188. Which Came First: Chicken, Egg, or Medicine? Neion Bio Turns Evolution into a Precision Factory

Speaker A: Our inputs are chicken feed and water. Our outputs are life saving medicines.

Speaker B: Hey Carl, how's it going?

Speaker C: Hey, Rem. Welcome to the Grow Everything podcast where we talk about how biology is making the world a better place. What's going on with you?

Speaker B: A lot. I'm, um, very excited for 4th of July this year. It's America's 250th birthday, the semi quincentennial.

Speaker C: You're celebrating that in New York City this year, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I usually go to Montreal on 4th of July because of the Jazz Fest, not because I don't like the us I love America and I'm American. But yeah, I'll be here and in New York City observing all the fireworks. There's so many celebrations. I was just looking it up and there's like block parties. There's this skywalk on Times Square, musicians coming out. It's going to be a big party. But yeah, there's a lot of events. And then they're in Los Angeles. Queen Latifah is going to be performing with the Smashing Pumpkins. And I'm like, that's a nice combo. I feel like I would definitely go to that. So a lot going on for the 4th of July. I'm just very excited for it. I just love fireworks. Hot dogs, red, white and blue. I'm wearing a little bit of that right now.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, and it's great. I mean, I remember I was telling you about in fourth grade when I wrote an essay called what the American Flag Means to Me. It was like an essay contest.

Speaker C: I remember. And you won an award.

Speaker B: Yeah, I won. I won it. And it was like, I went to a school in the suburbs that was the only Indian person in my school. Everyone was white. But it was just like meaningful that I wanted. Because of that, I was Ms. 4th of July and I was amazing. I was in the parade and I was like giving my little like hand wave and had flowers. It was really fun. I just wish I had that essay because, like, I always had deep perspectives. Even when I was young and my father watched the news a lot. You know, I had a very strong vocabulary when I was younger. And so then I would just probably like, it means freedom and the ability for my parents to come here and start a life.

Speaker A: And it's all good.

Speaker B: Liberty, pursuit, uh, of happiness. Probably use all the cheesy phrase, that's cheesy. But like the actual like phrases that are in the Constitution and the preamble. All of it.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: I think it's an interesting time for this celebration. I was very young when we did our 200th anniversary, so I don't really remember it, but I'm looking forward to this one. I'm going to stick around, be upstate, and I'll watch the fireworks there at the lake, and we'll just see how that goes. So I'm excited for this celebration. And I think, to me, the big thing about celebrating America is just this reminder that our democracy is something that constantly needs to be reinvented for the time. It's not a static thing. And I think that that's what makes it really exciting to me. It's ever changing and it's evolving, and there's a lot of opportunities for us to make it better.

Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. And it's evolving and changing to grow the bioeconomy. You shared some news on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. What's going on with that?

Speaker C: So for listeners of the podcast who might remember that a few episodes ago we had an interview with Senator Todd Young of Indiana, and he talked about the, uh, America's Living Library act of 2026. National Security Commission on Emerging Biotech just reminded us that the National Defense Authorization Act. That's a mouthful.

Speaker D: It's.

Speaker C: The NDAA is up for a vote in the House of Representatives, and it includes that America's Living Library act, but it also includes several other provisions that are important for biotechnology. And it's really an opportunity for all of our listeners and to let their voices be heard. So let your representatives know that you support biotech and that you support this National Defense Authorization act, and that we want biotech to really be a central part of our growing economy. We'll leave a link, uh, in the show notes, but I think it's very important for us to let our representatives know. It's something that I've probably said more than once on the podcast, and I'm a big believer. I tell every entrepreneur, get to know your representatives. You want to demystify what we do. Help them understand that we're growing the economy in a positive way with advanced technologies and advanced biomanufacturing. So I'm super excited about this.

Speaker B: Yeah, same here. And to remind listeners or those that are new to the podcast, the America's Living Library act is about sampling US Parks for all of the plants, animals and microbes and getting that information, sequencing the DNA and putting in a shared database, which AI can analyze and see what type of wonderful things that are happening in our parks here on American soil to see what type of drugs could be discovered amongst microbes and plants in our parks. And then, of course, there's going to be ownership of that. It's going to help grow our economy. If it turns out that the next longevity drug is in Yosemite, and all of a sudden people could monetize that. But then some ownership would go, perhaps fall back to the United States. I would love to learn a bit more about what the financial mechanisms, ownership, the provenance, how that's all being tracked. But I think those are the details that come after we all collectively vote that it's really good to have a living library that we can learn from. And as a reminder, there are trillions and trillions of microbes on our planet, and we've only studied about 120,000 of them. And of those studied, we've come up with such amazing, amazing innovations like insulin, citric acid, other drugs. The list goes on. It's a very long list. I'm sure you can ask your local AI this question, but. And you could probably ask it to write a very compelling note to your congresspeople and have them support America's Living Library Act. So let's grow.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, so there's a couple of other news items we wanted to cover before we get into today's podcast, but Yram, did you see this Mid Journey announcement?

Speaker B: You shared it with me, and then all of a sudden I was getting all these texts from people, like in our group chats about what's going on with Mid Journey and this idea of them getting into body scanning.

Speaker C: Uh, so Midjourney is known as being this graphics AI. You put in a prompt and it gives you an image. We use it a lot for grow everything. And they had Mid Journey con that last week. The thing that they showed off that got the most press was their MRI that they've been working on. And what I understand is the guy who runs Mid Journey has done hardware before, so it didn't really come out of left field. I thought it was really a fascinating thing when you have an AI company going into hardware and hardware that is really so specific. MRI scanning is something that is very specific and it's imaging, just like you produce AI, uh, images of them. So I thought it was great news.

Speaker B: Yeah. This idea of multiple modalities when it comes to data. Right. Like, a lot of what we use when it comes to ChatGPT and Claude is text based. And then of course, with Midjourney and Adobe, uh, Firefly, you're generating images. And it all has to come from some type of understanding. You prompt generate a picture of a dog in a park. And so it's going to do something that's somewhat accurate. Of course it'll look great, but it's just going to pick whatever dog and let's add more specifics. When it comes to biology in the human body, it's very complex and you need a level of accuracy. And having an imaging, especially an MRI scan is. And you could see things happening real time. Imagine what this AI is learning and if you could do it across different people with different body types and experiences and then you can have the population level data, this could be really interesting for clinical trials. Like if it went down that route and obviously people opt in and also for researchers. But for again this is something that we talk about, and I talk about a lot offline with a lot of founders in healthcare is that if you getting data from ah, a patient population to do research to develop a drug, they should be compensated somehow. And there are daos and crypto. They've been looking at this like how do you tokenize data from individuals? And then when that data is used for research to develop a drug and that drug is sold, that money comes back to the people that had given their data. So I think that there's a big opportunity here. I don't know if that's what they're thinking.

