CEO & Co-Founder of Neion Bio. Turning chicken eggs into medicine factories.
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This building is likely teeming with spies.
This is the City of Dreams Mediterranean resort in Limassol Cyprus. Photos taken today.
It is not anywhere near the beach like all other hotels in the area but sits directly facing RAF Akrotiri, a British base that serves many operations in the Middle East.
The top floors of the building offer great views of the base and all aircraft movements. It happens to be owned by a group led by Chinese-Canadian billionaire Lawrence Ho.
Beyond hosting British military infrastructure Cyprus itself is a useful intelligence location. It sits between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It has extensive commercial, diplomatic and financial connections to Russia, Israel, the Gulf and China.
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DM me if you want to completely overhaul how life-saving medicines are manufactured
Every job i’ve gotten in tech has been through X and I’ve always wanted a way to track/refer my network on here.
Excited about @cosign and what @david__booth @eriktorenberg and co are building.
Check out the companies I think you should join: cosign.co/lists/sonofalli/co…
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If you want to find something severely undervalued don’t follow the crowd.
One of the best bubble indicators from @pmarca -- where Harvard and Stanford MBAs go after graduation.
If they go into tech → market’s overblown.
If they go back to banking → great time to invest in startups.
Social status of MBAs is a good bubble indicator. Cool trivia!
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I grew up in a small mining town in the Copperbelt in Zambia. I remember being taught about HIV in first grade and the ads on every billboard about using condoms.
This is a huge deal for drug accessibility. It’s true that the future is here it’s just not evenly distributed. Often science and engineering isn’t the barrier its policy and regulation.
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I’m excited about the next decade in biopharma. We’ll find more drug targets and we’ll get better at binding them and reducing off-target effects. The major bottlenecks are not in finding promising candidates.
The evolving landscape of drug targets
nature.com/articles/s41573-0…
rdcu.be/22o1FPpNJ3Ga
In the past 25 years, advances in areas such as genomics and the diversification of therapeutic modalities have expanded the drug target landscape, which now includes ~700 targets mapped here
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Cool list. I know startups working on 2 and 6 with great teams. 7 seems oddly out of place compared to the rest.
Other ones that didn’t make the list that would be good to see: predict a precise cellular response to an arbitrary input, predict development from a genome, create a synthetic cell that can propagate, predict all on and off target effects of proteins in an organism.
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Finally breaking out of our shell 🐣
I made a list of great startups to join. It's called the Breakout List.
The list has 92 companies. These are the 20 with 25 or fewer employees:
- Hone (@moritz_stephan, @CarloWillem, @oqbrady)
- Normal (@ansonyuu, @hudzah)
- Standard Intelligence (@G413N, @devanshpandey)
- Tacit Labs (@ninklefitz, @AmDroste)
- American Terawatt (@atroyn, @rslparker, @aranibatta)
- Conduit (@clemvonstengel, @riopopper)
- Convergent (Omkar Savant, Vivek Katara, @debnilsur)
- Core Automation (@MillionInt, @_arohan_)
- Engram (@dan_biderman, @EyubogluSabri, @realJessyLin)
- Instinct (@noahrshinn)
- Keenable (@styskin, Matthias Petri)
- Lumaril (Mark Elliot, Ben Duffield)
- Neion Bio (@Dimkell, Sam Levin)
- Pangram Labs (@max_spero_, @bradley_emi)
- Quadrillion (@echinaceous)
- Re (@karnsaroya, @AnandDhillon, @thecliffwhite, @benaneesh)
- Ricursive (@annadgoldie, @Azaliamirh)
- Sail Research (@neilmovva, @blintzbase)
- Trajectory (@rronak_, @michaelelabd, @QuantumArjun)
- Watney Robotics (Sean Cheong, Ryan Gannon)
Picks from Elad Gil, Charlie Songhurst, Keith Rabois, Mike Vernal, Alana Goyal, Sonya Huang, Ramtin Naimi, Marc Bhargava, Cory Levy, Aashay Sanghvi, Konstantine Buhler, John Luttig, Varun Gupta, Ray Tonsing and Avichal Garg.
Disclosure: I'm a small investor in American Terawatt, Convergent, Standard Intelligence and Trajectory (in this post), and in Factory, Physical Intelligence and SF Compute (elsewhere on the list). I didn't vote.
The full list is on Breakout List.
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So true. The product is the factory as Elon would say
You cannot become a “hard tech” company without becoming a manufacturing company. You cannot become a great manufacturing co without becoming exceptional at physical operations. Technology alone is not enough to win in the space. If your investor does not understand what this really means be wary. 🚩🚩🚩
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Here's a glimpse behind the curtain at Neion Bio.
In biotech, we often take manufacturing for granted but it is fundamental to innovation. "Those serious about software should make their own hardware." The same is true in biology.
The manufacturing of life-saving biopharma medicines has been stagnant for decades. Legacy technologies that rely on a single type of cell reached diminishing returns in the late 2000s. In order to squeeze out more we relocated these factories in areas with lower costs ex-US.
Spending billions to rebuild this infrastructure domestically using largely the same legacy technologies is fighting a losing battle. Sure there may be an incremental improvement here and there but these facilities will be uncompetitive as soon as they go live (if they ever go live).
We now have the ability to efficiently and accurately reprogram complex biological systems, so why are we restricting ourselves to the small sliver of biology that happened to work 50 years ago?
Thanks @teleodaniel and @EricDai_BioE for helping tell our story.
Producing the 3 to 5 grams of a biologic needed for IND-enabling studies costs millions of dollars using traditional CHO manufacturing.
A single egg, meanwhile, contains 6 grams of protein, costs just 10 cents, and requires only chicken feed and water as inputs.
Neion Bio is taking advantage of this incredible technology to turn chickens into drug factories. And they’ve already signed a commercial deal with a drugmaker to produce biosimilars.
With AI leaders promising to unleash countless new therapies, we’re going to need to scale up our manufacturing. That sci-fi future may be one where we stop producing drugs in huge steel tanks, and instead start farming them like we do our food.
We sat down with co-founders Dimi Kellari and Sam Levin to discuss this future. [Disclosure: I’m an investor, though I wasn’t at the time of recording.]
Watch the full episode below, or look up Free Radicals (@FreeRadicalsBio) on your favorite podcasting platform.
Thank you to @SynBioBeta for hosting us!
0:00 Intro
1:07 What Neion Bio does
4:53 How the founders arrived at synthetic biology and chickens
10:21 Biosimilars as Neion’s first commercial market
13:30 Why farming drugs is a viable path to reshoring biomanufacturing
18:38 Neion’s technical moat & why engineering birds is difficult
25:50 Advantages of chicken-based manufacturing
30:06 Why CHO manufacturing became the industry standard
33:21 What it takes to disrupt CHO manufacturing
37:57 What it means to program biology
42:48 Skepticism around this new manufacturing approach
47:00 Applying tech principles to biotech
55:34 Natural intelligence vs artificial intelligence
57:14 The future of farming drugs & programmable chickens
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This might seem simple but it’s really damn hard. Congrats @jaimalik and team - this is what innovating in the physical world looks like…
as Amca matures, I'm excited to start peeling back what we've been up to. New software, a LOT more hardcore engineering - some of which hasn't been done in decades, and hopefully happy customers.
Exciting news coming over the next few months. More to follow soon...
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What if manufacturing life-saving medicines were as simple as farming eggs? What if farms that have long provided products to feed billions could provide products to heal billions?
Listen to Neion Bio's vision @messaginglab
piped.video/watch?v=zUIXUGLq…
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