IndieBio SF - Killer of the Week

Gozen Bioworks is founded by one of Turkey's most promising young fashion designers, Ece Gozen. She's been thinking about how to merge fashion and science together, ever since she started college. And in the peak of her design career, she left to start, this company that is now Gozen Bioworks, because she has found a way to replace leather... Using a bacterial nanocellulose. And th

We sit with MInus Materials, founded by Wil Srubar and Sarah Williams out of the LIving Materials Laboratory at University of Colorado Boulder. There is a type of algae that grows a shell made of calcium carbonate, which is what is used as cement for concrete, a dirty industry that emits about 8% of the world's total carbon emissions. With Minus, just replacing the calcium carbonat

This week we talk to MetalX Biocycles founders, Drs. Jesica Urbina and Ivan Paulino Lima, two NASA trained scientists who have been working on mining technologies that are safe enough to do in space... They bring those technologies here to earth. Rare earth, that is. They won Killer of the Week this week for a critical experiment that takes them to near completion on their proof of

It's the start of SEASON 2 of the IndieBio - Killer of the Week podcast! It's the 14th week of the IndieBio program (San Francisco, Batch 13) and Dr. Jonathan Kotula talks about how his company, Laguna Bio, is using an intracellular bacteria to supercharge the immune system to kill cancer. Laguna Bio won Killer of the Week, and Jonathan talks about recently going into a meeting wit

Veloz Bio was voted the Killer of the Week last week for making some killer moves, first, for successfully expressing an important protein in cheese called kappa casein only weeks after setting up their  "molecular farming without the farming" platform, and second, DOUBLING DOWN on that accomplishment by taking the biggest risk we've ever seen: Producing enough of this casein

Wayfinder Bio is last week's Killer of the Week, and won because they have been cranking through pilots and closing deals with investors and customers alike. When GFP came onto the scene, it changed cell biology completely. Scientists could now see the actin cytoskeleton move in real time, and find where new cellular elements are localizing between different organelles. Now, with t

The Killer for March 19th, 2022 was ProtonIntel, who is making the world's first continuous potassium monitor for kidney monitoring. They shrunk their electrode by over 1000x while also maintaining its sensitivity in the optimum range, making it now viable for in-human testing. They'll be flying out TODAY (date of publication) from Vancouver to Melbourne to jab themselves with thei

On March 11th, 2022, Puna Bio--who is using extremophiles as biological inputs for agriculture--won Killer of the Week #16 for two things. First, one of their repeat customers called to double down on their previous order, because they had just seen with their eyes how well the product worked. Secondly, they are starting their first US trial for the soybean crop, after 20,000 acres

Pyrone Systems (Batch 12) won Killer of the Week on March 4th, 2022, for engineering the first-ever yeast to use the peroxisomes to break down fatty acids to make their platform molecule: triacetic acid lactone. Learn why this is a breakthrough not only for Pyrone Systems, but for synbio as a whole.