Steve Jobs had, far sighted as he was, long before the advent of AI or ML in the field of biotechnology predicted how biology would one day get ahead of its technological counterparts and actually become available to an ordinary consumer like any other electronic commodity out in the market.
I mean, get this- we could, in the near future be able to store data in the very fabric of our being, our DNA!
The Irish biotech accelerator, Rebelbio, thinks it is likely that we would soon be able to order DNAs online, and a lot of such progresses are already underway.
“It’s already happening,” says Steve O’Connell, Associate Director of RebelBio, “You can kit out home DIY biolab for roughly $1000.”
Why now? Exactly now, you ask?
O’Connell said the timing is right thanks to “the onset of CRISPR: it didn’t exist 5 years ago, but with the new technologies and the drop in sequencing costs, the democratization of science is already happening.”
He also remarked, “Illumina is scary in a good way — soon, you’ll be able to sequence a genome for $100 — it’s moving very rapidly. That’s why it’s happening now and not five years ago
.”The outfit also wants to shepherd a handful of early-stage biotech companies to seed stage, which is sometimes enough for them to bring their first products to market through a four-month program that it has already devised.
The biotech accelerator, in 2016 joined in on a mission to develop a platform to synthesize DNA and sell it on Amazon through another Irish biotech start-up, Helixworks Technologies. “Now we’re working on drone delivery,” said the associate director.
Helixworks’ CEO, Nimesh Chandra, revealed this new service on stage on the 28th in Rebelbio’s demo day in Cork.
What this means for you and me is that by using the new product – called DNADrive – we can store 512KB of digital data on DNA ensuring that it will survive for an eternity!
While this might seem like a very small amount of data, this marks the start of a future DNA storage market where the possibilities of data storage quantities will only increase in size and reduce in cost.
Another consumer biotech, Cell-Free Technologies that Rebelbio has under its wing is working on engineering cells to consist of an active ingredient which it then keeps after breaking down the cellular factory. These compounds can then be sold to consumers “the next day,” said O’Connell. “They already have interest from Microsoft for a sizeable order.”
Such advances and all the great incoming support in our field is truly heart-warming is it not?
