DailyDirt: Breaking Bad... With Yeast?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've mentioned before how yeast can produce a bunch of useful stuff, beyond bread and beer. Synthetic biology promises to give us engineered microorganisms that can make almost any specialty chemical or even some biofuels. Brewing medicine might not be too far away, and it might be incredibly difficult to control "controlled substances" in the very near future.

• Genetically modified yeast can produce opiates similar to morphine. And it looks like several other derivatives of potent painkillers can be made this way, too, possibly leading to ones that are less addictive or that have fewer side effects. [url]
• Other scientists have coaxed yeast into producing THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), one of the psychoactive compounds in marijuana. It's still pretty difficult to do, but presumably, it will get easier and more economical. And by then, we'll have THC-infused beer brewed and on tap. [url]
• Meanwhile, the FDA is proposing new rules to help distinguish copycat pharmaceuticals and biosimilar drugs. Adding four random letters to the end of a generic name medicine could reduce some confusion, but hopefully, in the end, everyone who needs critical drugs will get access to more affordable pharmaceuticals. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: biology, biosimilar, biotech, drugs, fda, gmo, health, marijuana, medicine, microorganisms, morphine, opiates, painkillers, pharmaceuticals, synthetic biology, tetrahydrocannabinol, thc, yeast

Regulating Synthetic Biology: Does Freedom Of Speech Apply To DNA Letters?

from the democratizing-creation dept

Techdirt has written often enough about applications of DNA sequencing -- the elucidation of the four chemical "letters" A, C, G, T that go to make up genomes. But things have moved on: the new frontier is not just analyzing DNA, but synthesizing it. A fascinating article on SFGate describes the activities of one company working in this area, Cambrian Genomics, and some of the tricky ethical issues it raises:

In Austen Heinz's vision of the future, customers tinker with the genetic codes of plants and animals and even design new creatures on a computer. Then his startup, Cambrian Genomics, prints that DNA quickly, accurately and cheaply.

"Anyone in the world that has a few dollars can make a creature, and that changes the game," Heinz said. "And that creates a whole new world."

The 31-year-old CEO has a deadpan demeanor that can be hard to read, but he is not kidding. In a makeshift laboratory in San Francisco, his synthetic biology company uses lasers to create custom DNA for major pharmaceutical companies. Its mission, to "democratize creation" with minimal to no regulation, frightens bioethicists as deeply as it thrills Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

Printing the new DNA is the easy bit; increasingly, the hard bit is deciding what should -- and shouldn't -- be printed:

Right now, employees check each order to make sure that a customer isn't printing, say, base pairs of Ebola. But staff won’t have time to do that if, as Heinz predicts, orders dramatically increase in the next two years. In that case, he said, Cambrian might first ship the plates to an independent facility where experts would put the DNA inside cells, film and analyze it, and make sure that it is safe before releasing it.

This facility, he envisions, could be run by another company, not necessarily the government. Because Cambrian wants to keep government interference to an absolute minimum, its CEO insists that behaving well is in the company’s best interest.

That may be true, but as this technology spreads, and becomes cheaper, more and more companies around the world will start to offer similar services, making it harder to oversee their working. And then there will be the backstreet labs that intentionally try to avoid any kind of control. Soon, if you can model it, you will be able to synthesize it. Cambrian Genomics is already helping to drive the spread of its tools and ideas:

Cambrian will also share its technology with startups in which it holds a 10 percent equity stake. One is Petomics, which is making a probiotic for cats and dogs that makes their feces smell like bananas. Another is SweetPeach, which hopes to take samples of users' vaginal microorganisms and send back personalized probiotics to promote vaginal health. (Contrary to Heinz's description of SweetPeach at a recent conference, the products will not make vaginas smell like peaches.)

Heinz seeks to help create "thousands" more startups in this vein. On top of that, he wants to replace lost limbs, fight viruses and develop alternatives to antibiotics. Maybe someday, he said, scientists will even print DNA on Mars. "It’s going to be an amazing next few hundred years."

