News Digest #239 – SynBioBeta Awards + Live at 10am: Biopharma and Synthetic Biology (sponsored by Mayfield Fund)

Hi all,Join us today at 10am Pacific for a live webinar and report: Synthetic Biology + Biopharma. Tomorrow at 9am Pacific: Live webinar releasing our investment report: “Venture Investment in Synthetic Biology Hits Biggest Year Ever”. Engineering Biology Awards: In 2014, we created the Engineering Biology Awards as a way to highlight the great science, engineering, and technologies being pioneered within our community. This year, we invite you to join us in recognizing five tremendous contributors to our field: Dr. Christina Agapakis of Ginkgo Bioworks, Bryan Johnson and Jeffrey Klunzinger of OS Fund, and Dr. Richard Kitney and Dr. Paul Fremont of SynbiCITE. They will all be live in stage during the awards ceremony at SynBioBeta on Monday October 1st.

A big thanks to venture capital firm Mayfield for sponsoring this week’s digest. Ursheet Parikh, a partner at Mayfield will be speaking at SynBioBeta and Mayfield and WSGR are also hosting a lunch-and-learn on "Building Synthetic Biology Companies at Scale”. We talked to all four panelists about their unique views on scaling. Diego Rey from Y Combinator will be on that panel (and YC is accepting applications for their Winter 2019 program btw).This week we also take a look at how Procter & Gamble is leading the way in making high-performance bio-based products, and the challenges of going green in such a big way. P&G has a partnering workshop at this year’s event too. Congratulations to Molecular Assemblies, who announced three new patents this month for their enzymatic DNA synthesis platform -- bringing their total number of patents up to eight! Congratulations also to our friends at Thermo Fisher Scientific, who have licensed CRISPR technologies from the Broad Institute and ERS Genomics. Helge Bastian will be speaking about this and more at SynBioBeta.We have over 60 exhibitors at this year’s event, including: Singer Instruments who will be showcasing its precision colony picker, PIXL: Singer is welcoming early-adopter collaborators this month. Benchling has developed the first industry best practices for large molecule R&D data models. Check out their guide for modeling registration systems for strain engineering and fermentation here.The event app does not suck! If you are already coming to SynBioBeta then check out a sample of our attendee list here and watch out for our partnering app, which will enable you to connect with other attendees. The networking app will be launched this week. If you don’t want to be included in the app, please let me know by noon on Friday. If you are looking for accommodation this year: the block booking for Hilton San Francisco Airport Bayfront ends on Friday!Cheers,John

Ecovia Renewables awarded $500,000 to develop superabsorbent biopolymers

Evonetix makes key appointments to support development of gene synthesis technology

BioBright and Beckman Coulter to bring enhanced technical support capabilities to instruments

Sphere Fluidics introduces new Cyto-Mine Studio software suite

CRISPR Therapeutics and ViaCyte to develop gene-edited stem cell-derived the