Ayana Bio and Zenfold acquired 300,000L of fermentation capacity from Meati Foods for $75,000 to help scale plant-cell-culture production of high-value bioactives. agfundernews.com/exclusive-a… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

@judegomila launched an open oncology resource mapping cancers, treatments, technologies, bottlenecks, institutions, startups, key papers, open questions, and 1,000+ ideas for advancing cancer research. nitter.net/judegomila/status/2100… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

🔥 Week 40! 68 Bay Area Bio-economy events, Sept 28-Oct 4 🔥 🔗 docs.google.com/spreadsheets… 🔗 𝗕𝗬 𝗧𝗢𝗣𝗜𝗖 14 🚀 Startups & Ecosystem 10 🏥 Clinical Care & Health Equity 9 💊 Therapeutics & Drug Development 7 🤖 AI & Data for Science 6 🌱 Food, Ag & Climate 5 🧬 Genomics & Protein Design 5 🔬 Lab Tools & Automation 5 ⏳ Longevity, Metabolism & Wellness 4 🧫 Cell & Molecular Biology 3 🧠 Neuroscience & Brain Health 𝗕𝗬 𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗠𝗔𝗧 17 Seminar / Lecture 9 Webinar 9 Panel / Salon 6 Mixer / Social / Outdoor 5 Vendor Lunch & Learn / Expo 4 Conference / Symposium 4 Pitch / Demo Day 4 Info Session 4 Workshop / Hands-on 3 Grand Rounds (CME) 3 Patient & Community Day 𝗕𝗬 𝗟𝗢𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 21 Berkeley 18 San Francisco 17 Virtual 5 Oakland 3 San Carlos 2 Foster City 2 South San Francisco

@novonordisk and @AnthropicAI are collaborating to use Claude Science and frontier AI models to accelerate drug discovery, scientific reasoning, and AI-driven software development across R&D. novonordisk.com/content/nnco… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

Life sciences M&A spending reached $196B in H1 2026 as companies pursued larger strategic transactions and increasingly targeted early- and mid-stage biopharma assets. bioxconomy.com/partnering/if… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

@Ginkgo’s Datapoints partnered with @EliLillyandCo’s Lilly TuneLab to connect biological data generation and wet-lab testing with AI/ML models for drug discovery. investors.ginkgobioworks.com… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

Cellares and GenomeFrontier Therapeutics will evaluate automated Cell Shuttle manufacturing for GF-CART01, a virus-free CAR-T therapy advancing toward U.S. clinical development. cellares.com/news/cellares-a… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

If you work in bio x tech in the Bay Area, Boston, NYC, San Diego or Minneapolis, there's a free Slack posting 7+ jobs and 25+ events every week. Almost 14,000 people are already in it. It's @bitsinbio, and it's the most active I've seen it in three years. Events per week, last two months: - Bay Area: 4+ - Boston: 4+ - NYC: 2 to 3 - San Diego and Minneapolis: 1 to 2 - Everywhere else: about 6 more in #events, plus new chapters in Dallas and Nashville The jobs: - 4 in 10 are computational (ML, data, software) - 1 in 3 are wet lab and bioprocess - The rest are BD, ops and partnerships - Lots of founding roles: founding scientists, a CSO, co-founder searches - Mostly Boston and the Bay Area, plus remote, London and Copenhagen Your gateway to the nexus is here: join.slack.com/t/bitsinbio/s…

