108. Sequence and Desist: Aclid's Kevin Flyangolts On Safeguarding the Bioeconomy

[00:00:00] Kevin: there's a lot of damage that you can do with very little and the fact that we don't have mandatory screening that we don't have at least some fence around this, making sure that we're doing the bare minimum, the same way we wouldn't just ship dynamite to anybody that keeps me up at night.

[00:00:16] Karl: Hey, Ram.

[00:00:21] Erum: Hey, what's going on, Carl?

[00:00:22] Karl: What's up with these drones all over the country?

[00:00:25] Erum: Are they drones or are they unidentified aerial phenomena?

[00:00:30] Karl: I

[00:00:30] Karl: I guess we'll never know. The government isn't telling us what they are.

[00:00:35] Erum: Why? Why is it such a mystery? Why can't we just go up there and look and just say what it is? I don't know why there's all this mystery. I've been waiting for this moment. By the way, if there are aliens, hello. Finally, we meet, you know, feel like that, history channel meme with that guy that goes, it's aliens with his hair all messed up.

[00:00:56] Karl: Right.

[00:00:57] Erum: That's me now. I'm like, Oh my God, it's aliens. And I also feel like Tom Hanks and Da Vinci Code. I'm like, all right, what's this clue? What's this clue? And we had the, you know, Google with Willow, the quantum chip just released.

[00:01:09] Erum: And like, there's, all this advancement happening. And, breakthroughs in AI and just like, okay. And then obviously everything happening with politics and governments, like martial law. There's just so much. craziness happening. I'm like, okay, this, we're at that moment. This is it. This is it.

[00:01:24] Erum: Everyone goes get ready.

[00:01:26] Karl: let's just put it out there for our listeners, you're listening to the grow everything podcast, where you talk about the impact of biology as technology on everything. And I think we should just put it out there. If the aliens are out there listening, we want you to come on our podcast to talk about your biology and what is biotech like on your planet.

[00:01:45] Karl: it's the end of the year. So we've been going to holiday parties. There's been a lot happening in New York city. We're going to have our own holiday party,but.

[00:01:52] Karl: Your um, what's your review on the holiday party so far? Yeah,

[00:01:56] Erum: Yes. Well, yeah, it's , every night there's something incredible in our community. We have such a great community of leaders and scientists and students in biotech here in New York city. there are different, um, pockets and different focus for these groups. , as I mentioned, depending on what stage of life you're in from the earliest students, , for people that are curious that are coming into the communities like Genspace and space had their holiday party recently and then all the way, you to The more corporate level, , events to our friends, at echo, which is a bio pharma networking event partnered with bio labs, and they had a wonderful event,

[00:02:35] Erum: we got to See some of the different companies and there was one company I have to shout out quorum bio, our friend suda russian is a ceo and He has a new team member who's incredible dylan Very very intelligent and they took us to the lab and saw some of their plates and their experiments and they're working on Creating healthier soils, better plants through, soil microbiomes.

[00:02:59] Erum: but yeah non stop non stop and it's just great to be like, hey we had a wonderful year. What are you doing? What are you looking forward to? And that's really what I enjoy About holiday events is that it's a great wrap up and it's a great Way to just take some of the holiday spirit, take some of the professional work that we're doing, look at our aspirations for next year and just, celebrate, our industry.

[00:03:22] Karl: and I think that's a good preview for an upcoming episode that we're going to do Where we're going to do outlook predictions for 2025 Usually at this time of the year all the big biotech publications do their predictions they also do their reflections one thing I didn't put on our kind of news items was What are the Biopharma publications published their tomatoes list, so it was like all the bad news that, was in biopharma. A lot of it was failed clinical trials. there was a story about an Excel spreadsheet that was showing the proof points for this one trial, but there was a bunch of hidden tabs that people didn't realize that were there.

[00:03:59] Karl: That showed that people were losing bone mass while taking this medication, which is never a good thing. And so i'm not pointing fingers, but that stuff is all public and it's out there , so our next episode we will do some maybe we'll do a summary of the predictions We're seeing we'll do some of our own predictions And we're gonna put 2024 to bed.

[00:04:17] Karl: It's been a good year.

[00:04:18] Karl: When we start off the year, we said we were going to cover biomanufacturing because biomanufacturing is incredibly important.

[00:04:23] Karl: And, the department of defense just put out a press release and they said the next industrial revolution will be a biomanufacturing revolution. So thank you, department of defense for, agreeing with us. They just gave out 60 million, uh, under program called the distributed bio industrial manufacturing program, and it included.

[00:04:42] Karl: two companies that have been on our podcast cauldron from Australia. So DOD has given money to Australian firms and checkers spot who we've had on the podcast two times.

[00:04:52] Erum: Yeah. I mean, it's about time. , that's my thought on this. Um, 60 million is good. but it's just a start. I would say, there's many other companies that are also doing it right.

[00:05:02] Erum: We love the fact that cauldron got this because, they really honed in on their technology. Of continuous batch fermentation. , one of the challenges is with traditional fermentation or precision fermentation is that you just you work in batches. So there's downtime. But if you can continuously ferment and create product, that's when you get in line with what's going on industry.

