WhereStartup?

Let’s talk about top-tier biotechnology labs—the kind that can change the world on a massive scale. Think of industry giants like Bayer or Codexis—labs that require over €1 billion in investment yet can only take on 2 to 5 projects per year, each spanning an average of two years.

Despite their groundbreaking potential, these labs remain costly and exclusive. But what if we could make them more efficient, more accessible, and cheaper to operate? Let’s explore four game-changing technologies that could revolutionize these labs, making advanced biotech products—like gene and cell therapies, tissue regeneration, cellular rejuvenation, vegan proteins, and high-density data storage in DNA—available to everyone. But most importantly...

Where could you Start(up)?

Enhanced Bioprospecting: Nature’s Hidden Treasures

One of the biggest cost drivers in top biotech labs is building compound libraries—sets of molecules with desired activities. Finding these compounds in nature, a process known as bioprospecting, is no simple task. However, companies like Darwin Bioprospecting are refining their search with advanced sequencing techniques like nanopore sequencing, unlocking the power of metagenomics and functional genomics. By overcoming the limitations of traditional cell culture bioprospecting, these improvements streamline discovery, cut costs, and accelerate the development of new biotech products.

Synthetic Biology: Letting Cells Do the Work

Biology is the ultimate engineer. A single bacterium or yeast cell can perform thousands of chemical reactions—far more efficiently and complexly than any traditional lab setup. The challenge? Programming these cells to work for us. This requires an iterative design-build-test-learn cycle that can take years to perfect. Technologies like enzymatic DNA synthesis and robotics are making this process faster and cheaper, but further improvements are still needed to fully unlock synthetic biology’s potential.

Adaptative laboratory evolution: Speeding Up Nature’s Playbook

Nature evolves to survive, but what if we could fast-track that process for biotechnology? Adaptative laboratory evolution takes advantage of life’s ability to adapt under constraints, optimizing organisms for specific industrial applications. Take artemisinin, the world’s most effective anti-malarial drug—it took nearly 10 years and €80 million to optimize its production. With accelerated evolution, this could be done faster and at a fraction of the cost. However, this technology has its limits, excels at optimization, but struggles to create entirely new-to-nature activities. A key player in this field? Triplebar.

Lab Automation & Miniaturization: Shrinking the Lab, Scaling the Impact

Biotech labs handle complex biological materials—cells, enzymes, microorganisms—and manual handling slows everything down. Automation tools like Opentrons and flow cytometers boost efficiency by reducing human error and increasing speed. But traditional lab automation is expensive and takes up too much space. That's why lab-on-a-chip technology appeared—the microchip of biology, capable of performing experiments with tiny liquid volumes and small cell groups. These breakthroughs have enabled unprecedented miniaturization and parallelization. However, microfluidic systems often need additional processing steps, limiting their use in tasks like cell transformation.

Conclusion

While these solutions are promising, the real potential to bring down costs lies in combining them. And, while automation through robots is possible, the whole process remains as independent units that need to be joined. Finding ways to merge automation, miniaturization, adaptive laboratory evolution, synthetic biology, and enhanced bioprospecting will be the push that biotechnology needs to happen today. And it is the field where you could start your start-up.