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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Biotech is no longer behind the scenes—it’s on our shelves, in our homes, and part of our daily routines. From sustainable haircare to household cleaning, and high-performance materials, bio-based innovations are redefining everyday consumer experiences. This session explores what drives adoption, how brands communicate the value of biology, and why trust, transparency, and performance are key to building loyalty. Join us to hear from the companies making biology irresistible, accessible, and seamlessly integrated into daily life—and learn what it takes to create bio-products consumers truly love.

The next frontier of biology isn’t in predicting a single static protein structure, but in capturing how proteins move, fold, and interact across time and environments. This session explores how AI can illuminate protein conformations and dynamics, and extend those insights into virtual multi-cellular or tissue models. Experts will discuss the challenge of integrating heterogeneous datasets and instruments, and how breakthroughs in dynamic modeling could reshape drug design, disease understanding, and biomanufacturing. Can we build models that reflect the living, breathing complexity of biology—not just snapshots, but motion?

Scaling bio-based products requires integrated technical collaboration across strain engineering, fermentation, downstream processing, and analytics. Full-stack approaches—where startups, CDMOs, and platform technology providers align early on—can optimize yield, reduce variability, and lower cost of goods (COGS) at commercial scale. This session explores case studies of cross-company collaboration, from co-development of microbial strains and bioreactor designs to shared process analytics and predictive modeling. Hear how teams are breaking down technical silos to accelerate scale-up, improve reproducibility, and create competitive, sustainable manufacturing solutions that bring synthetic biology products from the lab to the market efficiently.

Mining has long relied on brute force and chemistry, but biology is opening a new frontier. Biomining uses engineered microbes to extract metals and minerals with precision, efficiency, and far less environmental impact than traditional methods. From rare earth elements essential to clean energy to critical metals powering electronics, synthetic biology is reshaping how we source the building blocks of modern life. This session spotlights innovators designing bio-based recovery systems, scaling sustainable solutions, and reimagining resource extraction.

Why do so many in silico models fail when moved to the lab or clinic? Too often, they’re trained on incomplete, non-human, or non-representative datasets. This session tackles the “data gap” head-on: from interoperability bottlenecks and the black box problem to the limits of current virtual cell simulations (~50 million perturbations vs. the billions biology demands). Panelists will explore how to create “human-first” datasets that reflect real biology, unlock mechanistic interoperability, and close the discovery–development divide. The goal: build AI tools that can directly identify viable drug candidates instead of stalling in silico.

Standard bioreactors often lack the instrumentation required to rapidly monitor cell physiology, leaving critical gaps in our understanding of scale-up dynamics. This session presents active projects from the Schmidt Sciences’ Sensors for Biomanufacturing Program designed to address this challenge through novel sensing modalities. Spanning from near real-time intracellular measurements to non-invasive off-gas fingerprinting, the panel brings together technology developers and industrial bioprocess experts to discuss the translation of these tools from the lab to the plant floor. Together, we will critically evaluate the utility of high-dimensional metabolic data and explore the engineering requirements for integrating physics-based sensors and machine learning into existing biomanufacturing workflows.

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.

What if brain damage—from strokes, neurodegeneration, or even aging itself—could be reversed? ARPA-H is launching an ambitious effort to make this vision real, catalyzing technologies that repair neural circuits, restore lost tissue, and recover cognition. In this interactive workshop, we’ll ask: What could be the role of programmable biology in healing the brain? Could engineered cells rebuild damaged regions? Could synthetic gene circuits guide regeneration? Could AI-designed therapies restore function after injury or decline? Participants will join ARPA-H leaders to explore these questions, identify high-risk, high-reward opportunities, and help shape the future of neurorepair powered by programmable biology.