Happy New Year everyone! It’s an honor to write a quick recap of 2014 and share with you all some of my predictions / thoughts of what 2015 will yield for the Synthetic Biology industry and scientific community.I’d be remiss in acknowledging the incredible work that the SynBioBeta team have continued in 2014. Without them we’d not have this community that’s grown in just three short years to something amazing – here’s to an even bigger 2015 for SynBioBeta!Let’s recap quickly what 2014 was like for the entrepreneurial community, the VC and public market environments, as well as straight up science!

First up: SynBioBeta!

I myself continue to be amazed at what John and his team are dreaming up and 2014 was no exception. To remind everyone SynBioBeta started in a smallish conference room at Orrick in Menlo Park in November 2012. You could already see the momentum building from that day forward though. The next years saw SynBioBeta move to the Mission District and host at UCSF’s new conference center there; a fitting location as many of the world’s leading biotech companies and institutions are a stone’s throw away (many others are in Boston – cough cough – yeah that’s where I reside). Furthermore SynBioBeta went international really quickly: London, Malaysia and Singapore! Let me focus on that statement briefly: these events made it clear that Synthetic Biology is a GLOBAL area of interest! The UK makes for a natural choice, since the British Government had previously identified Synthetic Biology as one of the eight great technologies to focus on, and the continued support for foundries and other shared capacities is laudable! Of course London itself is a great location for the “European Branch” of SynBioBeta since it’s co-hosting Institution is Imperial College, itself the southern anchor of the “Golden Triangle” of research and a powerhouse in Synthetic Biology itself. London is easily accessible from the continent and overseas and the attendance for SynBioBeta London showed that. However that’s not the only thing as none other than Steve Blank of Lean LaunchPad fame gave a workshop to transfer his highly successful business model canvas to Synthetic Biology; look for the first instantiation of Lean LaunchPad for Synthetic Biology @ImperialCollege in the spring of 2015!2014 saw two SynBioBeta Activate! events in Asia, the first held at Biopolis in Singapore and the second in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as part of the Green Power Conference on Biomass. Both countries see synthetic biology as a future area of growth. Singapore already has a growing academic community behind synthetic biology and Malaysia is pushing hard to find more sustainable uses of its biomass waste, which currently is being burned. 2014 saw announcements by Evolva and Verdezyne about partnerships with local companies in this area.Last and certainly not least for SynBioBeta is the November flagship San Francisco event! This year marked the largest ever attendance and luminaries of the industry such as Craig Venter giving the keynote address. On top of that we see new funds emerge like Rob Carlson’s BioEconomy Capital, as well as funds like Data Collective getting into Synthetic Biology and bringing a fresh approach.

Synthetic Biology is growing up, and SynBioBeta with it!

Now as for the structural overview of 2014 on the climate side we’ve seen an unprecedented acceleration of the funding of biotech startups, and with it it’s share of Synthetic Biology startups. Most notable in the new climate of big A round funding is the focus on the clinic! One example is SynLogic with it’s massive Atlas Venture and NEA A-round, as well as complementary investment and support from the Gates Foundation. Coupling big bets with risk-tolerant public markets has enabled VC’s to clear their pipes/portfolios and generate liquidity for their Limited Partners – a huge validating and beneficial trend for the biotech industry as a whole!This success in creating liquidity is at least one of the reasons that there are more and more accelerators for biotech and especially synthetic biology cropping up. Borrowing a page from the IT domain, the model of providing fully equipped (yes as biotech startups there’s more to it than just a desk, wifi and a coffee machine though those things help!) startup space for the 1-5 person stage is gaining traction. Premier startup accelerators in tech like YCombinator have branched out into biotech (1st batch&2nd batch), while new accelerators cum starter funding have cropped up (IndieBio).So much more happened in 2014 but here are some events that stood out to me because they have ramifications for years to come. A few declarative statements first: gene therapy is here to stay, the (US) patent system is thoroughly broken, and the “write” capability of Synthetic Biology is ramping up.Now gene therapy includes both “old school” gene therapy like the lentiviral delivery systems employed by e.g. Bluebird Bio, as well as of course CRISPRs. Bluebird showed the power of it’s therapeutic approach impressively with a small-scale Phase II trial for b-thalassemia that has 4 people that depended on transfusions to stay alive – since birth – living without this burden. Amazing. “New school” gene editing a lá CRISPR use got all the hype in 2014, including some big recognition by two of the discovers Doudna and Charpentier, as well as the granting of a very broad patent to another discoverer (Zhang). Two companies emerged as the primary and richly funded protagonists in the race to commercialize CRISPRS: Editas and CRISPR Therapeutics (no offense to Caribou and Intellia).Lastly for 2014 on the scientific side I wanted to highlight the complete synthesis of a yeast chromosome led by Jef Boeke of NYU. Aside from the impressive technical achievement, it also serves to showcase the increasing speed with which we can write DNA. It’s an enabling trend that’s going to help increase throughput for experiments. Clearly it’s not cutting the Gordian Knot of biological complexity and all of a sudden will allow us to unlock the secrets to health and life, but rather it serves as an accelerator to drive our rate of understanding up by enabling faster hypothesis testing.Look for the next post on the interesting events to keep an eye out for in 2015 (including of course the imminent J.P. Morgan conference).