Speaker C: Yeah. So this is an ultrasonic scanner and a uh, patient or a person would sit in it surrounded by water and then it's going to create an image of your body. Their idea is to create these mid journey spas where they'll have 50,000 scanners worldwide. They will be able to do a billion scans a month. They're not doing it alone. Again, I said that the CEO is a hardware guy but, but they're also partnering with another company that is known for doing these things. But it's super interesting because again it's like you think of mid journey and the first thing that comes to mind is generative AI. This is a uh, very specific type of image generation that as you said, eram, um, could be used to keep people healthy and for longevity and to really understand what's going on in your body. I think it's super exciting.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I just love the fact that this is commercial, direct to consumer and allowing consumers to have their data. If the consumers decide that they want to share it with some research entity, they can as long as they get compensated somehow. But just that I really believe in this patient first medical establishment or this medical system where they get personalized Medicine, they're a part of it, they have ownership over it. They're not just a number or their data's just being used without their consent, which has happened for a long time. But I love when companies that are consumer minded thinking about the individual helping the individual. And then this opens up opportunities for larger healthcare institutions to participate if patients want to or people want to.

Speaker C: So a couple more kind of related news items. Yesterday I read this article about Nvidia saying that they believe that AI scientists are going to become the norm in biotech. And they've got a model that's called Bionemo. But this was in the news yesterday again because one of the executives from Nvidia was presenting at the Bio International Conference which is taking place as we record this in San Diego. And the idea is that this stack is going to turn generic language, large language models into AI scientists, which they believe will become the norm in biotech. I'm not convinced. I think this human AI model where humans are working with AI is really going to be the norm for a while because we're still tapping into that. And I think the AI really needs the scientists. But I'm happy to be wrong. I've been wrong many times.

Speaker B: Well, the article does say an AI co scientist. So it's like a scientist to work with human scientists. We know that this is happening. Our friend Nick Edwards from Potato AI is creating an AI scientist that really syncs with lab automation and really help with hypothesis generation because one individual can come up with a hypothesis. But if that's wrong, you're just going down the wrong rabbit hole and your experiments aren't set up correctly. And then it's like the whole unknown, unknowns like you might not know how to frame the hypothesis because there are probably things missing that just aren't in your purview. So this is something I see a lot, actually a lot of people are creating AI scientists for very specific fields. So I know someone's creating an AI scientist for microbial electrochemistry systems. And that's a very specific discipline and requires a lot of focus and there's a lot of research and a lot of modeling that has to happen. So I see it being a standard to help human scientists and decision makers get to where they're going sooner. And of course we just had our live demo with Roebling CTO Brenton Alexander. But Roebling is an AI process engineer and uh, one of the big takeaways is like, yes, it helps a lot of engineers or those that are building manufacturing capacity to understand the economics and what is required to build a manufacturing plant and helps them do all that very quickly. Rather something that would take months and months and months and a lot of capital, a lot of money that would go into coming up with these plans just takes a matter of hours. So I'm really excited for this. I'm glad that Nvidia and these large companies are talking about it on large stage at Bio. But we do know that on these small stages and these conversations, we have one on one with people off the podcast, offline. It's what they're building and we see how it's happening and how they're doing things. And we'll certainly get more people that are developing AI scientists on the podcast.

Speaker C: Yeah. And you had flagged this AI value pyramid Iran, um, that you saw, I think on LinkedIn. Tell me about that. What's the AI value pyramid?

Speaker B: Yeah, we'll certainly link to it in the show notes. But this is something I saw from a previous investor of mine, his name's Murat. Murat is a, uh, investor at era, which is Entrepreneur's Roundtable Accelerator. And also he started a new fund called Remarkable Ventures and he posted this AI value pyramid and it really resonated with me because what they say is that the value goes up the stack. So on the bottom of, uh, this pyramid they have compute and infrastructure. So think of the GPUs, Nvidia, data centers, networking, everything that is required to build AI. And then you have above that models. So chat, GPT, Gemini, all the things that we use. And then they have the harness. So how do you harness those models? You could use agents, you use memory and evaluation methods, orchestration on the AI level, different workflows. And then above that, of course, you finally have applications. How is this AI being used? There's AI native products. A lot of people are, uh, now positioning their startups as AI native, so that's above it. But the top, the top, I just was like blown away. Uh, what they find as the most defensible moat, the most unique assets, is of course, data. But then it goes relationships, distribution, brand and customer access. That's amazing. That's what we do here on the Grow Everything podcast at Messaging Lab. If you know us, you know, uh, we show up in the ecosystem, we're developing relationships with a lot of people, the guests that we have on our podcast and also the people in the ecosystem because we know that that's valuable because we learn, we like to give back when we can. And I think the new IP is Your customer base. And when we were talking about, you know, the whole 23andMe situation that happened and they were taking the data and giving it to pharma. Pharma is like, this isn't the data that we need. It's like not enough for us to develop a drug. And like they were like snowballing out of the value and they actually, then they end up creating a nonprofit and acquiring 23 means things are just kind of sitting dormant. But I said the most valuable data that 23andMe M had was the contact information for the customers and developing that relationship and being honest with them and also giving them rewards for like continuing to give data. Right. Like, yeah, we all know like your genomic information, which is they didn't have your whole genome sequence. They only had little bits and pieces of it. It gives you some information, but not everything. It's just a blueprint. It doesn't tell you three dimensionally what the actual house looks like. So it wasn't enough. But you could paint that picture if you continue to have a relationship with the customers. So in the end, in sum I was like, okay, wow. Just having relationships, having your customers. And then between that, instilling trust and loyalty to then for, if you want to talk about business, to have that recurring revenue come.

Speaker C: I was just going to say. And also at the top of that pyramid is brand. Which brand is something that we aim to build. Every company is aiming to build a brand and a reputation and brand has a lot of value and it continues to have a lot of value. And the fact that it's up there with relationships and data just shows how important. Building a brand that people can trust, that is consistent and that delivers on what it promises is super important. I love this pyramid. I'm going to share it with a lot of people and it'll be in the show notes.

Speaker B: And so the next piece of news, which is a big piece of news in the world of biotech biopharma, uh, which we touch on a little bit here on the podcast. But when it this big, we got to talk about it. So AbbVie acquired Apogee for close to $11 billion. And we were like, wow, look at this. We do work with a company in the immunotherapy space. So we were really excited to talk to them about it. But what's your takeaway, Carl, about this?

Speaker C: So people have been predicting that biotech has been ripe for mergers and acquisition or M and A activity for a while because the whole industry has been somewhat depressed. It's been really hard for people to get investors seeing a deal like this. I think just gets the market very excited. We're going to link to an article that I read that talked about what are some other potential targets that could be acquired. And some of these are, uh, companies like Nectar Therapeutics. It's been around for a really long time. That could be something that a big company like an Eli Lilly, which is now a trillion dollar company, could acquire if it helps them expand their portfolio. The name of the game in biopharma has always been acquisition or licensing and marketing of assets by big pharma. And a lot of big pharma is like the Novo Nordisk and the Eli Lillys of the world have these gigantic valuations. I think they've been sitting on a lot of cash. And while bio, biotech valuations have been depressed, it creates a lot of buying opportunity for companies that will expand those portfolios. So I was excited to see this news and I'm really excited to see where this is going to go.

