Traditionally biotech startups are difficult ventures to handle. They typically require lots of money and other resources to start, months, if not years, to develop a proof-of-principle and have complex IP issues, not to mention profits are elusive. Products are usually subject to vehement opposition from anti-GMO groups (unless they save their lives in a more visible manner or aren’t visible at all). In addition, platforms frequently get outdated before the technology becomes profitable. In short, biotech startups often make reputable products, but not successful companies. People coding an app to hire taxis are billionaires, but people tackling the cure for cancer aren’t. This scenario calls for change and a need for the same is slowly being appreciated by VC’s. In an interview with SynBioBeta, Ryan Bethencourt talked about IndieBio, backed by SOS Ventures.The synthetic biology startup accelerator has announced the 11 IndieBio teams that would be building the future of biotechnology in San Francisco. Founders of these teams include a diverse selection of people, everyone from undergraduate students to those involved with startups for more than a decade are represented

Here’s a quick look at what the IndieBio teams are up to.

Platform hardware

We have already seen PCR be developed as an open source product. With Sensa, it’s the turn of another popular instrument, the bioreactor. They built their first bioreactor at an organic farm and it digested farm waste into fertilizer. The team then got involved with Biocurious and Counter Culture Labs to build a prototype and lately have been at work at a robotics lab in Brooklyn. Their dream would be open source bioreactors to be present in every home, lab, and school.The idea of connecting robots to the cloud so that anyone can execute an experiment remotely is not new. SynBioBeta has previously covered Emerald Cloud Labs and Antha. Arcturus BioCloud makes it look even cooler. The startup aims to allow researchers and DIY biologists to focus on solving problems rather than worry about the instruments or protocols. I’m eagerly waiting for their platform to go live.

Another startup, aBioBot, could make the job easier for Arcturus. It is intends to use machine learning to help build better robots. This would up the scale of automation tools used in biotech. Better robots, better businesses.

Enabling healthcare

Stem cells hold the likely promise to the cures for many diseases. The one bottleneck is that producing them is not a very efficient process. Extem enables a thousandfold increase in multipotent stem cell production over the industry standard. This would enable a stable supply chain for regenerative medicine and stem cell research.Another startup, Affinity, is doing the same for antibodies. The increase is only 10-fold in this case, but it is nonetheless significant given that antibodies are far more established than stem cells as therapies.Blue Turtle is combining together a less established paradigm in healthcare with a well-established one -- microbiome and enzymes. Imagine bioengineered probiotics that create enzyme factories within your gut microbiome to treat diseases that result from deficiencies of proteins at a significantly reduced price - 100 times less than today’s cost.Diagnostics are a vital cog in healthcare, for instance many cancers can be cured completely if detected early. Unfortunately, diagnostics equate to specialized labs stocked with hefty equipment. Not for much longer, thanks to Orphidia. It is building a $10 lab-on-a-chip to detect up to 50 diseases with a single drop of blood.Human genome sequencing is slated to become a routine clinical procedure within a decade. Ranomics lets you know what your personalized sequence means to your health. It is a rare genomic variants database to get functional implications. That is, it would help interpret which diseases you are more susceptible to from your sequence.

Product synbio

In food, Clara Foods is aiming to do to egg whites what Muufri is doing to milk, to produce it more sustainably outside of the farm. The energy input to food output ratio in poultry is a staggering 39:1. Add to it the inhumane approaches used across the industry and it becomes obvious why the need to produce egg whites ex-vivo needs to be urgently addressed.Another animal cause that more people talk about is saving critically endangered species from extinction. How do you solve the poaching of rhinos for their horns? Flood the market with bioengineered horns, says Pembient. The startup is creating horns, that are almost similar to the original, using a biochemical approach.The last startup is targeting the fashion industry. Bioloop is working on bioengineered textiles that put harvesting cotton out of the equation. The fabrics produced would be fully customizable and also be able to serve as industrial fabrics.IndieBio ’s next batch will be hosted in Cork, Ireland. Applications are due March 7th, 2015. Good luck!