[00:05:25] Erum: You can get to cost parity because you're just continuously making product rather than having the downtime. checker spot. I know they make algal oil. they must have some unique manufacturing practices when it comes to bioindustrials. I would love to learn more.

[00:05:39] Erum: We'll have to get some people on from Checkerspot. We know that our , friends from Checkerspot have moved on, so we've had Charles Dimmler on here, Nina, they moved on. We're excited for them for the next journey. but we'll love to meet some new people at Checkerspot since they're continuing to move forward.

[00:05:53] Karl: Yeah, I I'll just add this to, this idea by manufacturing what we're seeing is, really need to build ecosystems to make this happen and to bring costs down faster on one end of it, you've got it. The Department of Defense saying this is actually very important to do because they know that we want to onshore more manufacturing, we want to secure supply chains.

[00:06:15] Karl: We don't want to have to ship things from around the world across oceans, even though Australia is on the other side of the world. But, , Cauldron does have aspirations to build their facilities here in the U. S. since this is continues to be the largest economy in the world. And so this idea of building ecosystems is something we've been talking to our clients about.

[00:06:33] Karl: And we are seeing that this is playing out. And the Department of Defense is one of the people who is putting the money into the ecosystems. So now what we need is some really big companies, big consumer product companies to come in, big oil companies to come in. And to help the innovators look at their products, figure out where they fit in a supply chain.

[00:06:53] Karl: Is it a drop in solution? Who's going to fund it? We've been talking to the people who can fund these things, infrastructure projects. So these ecosystems are being built. We are helping to build these ecosystems. I think it's incredibly important.

[00:07:05] Erum: I would also say, the Department of Defense is on this, DARPA, they've been innovating since the beginning, there would be no internet if it wasn't for DARPA's influence and funding as well, and, They have the biological technologies office. We talked about it a bit on the podcast because they were doing a tour.

[00:07:22] Erum: almost like a listening discovery tour looking for what biotechnologies on the by industrial side. What's happening on that side? And they look at everything from. biosecurity, we're talking about today, , biosensing. So what type of sensors there are, microbiomes of the environment, which is super interesting that, I think I've, shared my enthusiasm for microbiomes a lot throughout this podcast.

[00:07:46] Erum: the department of defense wants to look at the boldest ideas, right? Like they're not going to look at an incremental improvement. They're going to look at something. Completely new that, of course, has national security in mind, but that could literally take us to the moon.

[00:08:01] Erum: Um, you know, I've heard of conversations where they're looking for specific technologies that they can use on the moon for creating a moon base. We had Kate Rubins, astronaut, amazing astronaut. Biologists on the podcast, talking about the Artemis mission and making a moon base. So the Department of Defense understands that biology is a great tool to be able to bring to the moon a way that's, used as a technology and not just running wild.

[00:08:28] Erum: Of course, controlled biology to be able to build things, build hard surfaces, build a way to, have astronauts. Be in a closed environment protected from radiation and the list goes on. , but I also heard that DARPA is Incredibly great organization to work with from people that have worked with them And these are you know for profit industrial companies and they're like one of the best things that they've done was accept money from DARPA and just Working with the people a part of that group is tremendous.

[00:09:01] Erum: Yeah, I'll just add two quick points about that. One is DARPA basically covers all areas that biotech could touch. So it could be anything that is like healthcare, pharma, materials, food related, all of these things are in the interest of national security. So DARPA does cover those. in addition, DARPA moves very quickly.

[00:09:22] Karl: So, A founder that I know from a company called stem loop, he was complimenting DARPA on how quickly they wrote them a check. They did a presentation, they had the check in their bank account by the end of the day. So DARPA moves really fast because they understand the importance of these technologies.

[00:09:37] Karl: we've been trying to get someone from DARPA on the podcast for a while. Eventually, one of them is going to come on and we'll have a nice conversation with them.

[00:09:44] Erum: Nice. Nice.

[00:09:45] Erum: So what else is going on, Carl?

[00:09:47] Karl: so biosecurity is one of those things that, pops up in the news and then quickly goes away unless it's something really big. we had this whole lab leak theory around COVID that basically shut down the global economy for a few years. And that's still a big question mark.

[00:10:03] Karl: We know people on both sides of the fence on that saying that it definitely was leaked. Some say it was done intentional. Some say it was done, unintentionally, but biosecurity is a very broad topic as I was getting ready for this introduction to our podcast, I just did a search.

[00:10:18] Karl: And one of the things that popped up was there's this thing called cattle feeders day, which is going to take place in Pennsylvania in a couple of weeks and Cattle feeders day includes a track on biosecurity and the name of the talk was not another talk on biosecurity. So clearly it's something that gets talked about.

[00:10:34] Karl: Biosecurity is not just about genetic engineering and keeping people safe from, a virus or an engineered organism. It also has to do with natural security. You talk a lot about biomes. we talked about a biosecurity event we did a few months ago. I had a presentation where I was going to talk about the.