Speaker B: There's a difference between investors investing in early stage biotech versus acquiring a company that's completely de risked the asset and they did all the heavy lifting because either they raised money or they figured out how to orchestrate different CROs and other supporting systems to de risk the asset. So if a company gets that far and like there's companies that have been around for 20, 30 years that have guess I don't know if you want to call it biopharm, I don't know how far back you want to go, but let's say like we'll call it 1.0 from like the 80s and 90s.

Speaker C: That is biotech 1.0.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like they're still around, they had a lot of value, they knew how to manage money and then they finally getting to a place where they can now leverage all this technology and the relationships they've built over 30 years. And then they're like, uh, all right, now we have all the data here and maybe they were even sitting on it to de risk and de risk and de risk that at this point $11 billion did make sense. Right. So there's still a lot of funding that's needed for some of the early stage biotechs that we talked to. And I don't know how that's going for them. And there's early stage biotechs that are making assets, but then of course there's biotechs that are making software. So that's a different beast. But it's great to see. So, yeah. And it's great to see that Apogee is an American company, so this is a win within America. We know that there's been a lot of assets being purchased from China that we can save for another conversation, but Great. It's great to see success and innovation happening here in biopharma world, and there's a lot more to come and a lot more that's being spearheaded, like what our guests today are doing.

Speaker C: All right, so with that, I think we should maybe just a little tiny bit of background. We joke around that we've got this Brooklyn biotech crew which is growing. There's a lot of people that we meet. We continue to meet new people that we add to our biotech mafia. And Sam Levin is an early member of the Brooklyn biotech mafia because we knew him from his previous startup. After finishing with that startup, he ended up joining forces with D. Me Kolari to start Neon Bio. And so we are very excited to have them come on the podcast. Talk about biomanufacturing of biopharmaceuticals and using a very special, very unique, natural, I don't know, incubator. Can I say it that way?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So I think with that, uh, let's let Sam and D take it away.

Speaker D: Dimi and Sam of Neon, we are so happy to have you on the Grow Everything podcast.

Speaker A: We're so happy to be here. Thank you. Awesome.

Speaker D: I'm going to kick it off by just dropping us into a big question. What we've seen is this massive push in the last few years to use AI to discover new drugs, but the infrastructure to actually make those drugs hasn't changed in more than 50 years. Do you think that tweaking traditional steel bioreactors is a viable evolution, or are we on the edge of something completely transformational in biomanufacturing?

Speaker A: I think you probably know our answer to this. It feels a little bit like you're leading the witness. Obviously, we believe we are on the verge of a revolution. The incremental improvements that have happened over the last 50 years or and are still happening today are exactly that. They're incremental. And when you actually plot improvements in traditional manufacturing of complex proteins using mammalian cell culture, we've hit diminishing returns. And so at Neon Bio, we believe that we need a bigger change. We need something bolder, and we need to begin truly harnessing biology in a way that unlocks its full potential.

Speaker E: The reason we needed sort of complex hardware for all this, um, traditionally and, um, in all this media formulations, it was to make up for the fact that we were stripping away biological complexity. So hardware compensated for a lack of ability to harness biology. I've, uh, built hardware my entire career. And nature evolution just does a much better job at making things efficient. So evolution's already created things that are better than we could ever think of. So why not try and harness those or use those?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Demi, let's talk a little bit about your background. It spans aerospace engineering at, ah, Airbus and Google X. And Sam, your background, you focus on evolutionary biology and automated bioreactors. So we'd love to hear from each of you, starting with Demi, what was the moment that brought, brought you worlds together to rethink drug manufacturing?

Speaker E: For me, you know, manufacturing in the world of hardware, it's always been constrained by the manufacturing technologies that are possible, not necessarily by what's possible to build. Right. I worked at CERN for some time and there millions and millions of dollars to build a part that would only ever be used for one single purpose and only ever be used once, maybe, maybe not ever. And we did things that you'd never see commercially done. Um, in aerospace engineering, on the other hand, at Airbus, the reason why planes look the way they do is not because it's necessarily the most efficient design, it's mainly because that's what we can manufacture efficiently. And so when you start to look at biopharma with that same lens, you sort of have a similar pattern. Um, so one of the questions that my naive aerospace engineering self came at this problem with was how could it ever be the case that one single cell type could produce all possible proteins, all biopharmaceuticals, and we have such diversity on ear. Nature produces complex proteins for pennies, and so it didn't really add up. And then layered on top of this catalyst like artificial intelligence and precision genome engineering and stem cell biology and all the things that we're sort of piggybacking on top of that form, those foundational engineering tools of biology just opened up this opportunity window. But I obviously, I needed someone who knew what they were talking about when it comes to biology. And when I met Sam, he was approaching this from, you'll learn about this in a second from his perspective, which is very different to mine, but we converge on sort of the same problem space.

Speaker A: You at least found someone who knows 50% of what they're talking about, uh, on a good day. So hopefully that was enough. Yeah, I mean my background is I am a biologist, I am an evolutionary biologist, although my PhD was on the origin of life on Earth, which is pretty different than what we do now. My history of biology has been sort of working forwards and the tree of life. But what I had previously built a company you guys knew called Melonfrost in Brooklyn as part of the Brooklyn biotech mafia. Uh, and we built traditional bioreactors and we worked with customers who built traditional bioreactors. And I remember the first time I went to a, uh, commercial biotech company and saw these, if you've ever been right, these look like giant factories, right? They are giant factories, these huge steel tanks. And it just didn't feel right. Right. It felt like something was missing. The vision of harnessing biology was that trees are out there turning sunlight and water into sort of complex giant 3D three dimensional protein factories. And they do that without any hardware. And yet we spend a billion dollars constructing these factories to make up for our inability to engineer, uh, complex organisms is really what it boils down to. So I think, although Demi and I came at it from very different directions, where we found our intersection was a belief that the way we do things today are not the best way we could do them. That there's sort of a better possibilities out there and that the future lies despite the fact that Demi's background is in hardware, lies not in better hardware, but in better biology.

Speaker D: I love that. Better biology for sure. And we're going to dig into that. So Neon Bio just recently emerged from Stealth with about $11 million in seed funding, which is a great funding round and congratulations to you guys. You also have a major multi product partnership to supply three monoclonal antibodies. Why was it critical for you to keep the platform quiet for as long as you did? Meaning you had to have validation from image or global pharmaceutical player. Why was that important?