In 2010 I helped put on @NASAAmes's first workshop on what synthetic biology could do for space exploration. @lynnjrothschild, my adviser at Ames, and I spent years arguing that you could send a single cell to Mars and let it build from whatever it found there. The microbe was never the hard part. Earth already has bugs that make plastic, food, and fuel. The hard part was the dirt. Nobody knew what Martian regolith actually gives a cell to eat, or how badly the perchlorate, salts, and heavy metals would hurt it. You can't model your way out of that question. Someone has to grow things in it. That's exactly what @Pioneer__Labs has been doing, and this week they showed it works. First they turned real rover and lander data, from Phoenix's Wet Chemistry Lab and Curiosity's SAM instrument, into Defined Mars Media: a lab recipe for the nutrients and toxins in Mars dirt. Then they screened 16 Earth organisms against it and ran more than a trillion cumulative cell divisions of evolution. The result is sPL.001, a strain of Cupriavidus necator that pulls every nutrient it needs from Martian dirt, water, and air, and makes more than 3x the PHA bioplastic of its parent. It needs no fertilizer from Earth and no washing the perchlorate out first. Their reference design says one rocket's worth of equipment could build radiation-shielded habitats for a small city in about four years. It's also built to be safe. It only grows inside a bioreactor fed acetate made from Martian CO2. Even a catastrophic leak clears planetary protection limits by several hundred times. This is what data generation looks like for an interplanetary species. Rover measurements became a lab recipe, the recipe became a trillion cell divisions of experiments, and the experiments produced an organism. Pioneer is the only team I know of doing this end to end. Congrats to @erika_alden_d and co-founder @StorkDevon, and to @unattermann, Tom Pedersen, Nathan Hicks, Jordan Mancuso, Karin Isaev, Max Schubert, Fatima Martin, Jonathan Liu, Harley Greene, and Edward Sukarto. Thanks to @AsteraInstitute for backing it. @lynnjrothschild, Pete Worden, Stephanie Langhoff, Chad Paavola: this is where that 2010 workshop was pointing. Last year I joined Erika, Chris McKay, Pamela Silver, @edwinkite, Robin Wordsworth, @mason_lab, and others on a @NatureAstronomy paper making the case for Mars terraforming research. Organism one of five is already here. Erika has spoken at @SynBioBeta, and so has @NikoMcCarty, whose @AsimovPress interview with her is the best 51 minutes you can spend on this. It is a joy to see this research making headways and I am excited to see what the future holds.

@NYSERDA’s Sun and Soil Program is seeking proposals to help New York farmers and communities plan, implement, and scale agrivoltaics integrating solar energy, active agriculture, and in some cases battery storage. portal.nyserda.ny.gov/CORE_S… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes recognized unconventional but meaningful research spanning splash-free urinals, mosquito microprinting, snakebite behavior, and soil-health experiments. arstechnica.com/science/2026… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

The OpenAI Foundation launched Public Data for Health with $125M+ in initial grants to create and preserve high-quality, broadly accessible scientific datasets for AI-enabled life sciences research. openaifoundation.org/news/pu… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

@mithrl_ai raised a $20M Series A to build AI infrastructure for biopharma R&D, reflecting pharma’s shift from standalone AI tools toward integrated systems spanning research workflows. axios.com/pro/biotech-deals/… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

🚨 Exclusive: Saku Biosciences and Sable Fermentation, Inc. have signed an exclusive US strategic alliance agreement, putting strain engineering and scale-up under one contract. @SynBioBeta has the story:👇 Most microbial products pass through four stages on the way to market: 1. Strain development: engineering and screening a microbe for titer, rate and yield. 2. Upstream processing: fermentation development and scale-up. 3. Downstream processing: recovery, separation, concentration and drying. 4. Formulation: turning the material into something a customer can apply or ship. Different vendors usually handle these stages, and each handoff means a new MSA and a new tech transfer. The costliest gap is between stages 1 and 2. Strains are usually screened in well plates or shake flasks, where oxygen transfer, mixing and substrate feeding look nothing like a stirred-tank bioreactor. The best performer on the bench is often not the best performer in the tank, and that mismatch shows up months later at pilot scale. Saku (strain development) Saku's PicoShells, developed in @dinodicarlo lab at @UCLA and published in PNAS, are picoliter-scale hydrogel particles with a porous shell. Each one holds a single cell and its descendants, fenced in but exposed to the surrounding media. That means more than a million clonal colonies can grow together in real production conditions and be sorted on standard equipment, up to 10 million in a day. Mark van Zee and John Alden picked Sable specifically because they knew what was missing was the scale up peice. Sable (upstream, downstream and formulation) Sable's Wake Forest, NC pilot plant runs submerged fermentation from 1L to 200L, with downstream processing including tangential flow filtration, centrifugation and spray drying, plus formulation and analytics. Its team comes largely from ag biologicals, including AgBiome, Marrone BioInnovations and Pasteuria Bioscience, Inc. Put together, Saku selects strains in the kind of environment Sable will run them in, and the results from Sable's runs go straight back into the next round of screening. "We saw an opportunity to solve one of the biggest inefficiencies in bioprocess development: the disconnect between strain selection and the conditions a strain will ultimately face at scale," said Toni Bucci, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Sable Fermentation. Sable manages the customer relationship end to end. Neither company takes back-end royalties or claims on customer IP. They are paid through success fees. The arrangement is aimed at food, agriculture and industrial biotech companies moving from lab scale toward contract manufacturing.

