Schedule

Agricultural Platforms are technology-enabled agricultural solutions that bundle together multiple services crop inputs, crop protection, insurance and more. As the population continues to grow and the food supply chain increases in complexity, engineering biology can play a crucial role in securing a resilient and sustainable food supply chain. Moreover, Agricultural Platforms are also playing an essential role in helping farmers decarbonize agriculture and ensuring the quality and safety of our food. Join this session to learn: How Agricultural Platforms are shaping modern agriculture? What is the opportunity of synthetic biology to develop novel Agricultural Platforms? And which new business models are arising at the intersection of synthetic biology and Agricultural Platforms?

The scientific publishing industry is expensive, slow, and guarded by gatekeepers every step of the way. Yet publishing new research is fundamental for all scientific fields. Could DAOs and blockchain platforms support scientists and create incentives for peer reviewers in academia? Could these kinds of DeSci platforms expand access to scientific knowledge, streamline peer feedback, and accelerate the pace of new data to researchers and industry?

Aquaculture, or fish farming, represents over half of the world’s seafood, and is growing. However, aquaculture relies on small, wild-caught fish like anchovy and menhaden to supply two critical components of feed: fishmeal and fish oil. With 90% of fisheries fully exploited or overfished, aquaculture faces supply chain bottlenecks on these critical inputs that portend a drastic reduction in seafood. Not only are farmed fish threatened, but also important commercial fisheries such as salmon, cod and tuna that rely on these little fish for sustenance. The consequences are not only a drastic reduction in seafood but also an ecological collapse in seabirds and marine mammals. Sustainable replacements need to be found before wild-caught resources become scarce.

Emerging solutions such as algae, insects, single-celled proteins, plant-based and cell-cultured products offer substitutes for fishmeal and fish oil, but we will need all hands on deck to offer new sources of nutrition to solve this aquaculture feed problem and to feed our rapidly growing population. This session brings together aquaculture industry professionals to challenge the synbio sector to reverse engineer solutions for nutrition that are needed not only for aquaculture and animal agriculture, but also ultimately for human nutrition.

The uptake of macromolecules by fragile cell types remains an important problem in both R&D and manufacturing of personalized medicines. Existing viral and non-viral delivery options have significant limitations for cell engineering and cell therapy development. Can next-generation delivery technology improve efficiency and viability when modifying fragile cells? What if silicon semiconductor technology could be utilized to deliver single-cell precision at scale? New ex vivo delivery approaches are simplifying the development of therapeutic pipelines and accelerating the creation of new cell and gene therapies.

It's been a huge year in DNA reading! In September, San Diego-based genomics pioneer Illumina introduced a new machine that will sequence a human genome in half a day for just $200. Advances in DNA sequencing were crucial in developing COVID-19 vaccines, and have led to blood tests that can detect cancer early, genetically targeted drugs, and diagnoses for people with rare diseases.

Allonnia is a bio-ingenuity startup using the world’s smallest organisms to tackle some of the world’s largest waste challenges. Allonnia will share how they are developing a scalable platform and process driven methodology to drive synthetic biology solutions from the petri dish to commercial realities, as well as introduce Allonnia’s newest bio-ingenuity products through the lens of their commercial deployment.