In an appearance March 10 on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," Jay D.
Keasling, Ph.D., chemical and biomolecular engineering professor at UC Berkeley,
explained how he and his colleagues at the Joint BioEnergy Institute were
persuading yeast to make ethanol instead of alcohol from sugar. In response to
host Stephen Colbert's suggestion that he was (and is) a mad scientist, Dr.
Keasling replied that the same yeast that we use to produce beer and bread will
soon be fueling our cars and planes.
The last laugh is definitely on Colbert, as Dr. Keasling’s
synthetic biology company
Amyris has developed fuels with properties superior to those of existing
renewable alternatives. In 2009, the company announced that the EPA had obtained
its No Compromise™ diesel fuel, making it the first hydrocarbon-based fuel made
from plant-derived resources to be registered for commercial sale.
Amyris also developed a semisynthetic form of artemisinin, a key ingredient
in first-line malaria treatments, in a project funded by a grant from the Bill
and Melinda Gates foundation. Amyris, however, handed over a royalty-free
license to this technology to sanofi-aventis for the manufacture and
commercialization of artemisinin-based drugs with a goal of market availability
by 2012.
Technological advances and huge investments have fueled this segment, which
has the potential to reach $2.4 billion by 2013. A lion’s share of the money has
come from oil companies. Amyris and other synthetic biology enterprises like
Synthetic Genomics (SGI) have thus
focused on producing alternative fuels despite first products that were
potential pharmaceuticals. Both Amyris’ and Synthetic Genomics’ deal-making
activities reflect those investments, as does the industry’s current
leadership.
Following the Money
James Collins, Ph.D., a professor of biomedical engineering at Boston
University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator told GEN that
alternative fuels has become the “killer app” for synthetic biology. The good
news was that they brought attention to the field and a lot of funding into it.
The bad news was that
biofuels detracted the focus from other fields
like new therapeutics development. “In my view, the amount of money thrown at
alternative fuels resulted in recruitment of a majority of talented scientists
into bioenergy at a critical time for the field.”
Amyris was founded in 2003 and has since raised more than $244 million in
private funding including $138.6 million on June 23, 2010. Its first CEO, John
G. Melo, was previously president of U.S. fuels for BP. The firm says that it
has about six corporate partnerships including one that resulted in an affiliate
of French oil and gas giant Total SA becoming its largest stockholder.
SGI was founded in 2005 by J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., Hamilton Smith, M.D., who
shared the Nobel Prize in 1978 for physiology or medicine, Juan Enriquez, and
David Kiernan. In 2007, BP reportedly made a substantial equity investment in
the company as part of a R&D deal. Synthetic Genomics was to study the gene
sequences of microbes that live within hydrocarbons and develop biological
conversion processes that could lead to cleaner energy production and improved
recovery rates. In retrospect, the deal should have focused on oil-eating, not
fuel-making, microbes.
Exxon Mobil made its first major investment in greenhouse gas reducing
biofuels in 2009 via a $600 million partnership also with Synthetic Genomics to
develop transportation fuels from algae. And technology companies wanting
broader franchises in synthetic biology have been putting money into SGI, the
latest being
Life Technologies. On June 2, Life
Technologies said that it had made an equity investment in SGI.
About two months before inking the deal with SGI, Life Technologies purchased
about 59% of Germany’s Geneart, which concentrates on DNA engineering and
processing. It provides custom gene-synthesis and gene-optimization services to
its customers. Life Technologies now owns a 74% stake in that company.
The SGI investment, in particular, extends Life Technologies footprint beyond
tools and services to the basic science behind creating synthetic life forms.
Peter Dansky, Life Technologies’ president of molecular biology systems, told
GEN that the move reflects the company’s openness to expanding its business
model. “It’s pretty unlikely we’ll be setting up biofuel pumps, but we think
there are significant evolving spaces for applications that we can play in.
“We’ve typically been a research tool oriented company, so why are we making
investments beyond the tool stage? First of all, our roots are in research but
our mission is to apply life sciences to improve human conditions. An example of
this in the medical world is molecular diagnostics. Our tools are increasingly
applied in molecular diagnostics, and we think this analogy holds in synthetic
biology.”
Dansky noted that the firm’s investment in SGI speaks to where Life
Technologies believes there’s an opportunity. “Our interest is being on the
leading edge and in touch with thought leaders. It’s not about their business
model.”
Will Good Science Prevail?
Governments as well as private industry have also increased investments in
synthetic biology. The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Synthetic Biology Project found
that the U.S. government has spent around $430 million on research related to
synthetic biology since 2005, with the Department of Energy funding a majority
of the research. By comparison, the analysis indicated that the EU and three
individual European countries—The Netherlands, U.K., and Germany—spent
approximately $160 million during the same period.
And the reality of fuel factory microbes may be somewhat closer to
realization with the
J. Craig Venter Institute
(JCVI) reporting in May that it had created a synthetic organism. The project
consumed $40 million, a team of 20 people, and about 12 years to complete. SGI
has provided JCVI with nearly $30 million in funding since 2005.
Dr. Venter and his team reported that they had assembled a 1.08 mega base
pair
Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 genome using digitized genome
sequence information. The scientists transplanted the genome into a
M.
capricolum recipient cell to create new
M. mycoides cells
controlled only by the synthetic chromosome.
Is the bug that Dr. Venter built a parlor trick or a real technological road
map for producing worker bee bacteria that can provide new drugs, sources for
scarce drugs, safer fuels, and address the messes made by oil companies? Plenty
of skeptics, while thoroughly impressed with the remarkable technical
achievement in producing the new organism, have raised some practical issues.
One significant issue remains the unpredictable results of introducing either
novel genetic sequences or whole new genomes into non-native hosts.
The new bacterial cell, nicknamed Synthia, certainly focused the President’s
and Congress’ attention on synthetic bio. President Obama, almost immediately
following the JCVI’s announcement, called for the Presidential Commission for
the Study of Bioethical Issues to “undertake, as its first order of business, a
study of the implications of this scientific milestone to identify appropriate
ethical boundaries and minimize possible risks associated with the
breakthrough.” The committee is expected to deliver a report within about four
months.
Ultimately, it is hoped that calm heads and good science will prevail over
the sort of fear-mongering stuff that appeared for example, in a June 3 online
edition of the Daily Mail, that seems to have created its own artificial life
forms with the headline “Scientist Accused of Playing God After Creating
Artificial Life by Making Designer Microbe from Scratch—But Could It Wipe Out
Humanity?” How many wrong ideas could you pack into one
headline?
