I am grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in the thinking behind the AB4S “Molecule Manifesto” published earlier this year. Having helped develop processes for and scale up twenty different molecules over the last few decades, it was rewarding to be able to contribute a perspective different than some of the others in the collective.

Saying that synthetic biology & precision fermentation is going to change the world is a standard part of a pitch to investors, and making an effort to get more concrete about it helps to advance the conversation I think. You might disagree with some of the assertions in the report, or you might think we didn’t pursue some enough. That’s great, everyone will have a different take on the content – we certainly did, even amongst the contributors. It’s certainly my hope that by putting a stake in the ground, more productive conversations can be had. I think we’re all seen enough power point presentations with mountain landscapes talking about the future being limitless!

It’s tough to bring a molecule to market. You’ve got to develop the differentiating technology sufficiently to ensure that your long-term costs are sufficiently below the long-term price. That’s obvious I know, but the business case is much more than that. Technology development is expensive, so how far do you need to push the technology? Does your business case still look good after you factor in the millions needed to get the technology to the right level and ensure it will scale-up?

Lastly, it is correct to assert that modern techniques to bring novel raw materials to market will revolutionize materials development in many industries. But that can be a long row to hoe, and it can be a challenge to know in which row to till:

A little while back I gave a talk to a large group of chemists and product developers, and I showed a slide of all of the different natural but currently rare molecules that can now be made through today’s techniques. It was a slide we were proud of - it really underscored the possibilities in our space. An attendee raised their hand and asked:

     “That’s really impressive Paul, thanks for sharing it. And,

      what are those molecules good for?”

I answered the question I wanted to answer (not 100% really what was asked 🙂) because often that’s a really hard question to answer satisfactorily. Many molecules can be made, but it’s difficult to know where they’ll end up in the future ingredient supply chain.

Many of these molecules are rare enough that you can’t even order them from Sigma, and botanical extraction or chemical synthesis can be exorbitantly expensive. So they need to be made by the techniques developed in the last few decades (“The Future!”) and tested in different possible application areas. And this testing process itself isn’t free and is likely not short, substantially delaying the time to be able to financially exploit the opportunity.

So while the future will certainly be about these new possibilities, without support and partnership of government organizations, corporations, and/or consortia to explore expert applications development with these historically rare biological compounds, it might be that the future will continue to largely remain in the future.

So good for AB4S for taking a step to try and make the future a bit more concrete. Now we need to work on finding more support for application development!