A microbiome model trained without human samples was still transferred to human-gut prediction tasks. Outpost Bio trained Waypoint on 539,308 microbiome samples, then open-sourced the model, data, and benchmark through @huggingface. synbiobeta.com/read/one-mode… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

AI-powered molecular design is expanding beyond drug discovery. @dsmfirmenich is partnering with Boltz to combine biomolecular foundation models with extensive taste and odor receptor data—supporting the prediction and design of new scent and flavor molecules. our-company.dsm-firmenich.co… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

Europe’s largest bacterial cellulose plant is coming to Germany. @BIOWEG_UG plans to produce up to 10,000 tonnes annually of biodegradable ingredients made from local industrial side streams, with construction beginning in Q4 2026 and commercial volumes expected in 2028. ilbioeconomista.com/2026/09/… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

@inductivebio has launched Indy, an AI assistant for medicinal chemistry. It handles assay QC, SAR analysis, synthesis tracking, FEP and dose projection. In Inductive’s 84-curve evaluation, Indy reached 89% accuracy and the company says its scientists doubled productivity. inductive.bio/news/meet-indy Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

FairJourney Bio has selected @SapioSciences to unify antibody discovery data across its Porto, Cambridge and San Diego sites. Its LIMS, ELN and Elain AI tools will replace disconnected records and manual reporting, potentially returning up to 40% of staff time to science. finance.yahoo.com/technology… Subscribe to our newsletter and get the biggest biotech news straight to your inbox 🧬 syntheticbiologysummit.com/?…

🚀 @ycombinator. 🤝 An acquisition. 💰 $2.6M+ in funding and fellowships. That's our 2026 @SynBioBeta Next-Gen Bio-leader alumni just 4 months post conference; 2027 applications just opened 👀 🔗 synbiobeta.typeform.com/to/B… Next-Gen BioLeaders is a one-day program at SynBioBeta for students, postdocs, early-career academics and pre-seed founders in programmable biology. You spend the day with biotech investors and founders who have built companies from scratch: VC masterclasses, small-group mentorship, a founders lunch and curated introductions. Here's what the 2026 cohort has done since May: ☘️ Nitroduck | Matej Zámečník, Matúš Grieš, Miroslav Rosputinský Just got into Y Combinator (F26). 🛡️ TwentyTwo (YC S25) | @_harm0n, Evan Seeyave Acquired by @LatchBio. They now lead Latch Biosecurity. 🧪 @cypherbio | @yaoyuyang $2M seed led by @MaCVentureCap for an AI operating system for lab work. ☀️ Solio Bio | Nathan Paumier Came out of stealth backed by Replicator VC. @jaykeasling just joined the scientific advisory board. 🫧 Flux Bio | Marika Ziesack Launched as a @Harvard / @wyssinstitute spinout to fix gas transfer in fermentation. 🦠 Outpost Bio | Jenny Yang Released Waypoint, a foundation model for microbial communities. 💾 BioCompute | @anagha_dna Moved from Bengaluru to San Francisco to build DNA data storage chips. 🧬 LUCAI Bio | Joaquin Ortiz Masllorens Won the South Summit pitch competition and Best Entrepreneur at the Puentes de Talento accelerator. 🐛 Yeast Bay Bio | Nazzy Pakpour Raised from the California Innovation Fund for yeast-based pest control. 🔬 On the research side: Sam Oliveira won a $302K @DARPA Director's Fellowship, one of seven awarded. 🪴 Nolux | Elizabeth Hann joined @activatefellows with her company Nolux and leads a Wyss Validation Project. @YeshDoctor was co-first author on a @NatureBiotech paper. If you're building in biology and want to meet the people who fund and scale it, this is your day. Selected participants receive a complimentary conference pass and up to $500 travel support. 🔗 synbiobeta.typeform.com/to/B…