For over a century, antivenoms have relied on serum extraction from animals — a process that’s costly, inconsistent, and limited to specific snake species. Today, advances in synthetic biology and antibody engineering are pointing toward a different future: a universal antivenom capable of neutralizing toxins across the world’s deadliest snakes. This session dives into the science and story behind this breakthrough — from the man who endured more than 200 bites to generate a unique immune response, to the researchers using those antibodies to design broad-spectrum, recombinant therapies. Together, they’re charting the path from survival experiment to programmable immunity.

Synthetic biology has changed, but the way DNA is made largely hasn’t. From mRNA therapeutics and gene editing to protein engineering and advanced vaccines, today’s most important applications demand DNA that is more accurate, more complex, and easier to use, without bacterial constraints. Yet much of the industry still depends on cloning workflows that introduce delays, contamination risk, and unnecessary limits on what can be built and how quickly teams can move. In this talk, we’ll explore why DNA remains one of the field’s most persistent bottlenecks, and why the future of DNA manufacturing will need to move beyond cloning. We’ll look at how cell-free approaches are removing bacterial constraints, and how the field is opening up through both cell-free DNA as a service and more accessible, kit-based assembly models that bring DNA manufacturing closer to the user. Together, these models have the potential to make advanced DNA easier to access, easier to integrate, and better aligned with the pace of modern biological development

Biology will be the center of the next industrial revolution, representing a $4 trillion economic opportunity. Yet, this value remains overwhelmingly unrealised for one fundamental reason: nature never intended to power industrial manufacturing. Biology was optimized for survival, not for the high-efficiency processes required to transform the global economy. For too long, the industry has relied on incremental improvements, essentially duct-taping enzymes and calling them industrial. At Biomatter, we believe that complete freedom to design any enzyme is the only way to realize the full potential of biomanufacturing. By combining Generative AI with rigorous physics engines, our Intelligent Architecture™ platform allows us to step outside the bounds of natural selection and build enzymes from the bottom up. We are turning the "previously impossible" into routine. From liberating enzymes of their cofactor dependencies for mRNA raw materials to designing lactases that reject the trade-off between lactose removal and high GOS fiber formation, we are proving that biology’s limits are negotiable. Join us to see how we are building the enzymes nature couldn't.

As artificial intelligence dramatically accelerates the design of proteins, manufacturing has become a critical bottleneck for medical breakthroughs reaching patients. The infrastructure for producing biologics has remained largely unchanged for over fifty years, and is capital-intensive, slow to scale, and dependent on fragile supply chains. Neion Bio is replacing nearly every component of this infrastructure, from bioreactors to cell culture media, with nature’s most prolific protein factory: the chicken egg. Enabled by breakthroughs in genome engineering and stem cell technology, Neion creates genetically engineered chickens that lay eggs filled with medicines. As a result, they produce life-saving therapeutics at the cost of egg production, eliminate scale-up risk with simple breeding programs, and solve the problem of resiliency by running on grain and water. A small Neion farm can produce the global supply of essential medicines, and can be set up nearly anywhere in the world. 

Biotechnology is enabling a new generation of ingredients that elevate both product performance and sustainability. In this fireside chat, leaders from Procter & Gamble will discuss how biotech is being applied across key material classes to enhance consumer products, highlighting innovations behind their latest Native launch and emerging bio-derived ingredients for hair and beauty. The conversation will also explore how biotech platforms are helping shape the future of high-performing, sustainable consumer goods.

While Twist Bioscience may look like an overnight success, its rise reflects a decade of persistence, innovation, and platform building. In this main stage keynote, CEO and co-founder Emily Leproust shares the journey from startup vision to global leader in DNA synthesis and programmable biology, highlighting lessons learned scaling deep technology, navigating industry cycles, and building trusted infrastructure for biotech and pharma. Looking ahead, Twist is positioning itself at the forefront of the convergence between AI and biology, using DNA as an information layer to accelerate drug discovery and advance human health. This keynote explores how long-term thinking and bold ambition are shaping the next era of AI-driven therapeutics.

While the industry has seen massive AI breakthroughs lately, predicting actual biologics affinity and immunogenicity remains the industry's greatest challenge. DeepSeq.AI is driving a paradigm shift from "Structure-First" to "Function-First" by training protein language models on billions to trillions of experimental protein interactions in a single experiment. This enables high-fidelity mapping of biologics against a broad spectrum of critical antigens, including viruses, human immune receptors, and the entire human proteome. Such scale is critical for designing broad-spectrum biologics that remain safe and effective against evolving variants. Validated by Genentech and funded by DARPA and the NSF, our platform further scales to human proteome profiling for pharmacokinetics optimization. In this presentation, we will share this novel platform that decodes the "protein-protein interaction grammar" to advance candidates into the clinic with unprecedented accuracy.

Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level, while therapies must ultimately work across tissues, organs, and whole patients. This scale mismatch means that even highly accurate cellular predictions can fail to translate in the clinic. This session explores strategies to bridge that gap. How do we connect single-cell dynamics to organ-level physiology and patient outcomes? How do we preserve biological context while scaling models? And how do we ensure that virtual biology does not stop at simulation, but informs real therapeutic decisions? Speakers will discuss multiscale modeling that links molecular and cellular systems to higher-order biology; spatial and high-dimensional phenotypic data that retain context; and integrated computational–experimental loops that translate cellular signals into clinically meaningful biomarkers. Together, we ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the full complexity of patients?