Given the rapid advances in synthetic biology, that certainly seems likely. The question is: will the next few hundred years be good amazing, or bad amazing? Where -- and how -- do we draw the line here?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: dna, printing, printing lifeforms, speech, synthetic biology
Companies: cambrian genomics

DailyDirt: There Will Be Blood... And DNA And Stem Cells

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Biotechnology takes time to grow and develop new stuff, but every so often, there's a big leap. And then it still takes time to verify results and perform rigorous double blind medical studies. Science fiction and CSI TV shows make it seem like we'll be re-growing body parts and curing every disease before the next commercial break. Unfortunately, biology rarely moves that fast. Here are just a few cool biotech projects that won't be available at your local drug store anytime soon, but these sci-fi-sounding projects are closer to reality now.

• Artificial human blood could be mass produced someday soon, providing a nearly limitless supply of type-O blood. This process could solve a lot of medical problems, but it could also bring out the vampires.... [url]
• The DNA laser printer can print custom strands of DNA -- to arbitrary lengths and with 100% accuracy. It doesn't quite match the sophistication of biological DNA synthesis, but being able to (cheaply!) create long stretches of custom DNA will make some biological studies a bit easier to do. [url]
• Surprisingly, it's not that difficult to obtain pluripotent stem cells from mice. Putting blood cells from a young mouse in a mildly acidic solution for about 30 minutes seems to do the trick -- but researchers are still trying to figure out exactly how this trick works so that they might be able to do it with adult human cells. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: biology, biotech, blood, dna, health, medicine, stem cells, synthetic biology

DailyDirt: Synthetic Biology Is Growing Up

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Biology has inspired artists and scientists and engineers to create all kinds of things from velcro to still life paintings. Living organisms have a seemingly endless supply of tricks up their sleeves, so why not try to use some biological mechanisms to do our bidding? Scientists can already re-create some biology by growing organs that could be used for transplants and by creating an (almost) completely synthetic cell based on a bacterium that normally infects goats (search for J. Craig Venter). Synthetic biology still has a long way to go, but it's a field that is maturing quickly. Here are just a few links on this fast-growing biotechnology.

• Since 2004, synthetic biology startups have raised around $1.84 billion -- based on the promises of Lego-like biotech that would allow scientists to grow biofuels or custom medicines or even genetically engineered buildings. However, the ability to engineer custom living organisms hasn't (yet!) lived up to the hype. (The field is only about a decade old, folks.) [url]
• Before synthetic biology gets out of hand, there are a bunch of groups that want to regulate the creation of artificial organisms. Some folks are justifiably concerned that harmful genetically engineered organisms (or even non-living genetic material) could destroy our existing ecosystem -- or just create ethical abominations. [url]
• Engineers have developed a programming language to create synthetic DNA that could help design biological macromolecules for all kinds of uses. It's just a first step towards making biology more accessible to engineering students and tinkerers outside the field of biology. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: artificial organisms, biology, biotech, genetic engineering, gmo, life, synthetic biology

DailyDirt: Fighting Biology With Biology

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

While most people have been taught to fear and loathe bacteria and other microscopic organisms (just watch some soap commercials), healthy people actually carry around more bacterial cells with them than their own human cells. It's estimated that there are ten times as many bacterial cells on a typical person than the number of cells that carry a person's own genetic code. About 100 trillion microscopic life forms usually live peacefully on (or in) our bodies, but the microbes that cause disease make us suspicious of all of them. In our battle to defeat the bad guys, though, we should be careful to limit the collateral damage. Here are just a few projects working on fighting "bad" bacteria without killing them all.