Speaker E: Yeah, being in stealth really allowed us to advance the technology, develop our own intellectual property, get ahead of potential, uh, competition without sort of noise around us. There are companies that come out the gates really flying and lose momentum and momentum is really important when it comes to doing something transformative. You don't always have the early stage growth that an AI company might have. Right. You don't have a hundred million dollars in ARR after a year and so you need other forms of momentum. We knew we'd need to cut through the noise and find the right partner early on and doing that on our own terms was really important as opposed to unstealthing early and losing some of that momentum.

Speaker A: I also think for me personally, having been in this space, that you Guys know so well for a long time where there have been companies whose technological progress, let's say, have outpaced their commercial progress. So I think it was important for us to, uh, be part of setting a new standard in that our first announcement was a commercial one. And that was intentional. Right. Even though we've built a bunch of incredible technology, we could have announced technology milestones earlier on. We wanted to be commercial first and help set that as a precedent for this industry.

Speaker B: Yeah, I have a lot of respect for you both for doing that. I remember when I would see you guys at events, I'm like, well, what are you working on? What are you working on? And you're like, shh.

Speaker A: Can't say exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah, but then it also created for like the people that in your network and have been following you from both you guys have very great experiences and you have a network and it just created a lot of curiosity. And I think, you know, that has worked in your favor. And also, you know, it's probably a lot more. You're not talking about the noise that's around you, but you were able to focus and not have all these people asking you questions about what you're doing and just have the space for yourselves to grow and really be strategic here. And what a great, great strategy. So commend you for that.

Speaker E: It was intentional, but I would say I'd be lying if I said it didn't happen sooner than we expected it to happen. It definitely the pace at which we talk about we moved into our lab space in February of 2025 and within a year we're signing a commercial deal. We'd be lying if we said we would have predicted that at the time we moved into our lab space with three people. So there's planning and then there's some serendipity involved there too.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. I love that. Okay, so let's get into the meat and potatoes a bit more. Okay. So we were very fortunate to see you guys at Synbio Beta. And Sam, you were on stage sharing Neon and all the glory behind it. So let's talk about that a little bit. You mentioned the pharmaceutical industry has been trying to make Chinese hamster ovary cho cells out of steel, but Neon has swapped out steel tanks for something else. So can you tell us a little bit about this biological story and what do you think resonates the most with pharmaceutical companies who are traditionally incredibly risk averse?

Speaker A: Yes. Well, we can cut to the meat and potatoes or, um, I don't know if you're intentionally teaming this up, but. Or the chicken and potatoes.

Speaker D: I was gonna say eggs and bacon.

Speaker A: Okay, eggs and bacon. Much better, Much better. So yeah, so we at Neon Bio, we produce medicines inside chicken eggs. We genetically engineer chickens to lay eggs filled with therapeutic medicines. We then crack eggs and purify out those medicines. Which means we replace all of that complex biopharma infrastructure, from steel tanks, to valves, to ph sensors to media with the humble egg. And doing this comes with a whole host of advantages which we can get into. But I think what has resonated here with pharma, which as you said, is risk averse, one is that there's been a ton of precedents for this, right? There is a drug on the market today made in genetically engineered chicken eggs, that there is a hundred years of safety data for producing therapeutics in chicken eggs. We make our vaccines in eggs. Many people don't know that, but we do. What we're building is a very different technology, but it means that behind us is a pathway and a precedent for making safe, efficacious therapeutics in eggs. And that's really been critical for us. I think that that is a key hump that we didn't have to get over, that we were already sort of over from jump street. I think beyond that, at the end of the day, it is cost, scalability and resilience. So I think an issue that has plagued synthetic biology and biotech has been getting things from the lab to commercial reality. And one of the beauties here is that we don't have that scale up issue when we create a chicken that lays an egg containing a therapeutic. If we want to scale up to 1000 eggs, we can scale up to a thousand chickens, which will lay 1,000 eggs a day. And we get there not by putting steel in the ground, but by breeding. In fact, our bioreactors, our chickens, are self replicating, right? They do that themselves. So scalability, I think has been a huge advantage for our customers and potential customers. And then the last piece is on shoring and resiliency. So the supply chain for biopharmaceuticals today is incredibly complex. It's this byzantine mixture of growth factors and ph sensors and valves and steel and plastic, all of the things that essentially go into rebuilding a hamster. And there are hundreds of inputs, they largely come from outside the US and yet our system runs on two inputs. It's chicken feed and water. And I think a huge draw for many of our partners is that we can do this here in the US on two very Reliable inputs that we have in abundance in every state in the country. Pretty much our inputs are chicken feed and water, our outputs are life saving medicines. And that is important and it's always important but I think that's become increasingly important. Ah, we saw during the pandemic what can happen if you don't have the things you need to make the medicines as you need them. And I don't think we've seen any other approach that can truly onshore, not just the manufacturing but the supply chain too. And I think that's pretty unusual.

Speaker E: You know before we started neon biome we explored many branches of the technology tree and we definitely didn't start by saying hey, chickens are the way to solve this problem. That became obvious when we saw the, the advantages of using the system versus others. We have not seen any other way to uh, both onshore, not just the manufacturing but the entire supply chain which is quite critical to that particular issue. And also do that while reducing costs, not just keeping cost parity or a slight premium which is sort of what happens in most other manufacturing domains. But do this at a cost competitive advantage versus doing this in countries that are traditionally you would locate there for cost reasons.

Speaker D: And I'm under the impression, correct me if I'm wrong. Well actually you guys, you did say this at the beginning that biology, nature already produces these incredibly complex molecules, macromolecules, proteins and the pharmaceutical industry is being driven by the design of biologics. I would imagine that as the need for more complex biologics evolves, your manufacturing platform will enable that. Is that a true ah assumption?

Speaker A: One of the most wild statistics to me about complex molecules and biopharmaceuticals is that something like 40% of the human secretome, the proteins that the human body secretes cannot be made in this one cell type that we use to make all our biologics in these Chinese hamster ovary cells. So there are ah, countless number of potential cures and therapeutics and medicines that are sitting on the cutting floor of pharmaceutical companies and biotechs because someone designed a potential drug, went to try to make it in the one tool we have to make it, which is a Chinese hamster ovary cell. And that one tool happened to not work and so it got discarded. You'll see this as developability issues and this happens throughout the pipeline. You know we're bullish on chickens but I think more broadly our philosophy is like hey, let's open up our aperture. That sort of spread out beyond the tree of life because otherwise it's not just about cost, scalability and resiliency. It's also about actually potential unmet medical needs that we could solve just by unlocking new biology.

Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. Can you help our listeners visualize your platform? It's called Raptor. If someone walked into a neon bio facility today, what would they see or hear? What looks radically different than the steel in the ground that a traditional pharmaceutical facility has.