For 20+ years, the synthetic biology community has generated breakthrough targets, but too many continue to stall at the same choke points: freedom-to-operate, productivity, process robustness, CMC readiness, and the leap from “works in the lab” to “works at scale.” In this lightning talk, Ingenza will share how we’ve repeatedly helped teams cross that valley of death, turning innovative discoveries into manufacturable realities across industrial biotech and therapeutics. We’ll spotlight our inGenius® platform: a proven panel of high-performing microbial and mammalian production hosts paired with AI/ML-driven enzyme discovery and gene design optimisation (codABLE®), scalable upstream and downstream platform process workflows, and a comprehensive suite of high-end analytical tools that accelerate and de-risk the path from early discovery to market readiness. Powered by 20+ years of successful delivery, expect rapid, real, case study driven lessons from the front lines: what fails most often, what fixes it fastest, and how to design with manufacturability from day one without slowing innovation. If you’re engineering biology to improve human health or the planet, this talk is your shortcut to faster timelines and better outcomes that help SynBio move at the speed it promises.

Biomanufacturing is entering a new phase, where customers want more than promising technology - they need proof that a true path to scale actually exists. In this session, Pow.Bio CEO Shannon Hall will share how Pow.Bio’s AI-enabled continuous fermentation platform is helping to solve the toughest challenges around scalability, commercialization, and what it really takes to move from process development to production. A key part of that story is Pow.Bio’s partnership model, including how collaboration with Bühler is helping create a more integrated, practical route to market. The talk will also look at how industrial automation is building more connected operations that support faster decisions and better economics.

Modern agriculture runs on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer—a system that feeds the world, but depends on energy-intensive production and fragile global supply chains. Every few years, a crisis reminds us how vulnerable it is. Biology has long promised an alternative, but making nitrogen-fixing microbes work reliably in the field has remained one of the hardest challenges in synthetic biology. At Switch Bioworks, we’re taking a new approach: engineering microbial systems that dynamically control nitrogen release directly on plant roots. This talk will cover what has held the field back, what’s changing now, and how biology could fundamentally reshape one of the largest industries on Earth. It's time to reinvent fertilizer. Its time to Switch.

Current bioprocess monitoring is limited to basic environmental proxies like pH and dissolved oxygen. Schmidt Sciences is changing this paradigm by adapting advanced physics for biology. This talk introduces three cutting-edge sensing platforms currently in development: fluorescent nanodiamonds, single-cell Raman spectroscopy, and non-invasive optical frequency combs. Join us to learn how these high-dimensional data streams are being integrated with machine learning to predict campaign outcomes and revolutionize how we monitor cell health at scale.

The PURE system, invented 25 years ago, established a fully reconstituted approach to cell-free protein synthesis. What began as a system to better understand translation has evolved into a versatile platform for engineering biology. This talk highlights how PURE-derived platforms such as PUREfrex® enable rapid prototyping, high-throughput screening, and AI/ML-driven optimization, accelerating synthetic biology and next-generation biologics development.

Meat is one of the world’s most complex biomanufacturing systems—and also one of its least optimized. For 12,000 years, we’ve cycled crops through animals to make meat. Drawing from his new book Meat, Bruce Friedrich contends that advances across science and engineering now make it possible to produce meat far more efficiently, which will reduce meat’s contribution to hunger, climate change, deforestation, antibiotic resistance, and pandemic risk. Most importantly for the success of alternative meats, these new technologies will also improve food security and add to GDP for the nations that lean in. It’s been exactly ten years since the first plant-based burgers were introduced and also exactly ten years since the first cultivated meat companies were incorporated. Bruce will reflect on how far we’ve come, how far we have to go, and what it's going to take to get there. Welcome to the next agricultural revolution—courtesy of science.

The primary barrier to a general-purpose biological simulator, (a model that can actually predict the phenotypic level response of the human body to any intervention),  is not a lack of compute, but the absence of causal, human-relevant datasets. In this talk, Matt Osman outlines emerging approaches to address this gap through iPSC-derived tissues that function as both therapeutic platforms and scalable engines for data generation. Polyphron explores why high-fidelity human tissue is uniquely capable of capturing emergence, where molecular interactions translate into functional outcomes, and why generating this data across diverse genotypes is essential to building true ground-truth datasets. By closing the loop between lab-grown tissue and clinical outcomes, this approach points toward a shift from sparse, mechanism-limited data to a more predictive and programmable framework for human health.

For decades, pharmaceutical supply chains were optimized for cost and scale, stretching across continents to source critical active ingredients. But fragility has made resilience a strategic imperative. Synthetic biology offers a new model: onshoring the production of essential APIs by programming cells to manufacture small molecules, peptides, and novel amino acids with precision and scalability. Instead of relying on distant chemical supply networks, biology becomes the factory—flexible, distributed, and programmable. This session explores how engineered microbes and directed evolution platforms are rebuilding pharma supply chains from the molecular level up, enabling secure, responsive, and locally anchored production of the medicines the world depends on.

After a full day of cutting-edge biology, it’s time to laugh about it! Join viral comedian Austin Nasso for a special stand-up set crafted for the SynBioBeta crowd. Known for his sharp impressions and tech-adjacent humor, Austin brings a fast-paced show that pokes fun at startup culture, venture capital, AI hype, and, for the first time, the quirks of the biotech world. Expect an evening of high-energy comedy, insider bio-nerd jokes, and a chance to unwind with fellow founders, scientists, and investors. A perfect late-night break from programmable biology, because even the future of life sciences deserves a good laugh.