[00:10:52] Karl: security of the forest. How do we keep the forest safe specifically around climate?, but 1 of the things that opened up my mind to buy security was an article that. Andrew Hessel, who's been on this podcast, wrote more than 10 years ago that appeared in the Atlantic called Hacking the President's DNA, and in that article, it talks about people being able to go online, order DNA as a drug for recreational use, but someone has in mind that they're going to make the president Deathly ill and the way that they do it is really fascinating and it opened up my thinking about what biosecurity is And so the subject is quite broad, but today we're going to get very specific with our guests and talk about biosecurity with regards to ordering dna or rna or genes in general And putting them into organisms and using them for bioindustrial purposes, which is really what we talk about here on the grow everything podcast

[00:11:49] Karl: That's super interesting, Carl. it's incredible what's going on in biosecurity. Yes, it's broad, but how does this relate to our guest today?

[00:11:55] Karl: Okay, so our guest today is  Kevin Flyangolts of Aclid Bio and Aclid has a software system that basically screens people who order DNA as well as the DNA sequences that they order. And Kevin will tell us about the technology that they use. We know Kevin really well. He's part of the New York City biotech ecosystem.

[00:12:17] Karl: Messaging Lab has done some work with Aclid as well. So I think with that, let Kevin take it away.

[00:12:26] Karl: All right, Kevin Flyangolts of Aclid Bio. We're so happy to have you here on the Grow Everything podcast.

[00:12:34] Kevin: So excited to be here,

[00:12:36] Karl: You're a friend of the pod. we know you from the New York City biotech ecosystem. You've helped organize, a biosecurity event in New York City a couple months ago. But let me start off with a theoretical question to set the stage. So let's just say that I'm an enemy of the state, and I want to cause some serious economic damage by destroying a valuable crop.

[00:12:59] Karl: My plan is to spray a virus on that crop, but before I can do that, I have to order the DNA to create it. How easy is it for me to go to a DNA synthesis provider and order that DNA, and would anybody stop me?

[00:13:10] Kevin: really starting off strong. see that. So can break that question down into a few different pieces. One is, yes, you could go to some DNA provider to find someone that will ship it to you and will give you the DNA you're asking for and exactly the sequence, exactly the form that you want. If you just went to any provider out there, especially if you went to the biggest names, you probably will get stopped very early on and they'll start asking a lot of questions.

[00:13:38] Kevin: And at that point you'll start to realize it's maybe a little bit harder than just ordering it online But if you're savvy enough, yes, you could find a provider out there that isn't going to ask you any questions That isn't going to follow any Guidelines, there's no mandates for providers to do this.

[00:13:55] Kevin: you can get the DNA you want. at that point you'll reach another roadblock, which is you need to actually have the expertise to make that virus, which is by no means easy. It might take multiple tries and DNA is not that cheap. It's cheap, but it's not tens of dollars. It's still hundreds of dollars.

[00:14:11] Kevin: So taking into account all the equipment you'll need to actually make this thing and taking into account All the expertise you'll need. You might see yourself spending anywhere from tens of thousands to maybe 100, 000 to make this happen. That being said, a lot of this is getting easier. So as we see biotech advancement move forward, as we see a lot of these tools get cheaper and a lot more accessible, that barrier that 100, 000 or 10, 000 is coming down and down, and it might become just as easy as using ChachiBT to Lend you a hand and where to go to find a provider that's not going to screen what steps to take the equipment you need might be readily available in a public lab or might be available to you all online through a contract research organization and you might be able to do this all within just a few thousand dollars.

[00:14:58] Kevin: So, right now, still somewhat hard, not within grasp of everyone, but slowly getting easier and easier every day.

[00:15:06] Erum: Well, that's terrifying. But, definitely need some tools to make sure that, we're secure and people like Carl can't do that.

[00:15:14] Karl: Wait a second.

[00:15:17] Erum: No, I'm just kidding. All right. This was a hypothetical question. Carl has no intention of doing anything crazy. so just said that, biotechnology is becoming more accessible, becoming more affordable.

[00:15:27] Erum: can you help us define what biosecurity means, what exactly, are we securing? So can you share some perspective on a definition of biosecurity?

[00:15:38] Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. I know a lot of people think of a biosecurity and biosafety as one in hand, and a lot of times those terms get confused. And there's a few different ways to think about it. like these two dichotomies. One is around internal versus external. Where biosafety is all about internally within your organization, within your team, what are you doing?

[00:16:00] Kevin: What can you control? What can you make sure that you're doing better so that you are preventing accidents, you're preventing any type of misuse, you're preventing any potential repercussions, consequences from dealing with a technology that has dual use potential. External being now that you are providing this service or you're shipping something to another colleague, or you might be selling a product.

[00:16:24] Kevin: What are some of the ways that somebody else can use that product that you have no control over at this point? So once you've shipped it, it's across the border. You don't really have a say in how that person's going to use it. They're going to do with it what they want. And biosecurity then refers to how do you make sure you set up the right System so that you're not providing those things to people that are going to abuse it or putting in the right safeguards within your product to make sure that the people that are going to be using it don't even have a chance to abuse it in any way.

