SynBioBeta Speaker
Douglas Crawford
Mission Bay Capital
GM & Mng Partner
Doug’s goal is to help entrepreneurial scientists create successful startups. His dream is that every entrepreneurial scientist with a dream be given a chance. To this end, he founded and manages MBC BioLabs network, which now has five sites in San Francisco and San Carlos that are home to 161 companies. These co-working labs allow startups to be fast, focused, and frugal. Rather than spending months getting a facility up and running, MBC BioLabs startups can do experiments in their first week.
Doug is also a Managing General Partner of Mission BioCapital and has overseen the investment in 45 companies, many of which have already enjoyed successful exits (for instance, Alector, Atreca, Cell Design Labs, iPierian, Mitokinin, Principia, Redwood Biosciences, and SiteOne). He is a board member of Alessa, Corsomed, Epiodyne, Invenio, Myka, and Tangible Sciences.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Douglas
This Year
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Business of Biology
Investor Panel: The New Capital Stack for Programmable Biology
As biology becomes an engineering discipline, the way companies are funded is evolving just as quickly. From AI-native biotech startups to capital-intensive biomanufacturing platforms, investors are rethinking how to underwrite risk, structure deals, and support companies from inception to scale. This panel brings together leading investors across venture, crossover, and strategic capital to explore how funding models are adapting to the realities of programmable biology. What makes a compelling company today? How are timelines, capital efficiency, and technical milestones being reframed? And where are the biggest opportunities emerging across human health, climate, and industrial biotech?
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Business of Biology
Investor Panel: The New Capital Stack for Programmable Biology
As biology becomes an engineering discipline, the way companies are funded is evolving just as quickly. From AI-native biotech startups to capital-intensive biomanufacturing platforms, investors are rethinking how to underwrite risk, structure deals, and support companies from inception to scale. This panel brings together leading investors across venture, crossover, and strategic capital to explore how funding models are adapting to the realities of programmable biology. What makes a compelling company today? How are timelines, capital efficiency, and technical milestones being reframed? And where are the biggest opportunities emerging across human health, climate, and industrial biotech?
Session lineup still growing
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
