Many of the scientists who are at the forefront of research in synthetic biology are also intimately involved in the private sector development of this field. There are many established companies which are using aspects of synthetic biology to drive new research but there are only a few new companies which are actively trying to drive their entire product development using a synthetic biology approach. These companies are mostly interested in optimizing and improving existing processes. The potential and promise of synthetic biology, is the ability to generate new ways of doing old processes more efficiently, more safely, and more economically.
A primary reason that there is so much controversy surroundings these companies is the money invested as well as the potential for significant future earnings based upon their activities. Especially in these economic times, control and flow of money are extremely influential and given that one goal of these ventures is to successfully market their products, there is concern about unmonitored support of synthetic biology, without ethical consideration. This raises concerns about their ability to be unbiased in the controversy since some are worried it may be extremely unlikely that they will even discuss the potential dangers of the technologies they are developing and the impact they will have on the world. Given that concern, some of the companies in this field have been quite forth coming and proactive in responding to public discussion. One very public example involved Codon Devices and the possibility that their service could potentially be a source for harmful biological agents. It is likely that this sort of proactive stance has been used because the scientists in charge of these companies realize that they are on the proverbial "thin ice" with the public and regulators. If people begin to get scared about what they are doing and think their products could cause harm it would most probably result in new regulatory hurdles being set up increase the time and cost these new companies would need to get through.
Amyris is involved in two seemingly unrelated ventures: renewable fuels and anti-malarial treatments. Traditionally a company focusing on one of these goals would never be able to properly compete in the market for both fuels and pharmaceuticals, however with the power of synthetic biology, Amyris hopes to be able to do this. They are trying to synthetically create novel metabolic pathways using the building blocks of natural pathways. Using this strategy they may find more efficient and cost effective ways to produce fuels such as diesel and pharmaceuticals such as artemisinin. Both are expensive to produce and have high demand so developing new ways to synthesize both products would be economical and efficient.
Amyris is a privately held venture backed start-up company. Many of the founders are prominent scientists including: Dr. Jack Newman, Dr. Kinkead Reiling, Dr. Neil Renninger, and Dr. Geoff Duyk. The company is based in Emeryville, CA and has ties to numerous universities, including MIT, US Berkeley, UCSF.
Codon Devices is involved in developing pharmaceuticals and biorefineries to produce industrial chemicals and Bio-energy. They plan to achieve these goals using computational design systems which are able to help scientists predict how known biological pathways will work when they arrange them in a novel order, an order that is not found in nature that could prove to produce some pharmaceutical compound very efficiently.
In addition to the lofty goals of developing novel biological systems to produce industrial chemicals and other products, they also had a service where they provided scientific researcher with specifically ordered DNA sequences. This DNA synthesis service, which is highly valued by biological science researchers, caused quite a media frenzy when the genome of the small pox virus was published. This panicked news storm was started when people questioned the use of this service where someone could order a small pox virus which could then be used for bioterrorism. Thinking quickly the founders and managers of the company instituted a rigorous screen of all sequence requests to prevent this possibility and quell the concern over the possibility that their company could allow for any future small pox outbreaks.
This company was founded in 2004 in Cambridge, MA by many well known and high impact scientists in the area . Some of these scientists include: Dr. George Church, Dr. David Baker, Dr. Jim Collins, Dr. Michael Elowitz, Dr. Drew Endy, Dr. Joseph Jacobson, Dr. Jay Keasling, Dr. Christina Smolke, Dr. Ron Weiss, and Dr. David Liu. Although the company enjoyed early scientific and economic success with large venture capital commitments, the company was forced to close down its operations in late March 2009. due to the recent national and local economic conditions (2).
Scientific breakthroughs primarily from the J. Craig Venter Institute (previously known as the Institute for Genomic Research) was the stimulus for the development of this company. Their mission in the formation of this company in 2005 was to pursue the scientific findings of the Venter Institute as a commercial venture. One of the key projects at the Venter Institute was called the "minimal genome project" (4). The goal of this project was to synthetically generate an organism that had the minimal number of genes which were required for life. Eventually scientists at the Venter Institute created, in vitro, the fully synthetic PhiX174 chromosome. The company plans to use this chromosome and the technology that created it to achieve similar goals of other companies involved in synthetic biology such as: now sources for oil based fuels, now processes to synthesize expensive pharmaceuticals, and novel processes to generate industrial chemicals.
Some of those scientists involved are Dr. J Craig Venter, Dr. Hamilton Smith, and Dr. Clyde Hutchison. Many of these members are from the Venter Institute, where this work was initiated.
This company is interested in developing plants like sugarcane, switchgrass, and corn to be energy crops. As an energy crop these plants could produce a variety of products such as chemicals, fuels, and bioproducts. Their solution is to add genes, synthetically, into the genome of these plants genes specific for particular digestive enzymes. Their strategy will be to harvest the plants and remove the edible parts, keeping the non-food, cellulosic portions of the plants. They would then activate the dormant enzymes they added into the plants and these enzymes would cheaply break down the plants into a product that can be refined into the downstream products desired.
The strategy Agrivida is developing has the potential to change the genomes of all the plants we now eat. Potentially all plants could be engineered to contain these dormant enzymes, so all plant biomass could, at some point, be decomposed and turned into some other product. Currently they have little information regarding which plants they have successfully added these enzymes into and what, if any, effect this addition had to the nutritional value of the food part of these plants. As time goes on, it will be interesting to follow the progress of the company to see what FDA or EPA clearance will be implemented, if any, to sell and grow these organisms in the main-stream farming community.
This technology is fundamentally based upon research that was initiated at MIT, with the company, Agrivida, which was founded by MIT and Harvard Medical School affiliated investigators. Dr. R. Michael Raab and Dr. Jeremy Johnson, both of whom received Ph.Ds from MIT's Chemical Engineering department are among the founders, who also include Dr. Mike Lanahan, and Mr. Mark Wong.
The goal of this company is to design biocatalysts which could allow the commercial microbial bioproduction of now expensive downstream products. Solazyme is taking advantage of the synthetic biology revolution by using processes such as directed evolution and metabolic engineering to quickly and accurately generate bio-molecules and organisms that perform the catalytic processes they are interested in.
This company has a solid background in biology and chemical engineering expertise and has ties to major academic institutions through its founders and scientific advisory board. So major scientists involved with Solazyme include: Dr. David Stern, Dr. James Barber, Dr. Michael Seibert, Dr. Robert Linhardt, and Dr. David Chapman.
LS9 is a San Francisco CA based start-up company focused on developing a renewable solution to biofuel production. They plan to use the power of synthetic biology to cheaply and cleanly produce petroleum from microbes. By designing novel microorganisms that are able to take in a feedstock and process it into a desired type of petroleum product LS9 plans to help lower the cost of oil based products. Their solution is somewhat unique because it does not require any modification of existing systems to use their fuel, rather they use synthetic biology to modify the systems of microbes to produce fuel we can used easily.
The founding scientists in this company are active researchers in the field of synthetic biology and have ties to universities and institutes across the country including University of Illinois, MIT, Stanford University, Harvard Medical School, and other international institutions. The list of scientists on the board of LS9 is impressive and includes Dr John Cronan, Dr. Edward DeLong, Dr Chaitan Khosla, Dr. Uwe Sauer, Dr. Anthony Sinskey, Dr Alexander Steinbuchel, and Dr. Chris Walsh.