[00:16:52] Kevin: Another way that I do like to think of safety and security is a lot about the actor. There's a common phrase. That's used in the space of biosafety is about protecting people from the bugs and biosecurity is about protecting the bugs from the people. So the biosecurity aspect here being that you're protecting people that want to do something harmful with the virus bacteria, the bug.

[00:17:14] Kevin: You want to protect them from having access to that bug from getting access to something that they can then use to do harm with. So that's the ways I like looking at it. I think the internal external is probably my favorite, but the bug one a cute little phrase and maybe way to look at it.

[00:17:28] Kevin: That's very intuitive and easy to understand.

[00:17:32] Karl: Yeah, I think both of those are really good. to help people understand the, biosecurity and biosafety at a high level. But when was it that you realized that there was a problem that needed to be solved? AndWhat was it in your background that made you uniquely suited to take on this problem?

[00:17:49] Kevin: came to the space from software. So I had very little biotech experience prior to starting anything here, but was really excited about synthetic biology and what it meant for being able to make new products, being able to program living things, to make materials, new chemicals, new foods, new ingredients, and, new medicines.

[00:18:09] Kevin: That felt really exciting to me. That was the first time that I had a chance to, Think about the same programming concepts that I've understood in software and apply it to a totally new domain making something physical also felt really cool. I spent the last 10 years working in software, making things that are all in the virtual world.

[00:18:25] Kevin: You can never touch them, and there's just something a little different about making something that you can touch, that you can feel that can physically interact with. so synthetic biology just got me excited from that perspective. I obviously had no experience in it, and so I started spending a lot of time.

[00:18:39] Kevin: Talking to researchers, talking to academics to people working at startups and just learning about the space, trying to absorb as much as I can understand how the industry works. What are the opportunities? What if people already built? What are the problems? What are some of the major challenges this industry and slowly learn that software is actually really valuable in this space?

[00:19:00] Kevin: There weren't a whole ton of engineers operating here, and even now they're still A lack of software engineers operating in bio. It's not the same as, FinTech or health tech where over the last 10 years, you've seen a lot more engineers working in these spaces. Bio has been lagging behind, but slowly catching up.

[00:19:16] Kevin: There's now a lot of and ML engineers excited about working on bio problems. So I'm hopeful that we'll see that change soon, but. About three years ago, there weren't as many and now there's still a lack. And so at that point, when I realized that this, this was a value, I started to think about what software solutions can I start offering?

[00:19:36] Kevin: How can I blend my personal expertise in building products building code with bio, which I knew very little about, but similar to fintech products, health tech products thought I knew enough that I could learn the domain, figure out how to build a good software solution and help Companies to move faster, went through a few different iterations, ended up meeting a professor out of Columbia, Professor Harris Wong, and he worked a lot within the synthetic biology space, worked on engineering microbiomes, worked on some DNA synthesis tools and knew a few providers in the industry that were making DNA and providing it for researchers to use in their daily experiments and their projects.

[00:20:17] Kevin: as a part of that started to learn a little bit more about the DNA sensitive space and almost happened upon this problem of having to screen your customers and screen your orders, make sure that they're providing them for safe use. And it reminded me a lot of anti money laundering and a fraud detection that happens in finance, have to.

[00:20:35] Kevin: Do your KYC know your customer and you have to make sure that the funds that you're providing are not going to be misused that they're not going to be used for drug trafficking or they're not going to be used with sanctioned in countries or individuals. so that same concept saw parallels here and I know that it was really great software for anti money laundering.

[00:20:55] Kevin: And for per KYC, banks weren't spending hours with every single customer trying to understand these things. There's millions of transactions happening every second in the background. lot of this processing is happening. And when I started to learn more about this space, I realized there was nothing.

[00:21:10] Kevin: There was no software. There was people doing this manually, calling up scientists, reviewing sequences, trying to assess risk order by order. And at that point I thought. This was a really great opportunity for me to take my software expertise, blend it with my interests in bio and build something that I thought could be really meaningful and impactful for the industry.

[00:21:33] Erum: Yeah, Thank you, Kevin. I that's incredible that you're bringing your software expertise into this industry to work on something that is very important and so surprising that, there's security solution for something like being able to synthesize DNA, which is what your platform is.

[00:21:50] Erum: Made to do so your platform works to prevent malicious DNA and RNA orders. What happens when someone tries to order a potentially dangerous sequence? What happens when someone does that?

[00:22:04] Kevin: It happens all the time, actually, mostly because researchers are legitimately ordering sequences to make vaccines or make diagnostics. If you're trying to study how to make a new vaccine to COVID, you're likely going to need to understand a little bit of how COVID functions and what are some of the bindings or receptors that it has on it.

[00:22:25] Kevin: The RNA vaccine is a very good example. It uses the spike protein from COVID to go and build your immune response when you get vaccinated rather than using the attenuated virus. If you want to make an RNA vaccine, you need to have the baseline sequence and you probably need to study some parts of it.