• Acne plagues millions of people, and its treatments aren't always effective -- so how about some anti-acne viruses to kill off the bacteria that cause these pimples? The key trick is killing off just those specific bacteria and not all the beneficial natural bacteria that live on everyone's skin. [url]
• A rare medical procedure, bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation, attempts to restore a person's natural intestinal flora. Antibiotics can sometimes kill off too many microbes, making people sicker, and sometimes the solution is to re-create the right balance of microbes in a patient. [url]
• Synthetic biology could create bacteria that prevent cavities, solve lactose intolerance, provide vitamins, and do all sorts of beneficial things for us. Imagine eating a yogurt that would replace the bacteria in your mouth or digestive tract... (and then wait 28 days for the zombie apocalypse). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: acne, bacteria, bacteriotherapy, biology, biotech, flora, microbes, synthetic biology

DailyDirt: Science Policies For The US

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We're generally interested in government policies that affect the discovery of information or the creation of new works. Usually this means we focus on copyright issues, but science policies are also important to us -- so here are just a few gov't policies that have been released.

• US research in synthetic biology isn't subject to a lot of new government regulations (yet), but there will be an exhaustive evaluation of current government funding for synthetic biology projects. That exhaustive report should be available to the public in a few more months... [url]
• The National Science Foundation (NSF) is trying to make it a bit easier to be a scientist by allowing for some flexibility for budding scientists -- such as cutting back on the demands to travel to NSF headquarters for renewals/applications. The new rules will also allow grant recipients to defer their projects for up to a year to raise children. [url]
• The US government's policy for isolating scientific research from politics was released last year. The guidelines set "minimum standards" for federal agencies to meet, and didn't really spell out many specifics. [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: grants, guidelines, policy, regulations, science, synthetic biology
Companies: nsf

Will We Allow Patents To Lock Up Synthetic Biology?

from the one-hopes-not dept

James Boyle has an excellent article worrying about the potential impact of patents on synthetic biology, following the recent news of Craig Venter's supposed creation of "synthetic life." Of course, as with nearly everything involving Venter, there's an awful lot of hype about this. Venter is a master self-promoter, and very good at exaggerating what he's done to puff himself up. He's been talking about this idea of "creating life" for years, but as Boyle notes, what he's done here isn't so much creating life, as it is modifying it:

Though many of the headlines talked of Venter being God and having created life in the lab, that is not an accurate way to describe it. Venter started with a particular naturally occurring cell and effectively, de-compiled, analysed and then painstaking edited and reassembled that cell's genome to create a version of the cell never found in nature. Researchers had already synthesized the genome of the polio virus, creating a genome that would actually "produce" a live virus that infected mice in the lab, but the size of that initiative was several orders of magnitude smaller. The significance of what Venter's team did lay in the scale of the enterprise and the mastery of the code that it demonstrated. It is as if I took your computer, copied the operating system, figured out what each part of that system did, pruned, cut and edited its functions, and then reloaded a substantially edited system back into the computer -- a version which actually proved capable of running it.

That doesn't mean it's not an important step, but it's not quite as big a deal as it's been made out to be. That said, however, Boyle is worried that Patent Offices around the world are going to start patenting the very basic building blocks of synthetic biology, and more or less monopolize the important research that can be done in this field to advance it from the theoretical to the useful:

In an article written for the journal PloS Biology in 2007, my colleague Arti Rai and I explored the likely legal future of synthetic biology. We found reason to worry that precisely because synthetic biology looks both like software writing and genetic engineering, it might end up combining the expansive patent law aspects of both those technologies, with the troubling prospect of strong monopolies being created over the basic building blocks of science itself. Some of the patents being filed are astoundingly basic, the equivalent of patenting Boolean algebra right at the birth of computer science. With courts now reconsidering both business method and perhaps software patents, and patents over human genes, the future is an uncertain one.

In the world of software, the proprietary model faces competition from open source alternatives, free both in price and in that their code is openly available and can be scrutinized and rewritten. Internet Explorer competes with the open source browser, Firefox. Microsoft dominates the desktop operating system market but there is a Linux alternative. Microsoft web server software competes with (and trails) the open source offerings from Apache and others. The same is true in the world of synthetic biology. The Biobricks Foundation is a nonprofit founded by scientists who are keenly aware of the parallels to the software world. They want to create an open source collection of standard biological parts, to make sure in other words, that the basic building blocks, the standard tools of this new world of biological science, remain "open" in a scientific commons. But their efforts, too, are rendered uncertain by the threat of overbroad patents on foundational technologies.