Speaker A: The first thing is what they wouldn't see or hear. Right. Most things would be missing.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: All of that steel and plastic and complex machinery and parts and skids. And these are big, complex operations that we don't have any of that. Right. We have chickens. Basically our entire bio process is the chicken. And these are incredibly clean biosecure chicken farms. So these aren't necessarily look exactly like what you would find at your. You know, my dad keeps chickens and so it looks a little different than what he does. But one beauty here is our margin profile is very different than a, uh, traditional sort of commodity chicken farm. So we can afford to have abundant space and all of that. You know, at the end of the day, it really is chicken farming. It's clean biosecure. Uh, but you would, you know, really hear clucking and roosters are loud, by the way.

Speaker B: I was going to ask that.

Speaker A: They're very loud.

Speaker B: Gets everyone awake. Oh my gosh. There's so much to do in terms of marketing for you guys with the egg and the chickens and the farm. Oh my God.

Speaker C: Which came first?

Speaker E: I would say we've probably heard them all, but every now and then we get someone who really comes up with something creative.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, this is great. And I, during this Sid by BigA presentation, Sam, you had this image up. You know, what can a farm look like? And maybe not a traditional chicken farm, but having a lot more greenery and really resemble that Biology is working here, not mechanics and not this electricity and steel. So I'm sure I would love to come see it. Maybe we'll bring our, uh, cameras when you're ready to have people see it.

Speaker A: One of our long term visions here is also to build the sort of farms of the future, right. And be a place where we can test out concepts that are at the forefront of animal welfare research that maybe today are outside the cost curve for a traditional food production farm. But they could be sort of tested and proven out at, uh, one of our farms and then kind of make their way into the broader. Because at the end of the day, the amount of total chickens we will ever farm is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the amount of chickens that are farmed for food.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: So we like to point out that we could produce the global supply of every biopharmaceutical on the market today with less than 0.01% of the chickens farmed in the United States each year. Right. You know, but if we can do things that ultimately make their way out into the broader, uh, food world, they will have a big welfare impact as well.

Speaker D: Are you guys able to put that into perspective, like how many football fields of chickens are grown in the United States? I mean, is there like that kind of image that you can create for our listeners?

Speaker E: We can hopefully paint a picture here. So let's take one of the top selling drugs of the last few years, Humira, as an example. 10 billion plus gross sales. We could produce the global supply of, uh, something like Humira using, uh, a very, very small chicken farm. So specific numbers would be under 4,000 birds. To put that in perspective, a small chicken farm that your grandparents or parents might run is a couple hundred birds. A large food chicken farm could be in the hundreds of thousands or millions of birds. The USDA would classify a small farm as anything under 25,000 birds. So under 4,000 is really a small, tiny operation. And that's for the global supply of one of the blockbuster drugs. So really, I mean, this is testament to evolution and just how efficient it is at, uh, being a great protein factory and producing this great protein factory inside the chicken oviduct.

Speaker B: Yeah, that is incredible. Okay, so now can you walk us, uh, through what happens after the egg is laid? How do you get clinical grade monoclonal antibody out of it and how does that compare to the downstream side of traditional CHO process?

Speaker A: I think actually it's useful to start there just to level set so that people understand how it's done today with a traditional mammalian cell culture process. In a traditional process, you have this bioreactor, you have your steel tank, it's filled with these cells. They are making your protein, your medicine. And then what you have is this big batch, this big sort of brew of cells and protein and gunk, let's say. And you then have to get your medicine out. And the first step is to clean up that process and sort of try to take out some of the big debris that's formed during your fermentation. So you take that liquid through, let's say, a series of filters and then you typically do a step that's called capture, where you run it through a column and that column has something in it that will grab your protein of interest. And in that step you get rid of a lot of the extra stuff and you end up with mostly just your protein of interest. And then you go into what's called polishing, which is cleaning up the remaining debris that kind of slipped through the cracks. That's for a traditional process. We do almost exactly the same thing. The key difference is we start by cracking eggs, which you do not do in a traditional process. And we separate whites and yolks, which you don't do in a traditional pharma operation, but you do in like a mayonnaise factory. And so there's actually equipment for automatically separating yolks and whites that exist for the food industry. So we separate yolks and whites because mostly we make our medicines in the egg white. From there we have a liquid that contains our protein of interest and we have to purify it out. And that sort of follows the same steps. We put it through a column that grabs our protein of interest and then we do some sort of final cleanup. I would say the biggest difference other than the egg cracking might be that the egg white, compared to that I specifically called it gunk because a mammalian cell culture like liquid is actually a pretty messy environment. There's thousands of background proteins, there's bits of cell membrane, there's DNA, there's rna, and you have to get rid of all of that. In comparison, egg white is a very clean protein matrix. There's no cells, a cell free system. There's no DNA or RNA that you have to get rid of. And compared to 5,000 background proteins in a CHO cell lysate, there are, uh, just a few dozen major proteins in egg white. And so we actually have an easier job of doing that sort of purification process than you do for a traditional process.

Speaker D: That's just amazing to me. I mean, we, earlier in the year we did this report with this advanced biotech for sustainability coalition and they talked about which are the molecules that should be produced via biotechnology. And one of that we talk and spend a lot of time exploring is how expensive downstream processing is because you end up with all this junk when you are producing things in cells. So just the fact that you guys can do this way more efficiently in egg whites is a, uh, mind blowing statement and something that I find to be super exciting. Since your bioreactors are living animals that replicate and run on grain and water, how do you navigate regulatory conversations with the FDA when you're manufacturing facilities and avian AG and not a Steel tank.

Speaker E: We're quite fortunate that we are not the first people to conceive of, uh, using genetically engineered animals as a way to produce biologics of various kinds. There are at least four drugs that we know of on the market in the US today produced using living bioreactors. Not all of them are chickens. One is a chicken. And they've really paved this pathway for us. So there's clear precedent. We know what that pathway looks like. It also helps us, as Sam mentioned earlier, we have a hundred years of safety data on using chickens in the vaccine supply chain. So everything from the protocols for raising clean chickens for human therapeutic use to the actual infrastructure itself is already in existence. And that further bolsters our case to regulators. It also helps that we have advantages in terms of protein stability and lack of immunogenic reactions and things like that when it comes to expressing proteins in the system. I think a common misconception is that regulators, uh, want to stifle our innovation. They actually want innovation, but they're there to make sure that it's safe. And so they work with us. We have these incredible benefits of the system in terms of accessibility and affordability and performance of producing critical life saving therapeutics. So it's important to have those dialogues and not think of the regulator as a police force that's there to, to tell us off before we've done anything. Right.