[00:22:41] Kevin: So if you're making a vaccine for COVID, the new generation, the next version of it, then you're likely going to need that DNA. The same thing goes for Any therapeutic or any viral therapy, viral vector therapy, cell therapy, any type of DNA based therapeutic that you're gonna be building, you're oftentimes going to need to be ordering DNA from the pathogens that you're targeting.

[00:23:03] Kevin: Or if you're making a diagnostic, the pathogens you're trying to detect. so in these cases, we'll find that there's potentially Dangerous order in the order stream, we'll find that there's a specific sequence that they're ordering that looks like it could be misused. And then we'll help the company to identify, does this customer have the right credential?

[00:23:24] Kevin: Do they have the right expertise, the right facilities? Have they done this kind of research before? What is their use case? Are they making a vaccine or a therapeutic? Do they have any licenses or registrations? If they Need to for this particular substance. So really identifying legitimate use. like to make the analogy finance a lot, because I think it's, illustrative in finance.

[00:23:45] Kevin: If you make a transaction over 20, 000, sending it from yourself to somebody else, that doesn't automatically mean that you're committing money laundering or that you're committing fraud. so in the same way that transaction on its own does not tell you enough to flag someone for fraud.

[00:23:59] Kevin: In order on its own, having some type of link to a pathogen or a virus or some type of bacteria doesn't automatically indicate that there is misuse. And so we're doing the extra checks when you go online, you purchase something and it looks like fraud, there's an online check that happens, they might ask you some security questions, you might get an alert on your phone asking to verify that this was you actually placing this order.

[00:24:24] Kevin: We're doing the same thing. Or the biotech space when the researcher places an order for something potentially toxic or dangerous, we will then in real time identify who that researcher is trying to collect any supporting documentation that they've done their prior proper bio safety approvals that know what they're ordering and then ultimately they're using it for the right use case

[00:24:48] Karl: Now, when we started this conversation, I gave a theoretical, Hey, I'm a bad actor trying to order some bad stuff. I didn't put this in the questions, but I think we should address it. what is the legislation for this kind of thing? I mean, we generally have, legislative system that is a little bit behind technology, technology advances very quickly.

[00:25:10] Karl: so biotech, synthetic biology, I think largely polices itself. But have there been any rules or regulations been, put in via, legislative actions to make people more aware and to maybe, look for solutions like what ACLID is doing?

[00:25:27] Kevin: for a little bit of history. The national, I think it was commissioned on bio safety and biosecurity. Back in 2006, recognize that there was. a gap or a vulnerability here and issued guidance that there should be screening put in place. And about three years later, the Department of Health and Human Services put together the first guideline for industry around how to screen your customers, how to screen your orders, and make sure you're providing synthetic DNA for appropriate use.

[00:25:55] Kevin: At that time, there were maybe two or three synthetic DNA providers. It was a very small industry. It's grown a lot since then. And around that time, there was a industry trade organization made called the international gene census consortium, which remember said that they would do screening. they made the statement that they thought it was important enough and that despite it being a cost to their business, they felt like they were going to be responsible actors and they were going to screen every single order, screen every one of their customers and follow this voluntary guidance from the department of health and human services. That was back in 2009. We are now 10 years later. This industry has exploded. It is used in much more than just medicine. there are now startups that are not being started by PhDs or people that have worked in labs in the past. there's now a lot of tools to help People like myself come from totally different domains, start companies in these spaces and operate without all the training that a PG would have received and would have known all about safety and security when dealing with some of these products working within the space.

[00:27:01] Kevin: we're starting to see place where there's just not as much infrastructure there used to be. If we hope that there's going to be more and more people working in this space that. It's not going to be a case of we're just have to train them a whole ton, but rather that there's a lot of existing infrastructure that makes it easy for them to get involved and makes it easy to make sure that they're not shooting themselves in the foot as they're doing their research.

[00:27:22] Kevin: U. S. government realized that in the last year, they issued an executive order that would put in the first piece of legislation or mandates around, Making sure that providers are screening their customers and screening their orders in 2023, they put out a mandate as part of an A. I. Executive order.

[00:27:42] Kevin: This was mostly focused on making sure that artificial intelligence was being used correctly, but within there about 2 pages was dedicated to bio. Where they saw that at the intersection of AI and bio, there was a unique vulnerability and they were asking for every federal agency that is funding anything in the life sciences, which makes up a large portion of the biotech market today, that those.

[00:28:05] Kevin: Agencies make sure that any federal dollars are only spent with providers that are screening that are attesting to screening their customers and screening their orders. And that is now a framework that has been built by OSTP in April released this year and should go into effect.

[00:28:22] Kevin: Sometime next year, it was initially slated to go into effect in October and has since been extended till April of 2025, and there's in two years going to be an extension of that to go beyond just genes, which are typically longer than 200 base pairs representing an entire protein or function within a cell to accounting for all of those as well.

[00:28:42] Kevin: So much shorter strands, things that are 50 base pairs or lower.

