How artificial life spawned a billion-dollar industry

Scientists are getting closer to building life from scratch and technology pioneers are taking notice, with record sums moving into a field that could deliver novel drugs, materials, chemicals and even perfumes.

Despite ethical and safety concerns, investors are attracted by synthetic biology's wide market potential and the plummeting cost of DNA synthesis, which is industrializing the writing of the genetic code that determines how organisms function.

While existing biotechnology is already used to make medicines like insulin and genetically modified crops, synthesizing whole genes or genomes gives an opportunity for far more extensive changes.

Synthetic biology companies are now becoming more like the disruptive, industrial-scale value propositions that define any technology business,- Matt Ocko, venture capitalist

Matt Ocko, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose past investments include Facebook, Uber and Zynga, believes the emerging industry has passed the "epiphany" moment needed to prove it can deliver economic value.

"Synthetic biology companies are now becoming more like the disruptive, industrial-scale value propositions that define any technology business," he said.

"The things that sustain and accelerate this industry are today more effective, lower cost, more precise and more repeatable. That makes it easier to extract disruptive value."

'Syn-bio' start-ups

Ocko, whose Data Collective firm has invested in companies including organism design firm Gingko Bioworks and bioengineer Zymergen, is not alone.

The global conference hosted by Imperial College London, bringing together scientists and money people, comes four weeks after researchers announced they were close to building a complete artificial genome for baker's yeast.

This ambitious project has brought complex artificial life a big step closer because yeast is a eukaryote, an organism whose cells contain a nucleus, just like human cells.

The yeast work shows how DNA can be manipulated on a large scale, with genetic code increasingly treated like a programming language in which binary 1s and 0s are replaced by DNA's four chemical building blocks, abbreviated as A, T, G, C.

'The next programmable matter'

"They've witnessed the power of software over the last 25 years and they are looking for the next big thing."

Work is also advancing by leaps and bounds in the complementary area of gene editing now being embraced by many of the world's top drugmakers.

Change of tack

The current product focus represents a change of tack from the first widely tipped application of synthetic biology in making biofuels from engineered algae.

Drew Endy of Stanford University believes the case for using synthetic biology to take on gasoline never stacked up.

A necktie made from yeast?

Today's synbio firms are looking at more niche and expensive products, such as potent painkillers and cancer medicines made in yeast cells or fabrics with novel properties, although some have only reached demonstration stage.

Boston-based Gingko Bioworks, meanwhile, is developing a rose oil for French fragrance house Robertet and Switzerland's Evolva has developed a vanillin, or vanilla extract, that, unlike most vanilla flavouring, is not made from petrochemicals.

There are always pros and cons, and we owe people a fair and balanced assessment.- ThomasBostick,Intrexon

Other controversies appear inevitable as synthetic biologists push the envelope with more extreme projects, such as a Harvard team's "Jurassic Park"-style proposal to resurrect the woolly mammoth by adapting the Asian elephant genome.

Intrexon's Bostick, whose firm is releasing millions of genetically manipulated mosquitoes in Brazil in a bid to slash populations of Zika-carrying insects, believes each synthetic biology scheme has to prove its benefits outweigh the risks.