Speaker A: I would add too, I think it's, it's actually because you mentioned that we're doing this in animals, right. As opposed to a kind of a, uh, steel bioreactor. I think a really common misconception that we've come across is that the steel bioreactor is like fine and controlled and consistent and the animal is messy and variable. It's actually the opposite for us. Right. Because if you think about it, the steel bioreactor, when it comes to um, a Chinese hamster ovary cell process, it's basically trying to recreate the hamster, right? So you have all these valves and sensors and mixers and spargers and all of them are there to try to, let's say, get nutrients to all those cells at the right time, at the right moment. You know, what does that really? Well, the vascular system of a, uh, hamster. Right. And so we have the same thing where the batch to batch variability from egg to egg is actually much lower than you get in a fed batch mammalian cell culture process. There you have proteins that are made on day one of a 12 day process that are sitting in the tank for 12 days. And then you have the proteins made on the last day. Whereas our.

Speaker E: This.

Speaker A: Our chicken system has been finely tuned by 200 million years of evolution to produce the same exact amount of protein with the same exact processional modifications in every egg. And so we've had to work to kind of educate the folks about this, but it's like, one of the most common misconceptions we come across. Wow.

Speaker B: Yeah. I just wanted to say that that's incredible. I, uh, just love how you guys are framing this as, like, this is so obvious and much a better solution than traditional way of making drugs or other biologics. I just think that's like, okay, it's very commonplace and, like, there's so many other things I want to use chickens for now because podcast is called grow Everything, and you can make, you know, anything, and you need a better bioreactor. So I see why people are giving you money. Take my money. Like, let's do this.

Speaker A: Yeah, sounds good.

Speaker D: So, Sam, at Symbiobeta, uh, I floated this idea that I keep coming back to, which is building on what Irem just said, that maybe we should be moving towards a world where engineering plants and animals is actually easier than forcing microbes to do things that they never were evolved to do. But at melonfrost, you built automated bioreactor systems that were driven by machine learning, but now you're working with a genetic architecture of a chicken.

Speaker C: What does that shift look like?

Speaker A: It's quite different, I would say, um, as you can imagine. I mean, I think, first of all, I agree, Carl. Right. That's. That's our. I said this before, but at the core of our. Of Demi and I, our philosophy is, I think the last 50 years of synthetic biology has been, there's a handful of organisms we know how to engineer. E. Coli, Cerevisia, Cho. Let's try to shove them and try to get them to do our bidding and work really hard to go against evolution. And I think the next 50 years of synthetic biology are going to be, let's go find the thing that is already good, that has 3.8 billion years behind it of optimization, that's already good at the thing we need, and then make smaller tweaks to get it to do our bidding. I think the shift from melonfrost to Neon Bio for me, was one where our challenges were hardware engineering and, uh, software engineering primarily. And here all of our challenges, all of our work pretty much is in tinkering with the genome of the chicken and taking a system that's Already really good at what we want it to do, which is making a ton of complex, abundant protein and then making one small tweak where we swap in a therapeutic protein for one of the native proteins. And that's just a very different task. I think Dimmy often reminds us that biology is getting to be more and more of an engineering discipline. I mean, we can. Our team pulls up on the screen their design for the genome, and then they pull promoters from a database and then they order the parts and it gets synthesized and it gets sent to us, and then we send it off to Plasmosaurus or whoever and it gets sequenced. And all of that is making it more like an engineering discipline. And yet it is not quite the same as hardware or software. There is still stochastic systems operating underneath there. That means there's still, uh, unpredictability that we haven't fully mastered and may not ever. That can, I think, lead to sort of challenges, frustrations, surprises. If you're wanting it to just look exactly like how you designed it and have it come out that way, you're in for a rocky road, I would say.

Speaker B: Incredible. Yeah, I mean, I just would love to see more, um, research and understanding happening about what's happening across biology writ large, across all organisms, and to be able to pick the right pathways or right organisms to use. And hopefully AI, uh, research is helping with that and helping us hone in on things a bit faster. But that remains to be seen. But I do want to shift gears and actually go back to the drug supply chain. They are incredibly fragile and geographically concentrated today. And demi, given your background in tech policy, can you talk to us a little bit more about how farming medicines locally in eggs inherently strengthens national health security? And I think this is very important to talk about, particularly because your episode's going to come after our conversation with Senator Todd Young, who's the chair of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotech. So you guys are the perfect poster child for that organization. But, um, we'll love to hear some more thoughts around policy and how we can strengthen national health security.

Speaker E: Yeah, we love what the Commission is doing. They actually visited us here at our offices a couple of weeks ago. And so this is all top of mind for us. I think the issue we have in biomanufacturing is mirrored across manufacturing writ large. If you look at silicon chips. Right. The U.S. started to address this, call it eight years ago. Six. Eight years ago. I think only recently in the last couple of years has biomanufacturing, uh, really entered the zeitgeist here. And I think what's important is that we try to control the supply of these critical life saving medicines. And for that it is not enough to onshore the manufacturing when the supply chain is exposed to potential adversaries. For example, we've seen this with rare earth metals, right? And that uh, supply chain has been weaponized time and time again. I think, you know, further, I think Sam mentioned this earlier. We saw the dislocations that can occur in times of pandemic. And I don't know that we're more prepared than we were in 2020 for this with sort of single points of failure and things like that. And the problem with the supply chain is we don't actually understand what's going on in most of it. Right. We may understand where a active pharmaceutical ingredient is manufactured. We don't understand where those ingredients or inputs come from necessarily. It's been estimated 25 to 80% of global API ingredients directly and indirectly are in the control of China, for example. Another Incredible statistic is 58% of manufacturing facilities registered with the FDA are actually overseas. And when it comes to generics or biosimilars, that's 87% plus. I think in biosimilars it's actually close to 100%. And so locating factories overseas is not a problem in and of itself. Right, if it's French word, of course. But you know, if these get inspected less frequently than the ones that are located here in the US that can create the sort of double standard. And that's uh, I think a situation we don't want to find ourselves in. It's led to some bad things happening in the past. And so I think the issue with sort of traditional manufacturing is it just takes billions of dollars and many years to build these facilities. And then once you've built them and onshore them, they still rely on these global supply chains. And that's where we think we're flipping that on its head. And we're doing this in a fundamentally different way can help to solve a bunch of these challenges. I mentioned earlier, we don't just onshore or French shore or nearshore, the manufacturing uh, itself, but the entire supply chain. And I think that's unheard of when you look at the potential options here for controlling auto manufacturing.

Speaker D: Yeah, that's amazing. One of the things I've heard you guys say is that your North Star is to drop end to end production costs of monoclonal antibodies below $10 a gram, which is an order of magnitude how do you think that price drop changes the global landscape for medicines and healthcare equity?