[00:28:46] Erum: Wow. Yeah, I mean, great that, there's some legislation going through. So that's a giving some peace of mind with that happening, but has there been any gaps or vulnerabilities in biosecurity that has kept you up at night?

[00:28:59] Erum: And Was COVID a lab leak? You're on.

[00:29:02] Kevin: I'll answer second question first. I don't know. I don't think anybody really knows. And I don't know if we'll ever find out, but it's not impossible for that to be the case. And the fact that it's not impossible is already a scary enough thought. The fact that we don't have mandatory screening and It is possible to create viruses from scratch. We've seen researchers in Canada do this in 2017 or 2016, where they reconstituted horsepox, which is an extinct virus at that point. It's not entirely unfathomable to imagine that there will be another research group that tries to do the same thing. At the time they did it with a group of maybe five people, very experienced in virology work and a hundred thousand dollars.

[00:29:42] Kevin: I can imagine today it's maybe half as expensive to do that same work and maybe in five years it'll be, Even half of the expensive again, there's a lot of damage that you can do with very little and the fact that we don't have mandatory screening that we don't have at least some fence around this, making sure that we're doing the bare minimum, the same way we wouldn't just ship dynamite to anybody the same way we wouldn't ship C4 just to anybody that keeps me up at night.

[00:30:09] Kevin: It feels like we should have something it doesn't have to be The most robust, the most secure system in the world. We don't have enough data yet to build something like that, but something would be better than nothing. And I think could lower our risks here drastically.

[00:31:21] Karl: Yeah there's a lot to think about in this space and, there's a lot of different approaches that can be taken, to biosecurity. one is that companies build their own screening or like you said, many companies voluntarily choose to screen, as I understand it, there's open source solutions or they can work with platforms like yours.

[00:31:40] Karl: What do you think are some factors that a company should consider if they're going to get into, screening? orders.

[00:31:47] Kevin: So the first part is just building out your process. that's probably the hardest part of it. There's lots of tools out there, automated tools, some that are a mix of both and require a little bit of human review. But ultimately, don't think the tools are the main thing that become difficult here.

[00:32:04] Kevin: It's really that process of once you get a flag, what do you do with it? Do you follow up with the customer? Do you automatically approve some regardless of the fact that they got flagged because you know that it's legitimate use? there's some examples of that. Researchers are always using sequences from pathogens because they're useful for synthetic biology techniques.

[00:32:23] Kevin: Things like two a peptides are very commonly used or talons are very commonly used in the industry. And they come from dangerous viruses that affect plants or that affect animals or humans. that's always going to happen. That's going to continue to happen. there's some use cases for just automatically approving those kinds of orders, even though they're coming from something that's flagged.

[00:32:43] Kevin: But beyond that, once you get to a point where somebody is legitimately ordering something that comes from a pathogen does not have one of these techniques that's being used, what do you do then? How do you verify that this is a researcher that has a legitimate use case? That kind of process, setting that up oftentimes takes a lot of effort. And that's where we've spent a lot of time focusing, helping companies to set that process up, making sure that they have the tools to be able to collect that information and spend as little time within their customer service departments or sales departments reviewing these kinds of things or following up with their customers and adding more friction to their process.

[00:33:19] Kevin: Manufacturing DNA is already very hard. We don't want to make it much harder by putting in all these barriers to Having customers get access to these tools. So really automating that piece and figuring out what your risk thresholds are, what your process there is, is I think major barrier. Once you've decided that you want to screen, there's lots of tools that will help you with figuring out whether a sequence has a pathogen or toxin in it.

[00:33:43] Kevin: There are lots of tools that will give you insights into what specific function those things have. then lots of tools that will also help you to manage the project management workflow of this. But where we see gap and where we're spending a lot of time is really after you get a flag, what happens, we obviously have all this stuff before have sequence screening, we have management of the compliance and orders, but we're spending a lot of time helping companies to build that process and set up their risk thresholds, take this more seriously and just make it easier for them to adopt this.

[00:34:16] Erum: Oh, wow. That's great. Yes. Streamlining any complex process is absolutely needed, especially in our world of biotech and, developing microbes, especially from the DNA. Level. so totally resonates. that is the world we live in. Everything's becoming a bit more automated. , just helping speed things along.

[00:34:35] Erum: but, you come from the world of software development. And, recently published a piece on red teams and biosecurity. And I was actually thinking about you yesterday I was at an event and one of the leaders of Google's risk and compliance team was there and I was chatting with him. About

[00:34:51] Erum: what Google's doing. And I can talk to a bit more about that offline because it's interesting. I can't reveal too much publicly. but can you tell us? What are red teams and how are they used in traditional technology? And how does accolade use them to test and improve your platform?

[00:35:10] Kevin: Red teams are something that come from cyber security. I think they were started actually in the military. That's where their roots are from. The use case in cyber security is what you hear of as white hacking, where you try to take a system, you try Do everything you can to break it you do these penetration tests you spend a lot of time seeing where the vulnerabilities are can you exploit something some opening and if you are able to find a potential vulnerability then you disclose it to the company or disclose it to the product.

