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Hot is the capital market's most immediate sense of the synthetic biology circuit. With the listing of foreign synthetic biology companies, the domestic and foreign primary market also began to accelerate the money. In the first two months of this year alone, synthetic biology startups raised $15bn globally. Some predict that 2022 will be the best year ever for investment in synthetic biology -- by the end of this year, total funding for the whole year will be as high as the previous three years combined.
On May 31, in the "Future Health" program, Liu Weiqi, executive director of the Greater China Medical Group of Sullivan, said that several key elements of synthetic biology technology, talent, funding and policy orientation have been in place. Frontier capital markets have also sensed this direction, and there will certainly be more hot investment in the future.
In his view, the explosion of synthetic biology tracks is a direct reflection of the growing global demand for environmentally friendly, clean and renewable production methods. It has a great prospect to replace chemical synthesis with biosynthesis.
On the policy side, there are clear directions. Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" for the Development of Biological Economy, which clearly mentioned that synthetic biology is one of the key development directions in the future. According to his observation, there is now a lot of money in basic research, commercial transformation.
In terms of talent and technology, the three fundamental technologies of synthetic biology, gene sequencing, gene editing and gene synthesis, have all matured. Costs have also fallen rapidly over the past decade. At the same time, China's early synthetic biology talents have accumulated in the industry for nearly 10 years, building a foundation of technical talents.
In a way, synthetic biology brings together "the right time, the right place and the right people". But Liu Weiqi pointed out that the overseas synthetic biology industry is still in its infancy in China. Now overseas star synthetic biology companies in artificial meat, flexible membranes, biofuels and other directions have landed products, to achieve industrial production. Most of the domestic startup companies have not entered the stage of product implementation, and mainly develop applications on a small scale.
At this stage, startups focus on how to take the lab product to the scale commercialization stage, a process that can take five to 10 years. In order to achieve industrialization, the short-term input cost is very high. He further points out that for startups, the talent and funding is basically enough to focus on just one product, which is the core competency of their survival. After this stage, enterprises can think about how to lay out the product pipeline and expand the business team.
Capacity is the key issue in the next phase. Once synthetic biology companies try to replace existing products on the market, they face a supply problem. Because demand for many materials is measured in tons, synthetic biology companies may now be able to produce only a few tons a year. Even at 10 per cent, the shortfall is still huge.
In fact, similar problems have occurred in overseas synthetic biology companies that have entered into industrialization. After the initial realization of industrialization, the company's capacity expansion stage is far from the original promised scale, which even caused some fluctuations in the capital market.
After the first product is industrialized, for synthetic biology enterprises, capacity scale and profitability are directly linked, which is also the basis for developing their next product echelon.
This is for start-ups. Now there is also a noteworthy phenomenon, traditional chemical companies are starting to layout the field of synthetic biology. Their strategies are different, and chemical companies of different sizes have different considerations. On the one hand, most chemical enterprises are under the policy pressure of energy conservation, emission reduction and environmental protection; on the other hand, they should reduce production cost and optimize production process through biological technology. Both are pushing them towards synthetic biology.
For big giants like BASF and DSM, their systems are more mature. There is a huge R&D system within the company, with hundreds of projects every year. In such cases, a small number of experiments are likely to be done through projects that advance different technologies, including synthetic biology. The giants can afford a certain amount of trial and error costs, after the results, to try to scale up production.
It is telling that giants such as BASF and conventional chemical firms are now investing in synthetic biology. In his view, the logic of synthetic biology is similar to that of electric cars, and chemical companies are likely to be eliminated in the future if they stick to traditional production methods
Liu Weiqi pointed out that the big trend of manufacturing in the future is definitely toward the direction of clean energy. And from the enterprise itself, synthetic biology compared with chemical manufacturing, although there is still a gap in capacity. But its advantages are more cost-effective, more flexible and sophisticated production methods.
Now the domestic synthetic biology is still in the initial stage, just completed the preliminary accumulation of talent and technology. In the face of broad market demand, with the support of policies and funds in the future, it will be a "gold mining land" for the continuous influx of entrepreneurs.