Speaker E: I think it's important to say where the $10 a gram came from as well. That was actually set by the Gates Foundation, I think, think a couple of years ago. Super ambitious target, but we think we can get there. My personal sort of story here is I spent the first 12 years of my life living in Zambia, a small mining town in the north of the country in the 90s. And access to cheap and um, abundant medicines were that access wasn't available. Things that you could buy over the counter here and here in the US and in the Western world back then that's fortunately changed. But now that we have more biological medicines that cost tens or hundreds of thousands per treatment or dose, those are still way out of reach. I think the largest impact of that $10 per gram number would definitely be felt in countries like Zambia. And it would fundamentally change who could be treated, where they could be treated, and where the manufacturing could happen as well. Just because the nature of the manufacturing. But I think even in high income countries there's still poor equity right here. We probably need another episode to talk about healthcare, uh, inequities here in the us but our first targets are in the generics, the biosimilars space. For that reason. Our core, the first sort of large advantage we have really is cost. And it's felt most acutely in the biosimilars and generic space. And so we do plan to move beyond just being a lower cost and more scalable and more resilient to unlocking, um, new medicines. But that $10 a gram number will guide a lot of the day to day decisions we make if we have an opportunity to improve our yields or remove a step in our downstream processing for the reasons that Sam mentioned that, that drive us towards the $10 per gram that will be a priority in terms of resource allocation.

Speaker A: And then actually to bring that back all the way to your first question, Carl, about incremental improvements to things like hardware for traditional processes, Dimmy's saying end to end, that is truly end to end, right? So I think it's important to note that a lot of times you hear reported breakthroughs in mammalian cell culture where they've increased the yields or titers, or they've removed some component or they've got a better bioreactor system that that's cheaper. The problem there is they're often not reporting the hardware costs and the capital costs and those need to be calculated in the full end to end cost and no matter what you do, if you're building bioreact facilities, that's going to make up half your cost or something like that. So I think that's really critical here is when we're talking about $10 a gram, that's end to end, including amortized capital cost for the entire operating system. And I just think that that's ambitious because I don't think there's any other approach right now that's going to get us there.

Speaker B: It's ambitious, it's powerful, it's very exciting, and can't wait for you guys to get down to that number. You guys have strong heads on your shoulders. And I wanted to wrap up the main question section of this interview to do a little visioneering and think about the future. Demi, you mentioned a little bit about going into different, um, drugs and manufacturing drugs through your platform. We'd love to hear a little bit about that. And then also what really needs to happen to make eggs. A default production system rather than an alternative.

Speaker A: I think for us, this will become the default. And I think they're the first customers who are taking that leap with us are going to be the beneficiaries of that. And as people start to see this built out and scaled out and our drugs on the market, it's going to be a pretty rapid spread across the industry. I think there are technologies that we are building that we need to build to broaden the markets that it makes sense for us to enter and the products that we can make. But I think we feel pretty confident that in the next decade we will be farming our medicines.

Speaker E: Maybe I'll add on that one of the reasons we, starting with biosimilars is our first advantages are cost and scalability and resiliency. Ultimately, how this moves beyond biosimilars into every novel therapeutic and becomes the default is speed and performance. And the cynical view is if you're bringing a new drug to market, you don't really care about how much it costs to manufacture it. And that's true because what you charge is so much more than the manufacturing cost. For a drug that's first coming to market, what does really matter is that it performs really well and, uh, you can get it there really quickly. The difference in a month for a blockbuster drug of a billion dollars plus is hundreds of millions of dollars right over, over the lifetime of a drug. And so the ability of the system to just scale that much faster and get to production that much quicker is what will, what will drive this to be the default? It will, I Think it will come to a point where we don't have to convince folks that this is the right way to do this. It will just be evident from the fact that it costs less, it's more resilient, it scales much more risk free and is far quicker for you to get there. When it comes to novel therapeutics, we sort of touched upon this throughout the conversation. But it's true that there are many drugs that you simply can't make, or many proteins you simply can't make using mammalian cell culture today. Those will be the tip of the spear for us in novel therapeutics. Those will be the first things that we bring to market with partners or ourselves. That's also a, uh, potential option. And there it's really the fact that we're unlocking new biology similar to how. Although, you know, we don't want to make this comparison too many times. Similar to how Genentech did that with E. Coli. Right. Or Regeneron did that with the mouse. We think we can do that with chicken biology. Anytime you give biologists a new tool to work with, there's so much you can do with that. And so I think beyond being a manufacturing platform that can do things cheaper, more resiliently, more scalably, faster, we can also do things that have never been possible before. And I think that's really one of the things that excites us most.

Speaker D: That's awesome. So we're going to move into the quick fire part of this interview where we're going to each ask you some simple, maybe complex questions and want you guys to give us some simple, perhaps complex answers. But I'm going to kick it off. What's the single most unexpected thing that can go wrong when you're trying to genetically engineer a chicken?

Speaker A: Yeah, the boring answer here is that the putting, you know, a gene in a particular place. And we've largely de risked that. Um, I think for us, we're just starting to get into some more, let's say out there, or moonshot engineering problems. And I mentioned this earlier, but there, at the end of the day, the challenge is its biology. And so until you see it made you, you just don't know what you're going to get. But one of the reasons we're so excited about this technology is for making proteins in egg whites. That part's already been done enough times to be de risked.

Speaker B: If your engineered hens went on strike, what would be the number one union demand?

Speaker A: I think right now, you know, actually, so they get a lot of enrichment. These are as you can imagine very pampered chickens. And we've recently given them wiffle balls and they're really into the wiffle balls. For whatever reason, they seem to love this enrichment. So, uh, I think if they went on strike right now they'd be asking

Speaker E: for more wiffle balls, more wiffle bars, more broccoli. They love to eat broccoli and things like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a good point. We give them broccoli, we give them lettuce, and we sort of irradiate these things so they're sterile. And, um, we recently stopped giving them worms because we weren't happy enough for the biosecurity status of the worms. So I think that if we can figure out better biosecure worms, they'll be very happy.

Speaker B: There's a company.

Speaker D: There you go. Biosecure worms. Or chick or crickets.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker A: If you're looking for a partnership and you make biosecure worms, contact us at. New.

Speaker D: Uh, I've got some very young entrepreneurs looking for projects that. There we go. What's a single funniest misunderstanding a biopharma investor had when you told them you were manufacturing drugs in eggs?

Speaker E: Yeah, there have been some very interesting ones. I'll share one. We had one investor who basically said something along the lines of, uh, I get the genetic engineering part makes a ton of sense. Recombinant proteins and eggs. But farming, that sounds really tough. I have a cousin who farms and he tells me how tough that is. And, uh, we basically agreed to disagree. But what we did agree on was the fact that, you know, it costs about 10 cents to produce a food egg. So it might, it might all be tough in there and challenging and all of that, but at the end of the day, the output is still pretty affordable.

Speaker B: Oh, wow, that's interesting. Yeah, I think farming wouldn't be as challenging as genetic engineering, but, you know, everyone has their own truth.

Speaker A: Someone had a bad experience.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so speaking of genetically engineering, if you could secretly genetically engineer a chicken to do one non medical chore for the company, what would it be?

