than $200 million has been invested in Massachusetts robotics companies since 2008, and annual sales of robotics manufactured in state have topped nearly $2 billion.” The Mass Technology Research Council has an entire report devoted to “The Massachusetts Robotics Revolution” which you can download here.

Interested in hearing more about innovations in the intersection of bioengineering and medicine? Download our report here. And don't forget to follow Biotech Week Boston on Twitter for news on innovation in biotech and medicine. Each year passionate scientists and innovators converge on Boston to share ground breaking data, research and ideas - don't miss our next event in September 2017!

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3D Bioprinting to Engineer Human Tissue: Wyss Institute's David Kolesky at Biotech Week Boston

The medical 3D printing market is expected to reach $983.2 million by the year 2020. What is the difference between medical and other 3D printing? Well to explain very simply, I will use a quote from Hod Lipson from ASME.org (Lipson is the author of  Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing): “Unlike traditional 3D printing of plastics and metal where after you finish printing you have your part, with bioprinting it’s just the beginning. Even after you finish printing there is a long road ahead. You have to incubate the part, simulate its environment – it’s much more complicated.”

This month I was lucky enough to hear David Kolesky from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute discuss his team’s latest work on 3D bioprinting. The idea that we are beginning to be able to print human tissue is mind-blowing, and to hear details from someone in the forefront of this work was awe-inspiring.

Human Tissue Engineering: Challenges and Solutions
David Kolesky is part of a team at Jennifer Lewis' Research Group at the Harvard John A. Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University who is working on engineering human tissue. In his talk at Biotech Week Boston on October 6, Kolesky focused on the team's work with engineering kidney tissue in particular. He described his team’s focus and some of their challenges: “(A human) kidney has a million nephrons, within the nephron we’re focused on the proximal tubule” and “(human) tissue is extremely difficult to mimic, because (of its) hierarchical structures that have a composite nature.” (You can see the tubule below, courtesy Wyss Institute.)

Stem-Cell Laden ‘Ink’ Becomes Living Tissue
Kolesky told the story of exactly how he was using 3D printing, specifically “bioprinting” to solve the challenges of vascularization. To someone not well versed in the latest discoveries it was fairly astounding – especially when he elucidated the use of “stem-cell laden ‘ink’ to build fully vascularized human tissue”. The materials they’re using are almost as fascinating at the engineered tissue: a hydrogel, which becomes “liquid when cooled” is the substance Kolesky and the Wyss Institute is using to make the bioprinting happen. With the methods he’s using, they are able to “keep these vascular networks perfusable for up to 45 days”. Their 3D printed proximal tubules actually contain living human cells and mimic many biological functions of nephrons.

How do they do that? Once the tubules are printed, they pump living kidney cells into them. After several days in the tubules the cells begin to function like the ones in our bodies. Cells in the tubules are “trained” by the chemistry of their environment to become and behave exactly like native kidney cells.

Researchers Can Now Study Real-Time Damage To Tubules
There are 60,000 people on a national waiting list for kidneys, and the CDC says that 1 in 10 American adults, more than 20 million people, have some level of chronic kidney disease. There is an urgent need for science to advance this research. The Wyss Institute is not only at the forefront of bringing us closer being able to engineer human kidneys in the future; with the current research researchers will actually be able to induce damage on these bioengineered tubules as if they were the real thing to study effects of drugs or toxins.

We Want a Synergistic Relationship with Biology
Kolesky closed his talk with the quote: ”We want a synergistic relationship with biology.” In fact Wyss Institute's Mission Statement is: "The Wyss Institute seeks to transform engineering, medicine and the environment by creating new materials and devices using Nature’s design principles".

Their team's paper:”Bioprinting of 3D Convoluted Renal Proximal Tubules on Perfusable Chips” was published in Nature Scientific Reports several days after Biotech Week Boston and gives more detail on Kolesky’s research. You can read the paper here.

Interested in hearing more about innovations in the intersection of bioengineering and medicine? Download our report here. And don't forget to follow Biotech Week Boston on Twitter for news on innovation in biotech and medicine. Each year passionate scientists and innovators converge on Boston to share ground breaking data, research and ideas - don't miss our next event in September 2017!

Learn more about #BiotechWeekBoston

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