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IndieBio ’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups . We submit especial note of a few , which were making some major , bordering on ridiculous , claims that could yield off in a freehanded way .
Biotech has been creep out in recent years to touch conterminous industries , as ship’s company find how much they bank on outdated process or even organisms to get thing done . So it may not storm you that there ’s a microbiome troupe in the latest heap — but you might be surprised when you hear it ’s the microbiome ofcopper ore .
I let the cat out of the bag with IndieBio ’s principal skill officer , Wes Dang , about the companies I found most promising or provocative , and he assured me that despite vocalise somewhat outlandish , these fellowship are serious and the IndieBio program does a lot of verification oeuvre .
“ We ’re all technical by setting , several PhDs , including myself — we do the industry together . We all look at the paper , and some of us go deep and check the shape and assumptions , ” he said .
Stream Genomicsis perhaps the most easily grasped of the new mathematical group : a genome sequence method acting and equipment that is quicker and gaudy than runaway grocery store loss leader Illumina , and more importantly reduce the need for wet - science lab prep that still takes a draw of time and expertise .
There are cheesy sequencer out there , but because Illumina is so deeply plant , the cost of shift is gamey , especially if you ’re only save money on the sequence step . Stream Genomics ’ advance minimizes sample prep and reagent used ( the sequencing is n’t cyclic ) while shifting a lot of the computational burden to the cloud . They say it ’s lodge of magnitude quicker and cheaper .
“ With Stream , you ’re just watching the nucleotides comprise in real metre , look at the colour associated with the As , Ts , Gs , and Cs coming up , and doing it without a huge computational lode , ” say Dang . “ It ’s the eq of cyclosis versus download a Blu - re . ”
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Illumina is too big to be displaced outright , but humble surgical process will likely appreciate a faster , less tortuous option for sequence than either sending it out to a third party ( which can take weeks or months ) or building their own sequence research laboratory ( expensive ) .
Another fellowship see at a potentially immense change is AquaLith , a electric battery tech startup that claims ( we cover them last year ) to have cypher out a atomic number 14 anode textile that resists the eccentric of long - term vesture and deplumate that it is usually subject to . The specific are certainly in the sess , but the company is planning to sell just the material to battery makers who already have the means to make batteries of this case but postulate the silicon potpourri — “ Basically a slurry , ” said Dang — which Aqualith pee exclusively .
barrage startups and alternative chemistries have fare and gone for decades , and only a small fate end up being anything but a footer ; however , AquaLith is seemingly solving for a very specific problem in an otherwise noncontroversial part of the domain of a function . They have plans to make a nonflammable battery cubicle soon as well . Here ’s hoping it bring out .
Farm Mineralsis starting its journeying off with a spot of skilful sometime - fashioned stunt advertising : It ’s ease up away the first million estate ’ worth of its synthetic fertilizer for free . “ They ’re fundamentally doing it as a sort of flex , ” say Dang . “ It ’s just so improbably trashy to make . ”
Fertilizer is a huge expense for land and you require lashings of it to get over a good - size landing field . But ultimately crop need only a lowly amount of the minerals in it — so Farm Minerals is encapsulate those minerals in a peculiar super - bioavailable carbon copy case . They say that 160 gm of it is enough for — checks notes — 2 millionhectares ? !
“ As a scientist , I was like , no fucking way this works , ” Dang said after I offered a likewise grim appraisal . But they looked into it and apparently it does . Also , that think they ’re give away about a cereal bowl ’s worth of product for the stunt . short that part does n’t seem so wild . That jug in the effigy above is probably enough to cover the whole country . We ’ll follow up with the company soon to see about autonomous establishment of these claims .
Transition Biominingmay be the most sci - fi of the companies , trying , as they describe it , “ to mash biography out of a rock-and-roll . ” The issue is this : Only a certain amount of the minerals in in the buff ore can be easy collected through the physical and chemical summons ( already quite extreme and caustic ) currently used . What ’s honest than getting 95 % of the atomic number 29 out of five gigatons of ore ? acquire 98 % of it . ( I ’m excogitate these numbers . ) And if Transition ’s method acting works , someone else will be doing the piece of work : microbes .
The ship’s company aims to test and understand the microbiome of the rock — that is , the unparalleled band of microbes experience in and around it — and change it so that minerals are being draw out by those microbes just doing their thing . It wo n’t replace the acid baths and other traditional methods , but it might assist make mines more efficient .
There are plenty more in the batch . Here ’s a brief rundown of the others :
We ’ll want to postdate up with these companies as they divvy up more about their advance toward these sometimes mad - sounding ambitions . The San Francisco – based incubator ’s demonstration day will be in June , at which time the ship’s company may have more info to share .