This is a very real threat. Venter has long been a strong advocate for patenting genes, so it wouldn't be surprising to see him try to limit this market quite a bit himself. History has shown time and time again that real innovation happens when there's real competition in the market, as players work hard to one-up each other. Giving the basic building blocks of synthetic biology to one company can lead to a vast decrease in research and development into this emerging field -- exactly the opposite of what the patent system intended.

Filed Under: patents, synthetic biology

Serious Worries About Locking Up Synthetic Biology Through Patents

from the be-afraid dept

One of the most interesting parts of Eric Schiff's (now hard to find) book Industrialization without National Patents is his discussion of the growth of the synthetic chemical industry in Switzerland -- specifically with regard to dyes. Specifically, Schiff notes "we can say with fairly good assurance that its start and initial expansion was, on balance, helped rather than hampered by the absence of a Swiss patent system." Specifically, many different startup dye companies showed up in Switzerland, and the country soon came to be a major player in the market for synthetic dyes. It was the lack of patent protection that helped build up this market -- and, yes, while it meant that many started by simply copying the inventions of others (some from abroad), the high level of competition drove innovation rapidly. Specifically, Schiff quotes reports from the era that talk about how those Swiss firms "invented and developed many important new processes."

Eventually, however, there was anger from the neighboring Germans -- specifically from a few giant firms, who hated competing against the nimbler Swiss competitors who were innovating at a pace the Germans couldn't keep up with. By this time, also some of the more successful Swiss firms realized that with patents, they too could start to block out any new upstarts, and slow down the pace of innovation, keeping monopoly rents for themselves. That resulted in a change to Swiss patent laws in the early 20th century, such that they started protecting chemical dye-making processes. It's worth noting that this actually helped diminish competition in Switzerland, concentrating power among a few giant firms -- including CIBA, who still exists today as a multi-national conglomerate.

However, the real innovation came prior to those patents, and following those patents, only a very few, very large, companies controlled nearly the entire market. I'm reminded of this story, thanks to one of our readers, who goes by the name "Another Mike," after he pointed me to a video debate by the Long Now Foundation concerning the challenges facing the coming synthetic biology market. The entire video is quite long, but in part nine, historian Jim Thomas talks about the early days of the synthetic chemistry industry, leaving out the part about the success in Switzerland, but focusing on the damaging results of the eventual monopoly and oligopoly in the hands of a few German firms.

He's now quite worried that the same sort of thing is likely to play out in the synthetic biology market -- where patents are being used to guarantee that only a few companies are able to do any actual innovating in this market, with fears about both how that could impact the market, and how it could lead to a dangerous amount of power in the hands of a single company.

And the concerns can go much further. In James Boyle's The Public Domain, he spends the second half of chapter 7 quite worried about efforts to lock up the basic building blocks of synthetic biology. As he notes, synthetic biology is quite similar in many ways to software -- and locking it up with patents would have the same disastrous implications as software patents currently do. Luckily, the early days of software did not involve patents, but the same cannot be said for synthetic biology. Boyle notes:

It would be as if, right at the beginning of the computer age, we had issued patents over formal logic in software -- not over a particular computer design, but over the idea of a computer or a binary circuit itself.

There are efforts underway, described both in the video linked to above, and in Boyle's book, to create more open information in the synthetic biology world -- but there are also numerous investors and companies rapidly trying to patent up every aspect they can. It's easy to pay attention to things most of us use every day -- like software patents. But we should be quite worried about what's happening in other important fields like synthetic biology as well. When the basic building blocks are being locked up by patents, there is much to be worried about.

Filed Under: patents, synthetic biology, synthetic chemistry