[00:35:40] Kevin: Manufacturer and then you have that patched and hopefully you fix the issue so that nobody's going to exploit it for bad use case where they're going to try to use it to make money or use it to harm someone use it in nefarious way. The same concept applies this industry where we have thousands DNA happening every day.

[00:36:01] Kevin: Companies are required to ship within days. They're required to do it cheaply and effectively and at high quality. That's no short order. And they're going to be things that they implement in their process to try to make their customer experience better. That ultimately may leave vulnerabilities, may leave gaps in their security process.

[00:36:23] Kevin: There are two Two types of ways that you can think of red teaming here. There's one which is about. Can you exploit vulnerabilities in the screening system? So are there specific constructs that you can make that will hide some kind of pathogen in your sequence or in your order? And you'll get it shipped because the manufacturer's screening system wasn't able to detect the pathogen was present. The other type is around social engineering. So Let's say you're going to be up front. You're getting a pathogen ordered and now you're going to pretend that you're this legitimate researcher with a lab that has a vaccine program and you're just going to try to trick the manufacturer into sending this to you because You're trying to pretend that you're a legitimate researcher.

[00:37:05] Kevin: So those are the two types of red teaming that you can think of, they're happening more frequently now. Some of them are sponsored by academic institutions. Some have been done in coordination with FBI, where the FBI was let know that they were going to do a red team study so that any flags wouldn't get reported and wouldn't get followed up on.

[00:37:23] Kevin: And then Companies would go and try to order sequences that they knew were pathogenic and see if provider would send it to them. And there are some that have been done that are probably not public, where some companies have tried to socially engineer or some groups have tried to socially engineer or try to sneak, pathogenic sequences within the order.

[00:37:42] Kevin: those are now becoming just more commonplace to help stress test these systems and figure out. How much of a vulnerability do we have? We have the IGSC, this international gene census consortium of companies that are screening. How well are they actually screening? And then we have lots of companies out there that aren't screening and don't say anything about it.

[00:37:59] Kevin: Maybe they're screening anyway, or Maybe they're not doing anything. And so there's a lot of researchers that have a motivation to start to get this data and figure out how big of a vulnerability do we have? How big of a risk do we have in this space? And I think the same thing is true with governments.

[00:38:14] Kevin: Governments know that they have a synthetic biology industry within their countries. Especially in the US here, they're very sensitive to how big of a vulnerability they have domestically to potentially a terrorist act or or how easy is it for somebody to cause harm with these tools.

[00:38:28] Kevin: so similarly to how companies are using this to measure risk, we're also using this primarily with the sequence screening to measure how well can we trick our system? What vulnerabilities do we have and what can we do to patch it? We participated in a few of these red team studies where we've had sequences sent to us that were meant to try to trick our system.

[00:38:47] Kevin: And we tried to patch any vulnerabilities that we found. And we continuously test our system against these kinds of obfuscated or challenged sequences every time we make a new change. Every time make an update to our system to make sure that we're continuing to improve and we're not regressing on anything that we've seen before.

[00:39:04] Karl: so when we started this conversation, we mentioned that, part of the New York City biotech ecosystem. we see each other frequently in different biotech events. how do you think being part of this community has helped Aclid or helped you think about biotech?

[00:39:19] Karl: You said you're a big fan of synthetic biology, and we do have a lively ecosystem. How has that helped, Aclid?

[00:39:27] Kevin: network has helped a lot. I think the other founders I've met that are working in biotech in New York, there's a lot of shared lab spaces here like Gen space, which have been super helpful for me to just learn more about biology because I don't come from this domain at all a little bit about the different products that people are building also helps us to understand what are some of the different use cases.

[00:39:50] Kevin: For our tools that go beyond just biosecurity there's A much larger industry beyond what we're doing in this very small nation where we're always looking for how some of the technology that we've built can be leveraged in those places to so trying to extend some of the things that we've built for biosecurity into things like biosafety into things like biodefense or biosurveillance.

[00:40:12] Kevin: And those are things that we've been working on actively. We have a couple of partners that we've been working on biosafety with, and we've been working with the government on biodefense solutions, essentially taking the same technology that we build for screening synthetic sequences and applying it to natural ones in the field.

[00:40:26] Kevin: Having that ecosystem here makes it really easy and accessible for me to learn about these spaces that I knew nothing about and that I was still very amateur on so far. it's helping us to build a better product that's helping us to grow our business and. The fact that there's so much infrastructure here already just makes it so much easier for me build a company without having to relearn or rebuild the wheel and all these little things that I'm sure my predecessors in the early 2000s or in the 90s had to do.

[00:40:56] Kevin: So grateful that I don't have to go through all that and I can rely on a lot of the learnings from them a lot of the tools infrastructure has been built up make this possible.

[00:41:06] Erum: Yeah. And also bringing people together, , you along with Andrew Hessel and Carl too, hosted a biosecurity unconference and I'd love to know, like, what were your takeaways from that day? what are the biggest challenges you see in biosecurity over the next five years as technologies advancing, but also as some, bad actors are getting more sophisticated.

