Evolution Built the Perfect Bioreactor. Neion Bio Is Finally Using It.

In an exclusive conversation ahead of their appearance at SynBioBeta 2026 on May 4–7th in San Jose, Neion Bio co-founder and CTO Sam Levin, an evolutionary biologist turned entrepreneur, makes the case that the future of drug manufacturing has been sitting in plain sight for 200 million years.

The vessel in question holds six grams of protein. It requires no steel tank, no sterile cleanroom, no disposable plastics. Self-contained and naturally sterile, it has been optimized by evolution to package and stabilize complex proteins at scale. Neion Bio's founding insight, both obvious and radical, is that the chicken egg is a powerful molecular factory that biopharma has never seriously tried to use.

That neglect, Levin argues, is a symptom of a deeper structural failure. The dominant manufacturing platform for biologics is Chinese hamster ovary cells, a choice that traces back to a mid-century laboratory accident rather than any deliberate engineering logic, and has since calcified into an industry-wide standard. The result is a manufacturing process that is expensive to build, slow to scale, and totally misaligned with the pace of drug discovery. 

"AI is dramatically reducing the cost and time to design new proteins, and yet the way we manufacture these proteins is decades old, and increasingly the bottleneck to medical breakthroughs reaching patients," Levin says. "We are reinventing biomanufacturing to make medicines affordable and accessible to everyone, in a system that is resilient to shocks and can be onshored in the US."

Neion's Raptor™ platform is built to address that bottleneck. At its core is precision engineering of avian primordial germ cells, the embryonic progenitors of eggs and sperm, which the company edits to carry therapeutic genes before introducing them into developing embryos. The resulting hens express recombinant proteins directly in their egg whites at concentrations that change the economics of biologics manufacturing. Levin estimates that fewer than four thousand hens would be sufficient to meet global demand for a blockbuster antibody like Humira, at one-hundredth the operating cost of an equivalent CHO facility. Looking further ahead, the team is developing a somatic delivery approach, using viral vectors to shuttle therapeutic genes to the protein-producing glands of adult hens and collapsing the timeline from engineering to production from months to weeks.

The company was founded in 2024, its origin tracing to a conversation between Levin and co-founder and CEO Dimi Kellari, a former aerospace engineer who spent four years building autonomous vehicle technology before concluding that the most consequential frontier lay at the intersection of biology and engineering. The two were introduced through a mutual connection, and a single question proved enough to align them: why, in 2024, are we still making our most important medicines in hamster cells? Chief Scientific Officer Sven Bocklandt, whose background spans precision genome engineering, joined as the platform's scientific architect. Industry veteran Ming Li, with two decades across biopharma strategy and capital markets, has since come aboard as President of Commercial Operations. The company raised approximately eleven million dollars in seed financing, led by Caffeinated Capital with participation from Basis Set Ventures and Haystack VC.

Neion emerged from stealth in March with its first commercial milestone: a co-development and supply agreement with an undisclosed major pharmaceutical company to advance up to three monoclonal antibodies, structured around upfront payments, milestones, and downstream profit participation. The initial focus on biosimilars reflects a considered bet on regulatory momentum. As clinical requirements for biosimilar approval continue to ease, the space is poised for a significant wave of investment, and Neion's platform offers the cost and complexity advantage that could make new entrants viable.

At SynBioBeta, Levin plans to make an argument that reaches well beyond his own company. His intellectual frame is evolutionary: synthetic biology has spent fifty years trying to tame biology, stripping away its complexity in pursuit of control, when the more powerful move is to harness what evolution has already built. The CHO bioreactor, in this reading, is a costly attempt to reconstruct mammalian physiology from scratch. The egg already solved that problem. "We want to encourage folks in the community to think outside the tank and move beyond CHO, E. coli, and yeast," he says. "We believe the next era of synthetic biology will be driven by expanding across the tree of life, and letting biology do more, not less work for us."

The infrastructure to run Neion's platform already exists in every state in America. It runs on grain and water. It requires no billion-dollar facility and no years-long scale-up. Whether the field is ready to follow that logic is the question Levin is heading to San Jose to answer. His own conviction is unambiguous. "This," he says, "is just the beginning for synthetic biology."