SynBioBeta Speaker
Shai Melcer
Israel Innovation Authority
Head of Nat'l. Bioconvergence Prog.
Dr. Shai Melcer was appointed Director of the National Bioconvergence Program, responsible for implementing the program within the TELEM Forum. Dr. Melcer holds LL.B and LL.M degrees, a PhD in Genetics from the Hebrew University, and 15 years of experience in biomedical entrepreneurship.He has collaborated with institutions including the Hebrew University, Hadassah Medical Center, IBM, and Bio-Jerusalem, and co-founded innovative biomedical ventures such as BioGiv, BIOHOUSE, and the Hadassah Accelerator. In both public and private sectors, he has worked with hundreds of bio-medical companies globally in pharma-biotech, medical devices, and digital health, many within bioconvergence. He also served as CBO at Minovia Therapeutics, a bioconvergence startup developing mitochontrial therapies.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Shai
This Year
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Biomanufacturing
Bioconvergence for Biomanufacturing: Closing the Scale Gap in Synthetic Biology
Synthetic biology has entered a new era of capability. AI-driven protein design, advanced cell engineering, and increasingly automated labs are rapidly expanding what is scientifically possible. Yet commercial scale and sustainable economics remain out of reach. The core challenge is no longer whether biology can be engineered, but whether it can be consistently deployed in real-world environments. Moving from lab success to industrial production introduces a new set of constraints, from process robustness and yield to infrastructure, supply chains, and cost. This session focuses on what it actually takes to translate innovation into manufacturing reality. Rather than diagnosing failure points, it highlights the systems, platforms, and partnerships that enable biology to scale. What is working today, where are the key integration bottlenecks, and how do we build a more cohesive path from design to deployment?
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Biomanufacturing
Bioconvergence for Biomanufacturing: Closing the Scale Gap in Synthetic Biology
Synthetic biology has entered a new era of capability. AI-driven protein design, advanced cell engineering, and increasingly automated labs are rapidly expanding what is scientifically possible. Yet commercial scale and sustainable economics remain out of reach. The core challenge is no longer whether biology can be engineered, but whether it can be consistently deployed in real-world environments. Moving from lab success to industrial production introduces a new set of constraints, from process robustness and yield to infrastructure, supply chains, and cost. This session focuses on what it actually takes to translate innovation into manufacturing reality. Rather than diagnosing failure points, it highlights the systems, platforms, and partnerships that enable biology to scale. What is working today, where are the key integration bottlenecks, and how do we build a more cohesive path from design to deployment?
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
