SynBioBeta Speaker
Nick Ohler
Oobli
COO
Dr. Ohler received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley and is a Professional Engineer in the State of California. He has spent the last 20 years working in chemical and biochemical process development and scaleup, focusing primarily on development of new fermentation-based products. He has led development and scaleup efforts for Amyris, Bio Architecture Lab, Evolva, Lygos, and currently Oobli, developing production technology for a broad range of commodity and high-value bioproducts. He has participated and led design and startup efforts for several pilot plants and commercial-scale operations, and has worked with a wide range of contract manufacturing sites while commercializing new bioproducts. Some of those bioproducts crossed the valley of death and are on market; and some were not destined to cross that valley. Dr. Ohler endeavors to use his experience to shepherd winning products across the valley and into commercialization with speed.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Nick
This Year
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Biomanufacturing
Mind the Gap: Survival Guides for the Valleys of Death in Biomanufacturing
Industrial biotech faces repeated “valleys of death” between laboratory success and commercial manufacturing, driven by a combination of technological uncertainty, scale-dependent constraints, and (mis)alignment between engineering reality and investment expectations. Promising technologies often fail not because the science is wrong, but because scale-up trajectories are built on insufficient data, optimistic assumptions, and decision-making based on the 1st product specifications from the lab that do not translate to industrial conditions. This panel returns to fundamentals, drawing on real-world experience from piloting, process engineering, and early industrialization to examine where and why scale-up breaks down. Experts will discuss how important the scale-up journey is to align technology performance with investor expectations, support sound business cases, and turn the industrial biotech toolbox into a more robust, scalable, and profitable manufacturing platform.
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Biomanufacturing
Mind the Gap: Survival Guides for the Valleys of Death in Biomanufacturing
Industrial biotech faces repeated “valleys of death” between laboratory success and commercial manufacturing, driven by a combination of technological uncertainty, scale-dependent constraints, and (mis)alignment between engineering reality and investment expectations. Promising technologies often fail not because the science is wrong, but because scale-up trajectories are built on insufficient data, optimistic assumptions, and decision-making based on the 1st product specifications from the lab that do not translate to industrial conditions. This panel returns to fundamentals, drawing on real-world experience from piloting, process engineering, and early industrialization to examine where and why scale-up breaks down. Experts will discuss how important the scale-up journey is to align technology performance with investor expectations, support sound business cases, and turn the industrial biotech toolbox into a more robust, scalable, and profitable manufacturing platform.
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Session lineup still growing
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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?
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