Governments invest huge sums of money in research to spur economic growth with technological advances, but a return on this investment is contingent on scientific innovation moving from the university lab to the marketplace.

In the UK, the Research Council and government both financed Rainbow Seed Fund has been supporting commercial spin-offs from publicly funded research for more than a decade.

But two years ago it raised £10 million to inject exclusively into synthetic biology startups.“Synthetic biology is truly technology that is starting to make things happen,” says Oliver Sexton, the investment specialist at Midven who manages this portfolio of the Fund. Sexton himself recently made the transition from healthcare biotech to synthetic biology, and is excited by the potential of rational biological design principles. He believes its greatest impact could be novel applications, but the revolution in the efficiency and affordability to experiment is a key driver for its widespread adoption. “Synthetic biology is the PC to the typewriter. You could edit another paragraph but you can also use the convergence of expertise to create previously impossible designs and applications.”

The Rainbow Seed Fund is unique not only for its exclusivity to this field, but also for its focus on early stage investments. Sexton reports that a third of the groups they speak to have yet to incorporate a company or locked down IP. By biotechnology standards, they deal with small amounts of money - £25,000 to £500,000. But their goal is to help scientists spin an innovative idea into company that can attract further venture capital. Indeed, the fund has leveraged £150 million in private investments with only £7 million of their own assets.But working with fledgling companies often involves guiding scientists out of their comfort zone. I asked Sexton what separates an interesting idea from a promising investment. “One thing: people need to think bigger.” Academia trains scientists to dive into the details of a component part, but it’s far more important to think about the big picture when building a company. Attracting venture capital involves demonstrating a global market and the potential of sustained growth.Sexton also urges entrepreneurial scientists to avoid playing up their technology more than its applications. “We don’t care how you do it, but what you can do with it,” he told me. So much of a scientist’s success in academia depends on the invention of sexy methods to elegantly solve problems. It’s reflexive for a scientist to be proud of this, but technological creativity is relevant in a sale pitch only to the extent that it improves the production of compound A or the efficacy of a gene therapy. Otherwise, it can be intrinsically difficult to value a tool. To this end, the Rainbow Seed Fund tends to work with synthetic biology companies that fit into one of three categories: healthcare, renewable production of chemicals, and computational services.In the future, Sexton hopes expand the size of the fund so they can tackle projects of a more ambitious scale. They want to work with more application driven companies, focusing on specific markets instead of a technology push. As they do so, they will continue enabling scientists and demonstrating the global value of emerging synthetic biotechnologies.

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Oliver Sexton will be speaking at SynBioBeta's London event! Click here for more details!