Speaker E: I mean, as the farming. The hard part, that would be. That would be really. I forgot what the saying is, maybe leading the blind in this case. But I think if we could, you know, personally, if I could get a chicken to run my calendar, that would be amazing. But if we could teach chickens to carry out the delicate microsurgeries that we have to do to do the genetic engineering, we'd have like, close that loop. It'd be chicken, egg, genetically engineered Chicken. You know, it'd be a different loop, but that might be something we'd want to do.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, there was a chicken.

Speaker B: Oh, my God.

Speaker A: There was a famous chicken in Chinatown in New York City that played tic tac toe. I don't know if you guys know about.

Speaker B: Yes. Oh, my God. That's another marketing like, you use that chicken as an influencer.

Speaker D: Okay, so, final question. Settle the ultimate debate for all of us once and for all. What actually comes first, the chicken or the bioreactor egg?

Speaker A: Well, Carl, uh, at NeonBio, we like to say that it's the wrong question. The right question is what comes next? That's my last chicken, uh, plan for the day.

Speaker B: Oh, wow. Well, this has been an incredible conversation. I'm so happy you guys are finally out of stealth and we could talk about this openly. It's a big lift off my shoulders because I was always wondering, but I wanted to know, is there anything you want to ask our audience? I know that you had some, uh, call to action. Sam, when you're on stage or you're looking to hire. Looking for customers, of course.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think those are. Right now, the two biggest things for us are, one, if you are making proteins, need proteins made, developed, supplied, uh, reach out. We're excited about what this can do. And we're commercial now. We're working with partners, and we want to expand that pipeline. And then we're always looking for talent right there. What we're doing is bold and ambitious and requires the best talent in the world. If you're a brilliant engineer, uh, scientist, uh, yeah, reach out. You can go to our website, find our contact, and we're excited to keep expanding our team.

Speaker D: Love it. I love this conversation. I can't wait to check back in with you guys. And then also to see you guys at a, uh, soon to happen Brooklyn Biotech Mafia event.

Speaker E: Let's do it.

Speaker A: Can't, uh, wait. Would love that.

Speaker B: Awesome. Hey. This episode is sponsored by Messaging Lab. At Messaging Lab, we translate complex science and economics into compelling business narratives. And we have done so for the most successful biotech forward companies across pharma, agriculture, personal care, and beauty materials. And the list goes on. We're here to make sure your ideas not only get heard, but resonate with your audience. So if it's time to amplify your company's voice and elevate your business, Visit us@messaginglab.com. let's grow. Hey, Carl, what'd you think about that episode?

Speaker C: I'm a huge fan of Sam and DME and what Neon Bio is doing. I agree with them that drug development is very challenging and manufacturing infrastructure is very expensive. So this idea of trying to reproduce Chinese hamster ovary cells in steel doesn't really make a lot of sense. And going to nature as a biomanufacturing, uh, facility, I guess is what I would call it is something that is really unique. And I'm surprised no one's done this before. I'm very excited for them. What do you think, Jerome?

Speaker B: Um, yeah, I mean, I love it. We've known Sam for quite some time and I've met Demi and when we were talking, they were in stealth and then they finally came out of stealth and I was like, wow, this is such a breakthrough idea. And I just love that it's under engineering. You know, I feel like a lot of pharma is so over engineered to create one molecule. When biology is complex, there's multiple biological processes happening and requires multiple molecules. And just like food. Right. You know, when you eat spinach, it's not just one molecule that's coming out of the spinach. Right. There's multiple molecules working and that has multiple benefits. So I just love that. This idea of looking at biology to create a product. Right. Is a beautiful thing. I mean, hello, grow everything right. This is wonderful. And this idea of using synthetic biology to genetically engineer these chickens to lay eggs that contain the therapeutic proteins is incredible. It's this biologically native production system that it's way cleaner, it's simpler and clearly more scalable.

Speaker C: Yeah. And it harkens back. And harkens is a world that I rarely use to. We had Josh Robinson of Cocoon Biosciences on. They were using moth larva as a biomanufacturing factory. And we had worked with a company called Core Biogenesis that was using a very specific plant. And so we've seen a couple of companies do this in the past and I think we're going to see a lot more of it because nature solves a lot of the problems that we're trying to solve in fermentation tanks. Yes, it might make the downstream processing more challenging, but I think if you do it the right way, it could actually make the downstream processing a lot easier and cheaper. For listeners, what this shows is that this isn't something that's going to happen in the future. These guys are doing it right now. They at Neon. It's like they've already thought about the downstream purification. It's going to be faster. They can scale up faster. They don't have to wait to build these huge facilities and they can start making proteins that CHO cells can't make. So very excited for them.

Speaker B: And of course, this connects to bigger industry themes. So this conversation that we had with Sam and dme, it talked about, of course, how do you model cost? What does supply chain resilience look like? It's something that we talk about in the industry level, but also on the governmental, national level. How, uh, do we have this supply chain resilience and of course means the national health security. What does that look like? So this is an idea that's truly domestic biomanufacturing. It requires onshoring, both manufacturing and its underlying input. So I just love this. And I also want to appreciate the decision that Sam and Demi made to be stealth until they had partnerships. Even they raised money. They made that quiet until they got more money and they made this. It was a beautifully orchestrated startup where it was both on the technical side, the partnership side, the narrative side, the fundraising side, all of it. And so this is a, uh, wonderful playbook. Right. Some people have these large campaigns and they don't have anything. And I get that that could work for some type of products. You know, you could do that just to prove out that if you're trying to create a skin cream that's a unique brand, you might want to do the branding first to see if people would even buy it and then can develop perhaps later. I don't, uh, know, but I just liked the fact that this company that has this product, when stealth and worked and worked and worked and then bada bing, bada boom. Yeah, they come out.

Speaker C: Yeah, I love that too. And I'm super happy for Sam and Demi, and I can't wait to, number one, see them around and number two, have them come back on the podcast that are in six or 12 months and really talk about their progress. I think as soon as we had recorded, Sam took off and got married. Congratulations, Sam. And then they announced a very substantial fundraising. So congratulations to the team for that and we're just very excited for you.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So that's our episode. We wanted to point you to our, uh, grow everything LinkedIn page. So if you're on LinkedIn and you want to get amazing biotech content delivered to your feed, definitely follow. And like, the link is in the show notes, Our LinkedIn is very good, very interesting, the best. And then finally, of course, we want to point you to direction of World Biomarkets. They've been a great communication partner. We will be going to Omaha in September. Join us. Get your tickets. We do have a promo code. Use promo code grow everything for 25% off your ticket to World Biomarkets. If you're interested in commercializing and scaling up biomanufacturing, this is the conference for you.

Speaker C: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker D: All right.

Speaker C: Well, thank you for tuning in to the Grow Everything podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us. We love when our audience reaches out. Our contact information is in the show notes. And don't forget to subscribe to our substack. Let's Grow.

Speaker B: Let's grow.

Speaker A: Sam.