An industrial revolution is in the making. Biotechnology has touched almost every aspect of our lives over the past few decades. Food, pharma, power, manufacturing -- you name it and biotech has impacted it. The one community to thank for all this, other than the scientists, is the microbial one. With synthetic biology enabling design of better microbes, biotech is set to become an even more potent force. However, if the industrial revolution of the 21st century will be centered on optimized microbes, then the companies making it all possible will belong to the organism industry.

1. What is the organism industry?

Organism companies specialize in the wet and dry techniques, automation, and engineering required to design efficient metabolic pathways that enable the production of various cultured products. By designing one metabolic pathway or cell type, companies gain insight into similar pathways and partially develop branched pathways that could produce valuable products for future customers and partners. Over time, the targeted investments of organism companies will develop into unparalleled infrastructure and knowledge, which will drive down development costs.

That will enable companies without in-house engineering capabilities, such as those with large amounts of cheap feedstock or those selling personal care products that are looking for more sustainable production, to utilize optimized organisms to grow their businesses. It could also force external companies looking for optimized organisms or cultured product creation to think twice about investing tens of millions of dollars into in-house organism engineering capabilities. At some point, it would be much less expensive to partner with an organism company and use their army of robots and scientists.

As Jason Kelly (@jrkelly), founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, points out -- the organism is the product.

2. What enables the organism industry?

The basic obstacles to biological research are a lack of standard parts, which leads to irreproducibility of results and difficulty in interpretation of data, and the requirement of skilled labor for long hours, which leads to high costs. The companies that are powering the organism industry -- and, in some cases, the organism companies themselves -- are tackling these very hindrances with three major technologies.

Better software: Genome Compiler, TeselaGen, and Autodesk offer platform technologies for in-silico design of gene circuits. The design process is optimized to reduce errors and created with user-friendly interfaces. Their clients can potentially save large amounts in in-house tool development and software costs.

Automation: When combined with moving biotech to the cloud, automation has the potential to disrupt product biotechnologies. As covered earlier, such platforms could help enable the rise of lean biotech startups. Established food, chemical, and pharma companies, as well as opportunistic startups, can now begin designing their killer biotech applications without worrying about the infrastructure required to scale-up the microbes themselves.

Cheap biological parts: The designer genes can be ordered online from gene synthesis companies such as Gen9, Integrated DNA technologies, SGI-DNA, and DNA2.0. Similar to sequencing, gene synthesis costs have dropped considerably over the past decade. One major driving factor has been the development and use of robots with integrated systems that are capable of testing over 100,000 strains in a single day.

3. Who are the organism companies?

Ginkgo Bioworks built the world’s first organism engineering foundry. Its organism engineers are designing microbes for producing cultured ingredients -- flavors, fragrances, colorants, and sweeteners -- for several leading companies. In another project for the DOE, Ginkgo is creating microbes which capture single carbon molecules like carbon dioxide and methane and convert them into fuels or chemicals.

Intrexon is the only organism company that is currently publicly traded -- and it has used proceeds from its IPO to further develop its platform. The company has partnerships and collaborations with many smaller companies, such as Oragenics and AquaBounty Technologies, as well as larger ones, such as Sun Pharmaceutical and Johnson & Johnson. Intrexon has a broad focus that covers food, energy, and health applications.

Synthetic Genomics, founded by J. Craig Venter, is developing organisms ranging from bacteria to algae to pigs for various applications. One of the most widely discussed collaborations is that with Exxon Mobil. The pair are engineering algae that can produce petroleum replacements at commercial scale.

Other notable players are Synthace and Zymergen. Both deploy computational data modelling and multivariate analysis to design enhanced microbes for industrial fermentation.

4. What is the business model?

Essentially, the goal is to invest heavily in really smart individuals and biofoundries for developing optimized organisms. Customers will pay for development costs to get an organism to commercial production targets and then pay royalties on revenue or profits realized from selling the cultured products into the marketplace. Usually, the role of organism companies is limited to development, while scale-up is the responsibility of the client. These companies build their product -- the organism -- and demonstrate its ability to achieve target metrics at pilot or commercial scale.

That can lead to the emergence of a very different kind of biotech startup. Consider that Solazyme and Amyris have invested around $1 billion each over the last decade to set up in-house production facilities. Not all companies have that financial reach. Organism companies could help startups stay lean by enabling them to execute their technology strategy without investing heavily in in-house capabilities.

At the moment, customers comprise mainly of established companies lacking infrastructure or biotech experience and those looking for product or production improvements without breaking the bank. However, smaller companies are important customers, and can exchange equity for development to align the incentives of an organism company partner.

5. What could this lead to?

An industrial revolution puts a single industry at the center of many others. The last time the global economy witnessed such a shift was during the advent of the computer. Today, however, we're beginning to realize that microbes offer the best way to produce many different molecules and products. So, should we expect another industrial revolution? I’d say "yes" -- and sooner than you may think. Why?

Take, for instance, genome sequencing. The first human genome sequenced in 2003 took nearly 13 years and $3 billion. Just over a decade later, it is estimated that 228,000 human genomes would be sequenced this year at one-fifth the price of that one single genome, or just $1,000 per genome. When designer microbes become this efficient, we could possibly see biotech moving into areas other than the conventional.

Biotechnology had acknowledged the informational nature of biological systems, but it is synthetic biology that has elevated biology as an information technology, enabling exponential growth. In the next several decades I believe biotechnology will be the one industry all others will depend on, thus creating a true bioeconomy. If reports are to be believed, such an economy isn’t as distant as we would have thought of even a decade ago. According to estimates, the American bioeconomy reached 2.5% of GDP in 2012. At 15% annually it's growing much faster than many other sectors of the economy.

Even investors have woken up to the fact that a cure for cancer or food for the malnourished deserves to be valued more than some silly app. So, what bio-app will you design?