[00:41:31] Erum: So would love to get your takeaways and your, future predictions.

[00:41:36] Kevin: Yeah. So we hosted this on conference as a way to get more people to engage on these topics and think about them and just get more ideas in the room because we do think they're so important. One of the big takeaways that we found from that conference is that it seems like there's a lot of people that are excited about this space and about these topics.

[00:41:56] Kevin: But there just aren't the right incentives and resources for them to get involved The incentives and resources are tied hand in hand the fact that there isn't the larger community of biosecurity is partly because There isn't a lot of people paying attention to the space and funding it I think that's going to be the major risks going into five years from now when these tools are getting easier I'd love for us to Have maybe a slightly different paradigm here where we don't wait for an incident and we try to put something proactive in place beforehand.

[00:42:25] Kevin: It's not how we've operated in the past. Usually we're very reactionary from a policy perspective or security perspective. Something happens, we realize there's a vulnerability and we do something about it. I don't want us to be in that position here because I think the consequences are so much higher.

[00:42:41] Kevin: And, It would vote us well to try to do something ahead of that and try to create the right incentives for people to think about this, not just from a security perspective, but also from the economic interests in the space. if there is an incident here, if there's ever something that's linked to a synthetic biology company.

[00:43:01] Kevin: I think it would hurt all of us, not just because there would be consequences for the individuals involved, but because I think it would lose trust within the industry. We have a lot of companies that are already losing trust to things like GMOs to consumers not trusting what coming out of science If we're doing this responsibly, I think we have a really good opportunity to show How we're making products and how we're doing this in a way that is preventing people from harm so I really hope that not just from a security perspective, although that's extremely important, too That economically, we're prioritizing this because it is going to affect whether people adopt these products, whether people start using synthetic biology based foods and chemicals and whether they're going to be okay with more of our therapeutics, more of our materials being made from biology.

[00:43:54] Kevin: I think if we want these things to achieve their potential. We're gonna really need to start thinking about that messaging. And I know you guys have spent a lot of time thinking about that with a lot of other companies.

[00:44:04] Karl: Yeah, I mean, I think you make bunch of good points. and I think that the biosecurity on conference is really useful because we did, expose a lot of people that normally wouldn't have had any idea about biosecurity and its potential impact. And I think everything that you touched on is, super important.

[00:44:21] Karl: Kevin, but let's talk about accolade again, beyond gene screening, serving as a contributor to the bioeconomy's growth?

[00:44:29] Kevin: So right now we're building tools for security. Ultimately, don't see any reason that we couldn't build tools that go beyond just security and go into even design and help companies with procurement, help recombinant supply chains. The same way that I view code where we have a ton of infrastructure already built up to monitor how your code is running to measure its performance to help develop it with integrated development environments to help test it to help look for vulnerabilities.

[00:45:01] Kevin: There's a whole ecosystem of developer tools out there, I think as this industry grows, we're gonna have a very similar ecosystem of. DNA or recombinant tools. We already see some of that, We see things like snap gene and bench link that help you design DNA constructs. There's now awesome of that help with colonel that's helping you to design constructs.

[00:45:22] Kevin: There are some tools that help you with identifying vulnerabilities in your constructs. I think some tools that will essentially tell you how to optimize Your when I say vulnerabilities here, I mean, maybe problems with your design that would lead to lower yield. So there are tools that will help you optimize your code ons or pick the best promoter.

[00:45:40] Kevin: these are the kinds of things that I think will only get bigger and better as the industry progresses. And so the same ecosystem of developer tools that I'm seeing within software I think we're going to see for DNA and for recombinant tools. And we see no reason that we couldn't participate across that ecosystem.

[00:45:57] Kevin: So that's the broad vision that we're seeing here. you have CrowdStrike deploy on every single machine all around the world. We saw that when it went down, how much it impacts the world. I see no reason that we don't have that same parallel for DNA everywhere that you have a living thing, you're measuring something, you're viewing it, you're monitoring you're.

[00:46:15] Kevin: starting to build an ecosystem of data and tools that can help companies build better products in this space.

[00:46:22] Erum: Well said. that's incredible. I think it's a great vision. I felt like a lot of what you said is also call to action for other software developers to take what they've done in the traditional technology space and bring it to biotech. There's a lot to be done, We are just at the beginning of the growth that the Bioeconomy is experiencing and will be experiencing.

[00:46:42] Erum: So thanks so much for coming on. Kevin, this has been great. we've seen each other, but to be able to have you in the pod and talk to you like this, I've learned so much already.

[00:46:51] Kevin: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:46:52] Karl: Yeah, it was a treat. Thank you so much, Kevin.

[00:46:59] Erum: So, Carl, what'd you think of that episode?

[00:47:01] Karl: Biosecurity is a very serious topic that doesn't get covered enough. And I think Kevin, Does a really great job of laying the foundation, why it matters. And then explaining also why software like his, applets is important. I think it's also worth saying, working with Kevin, we've learned that there's multiple ways that people are screening, DNA orders.

[00:47:22] Karl: There's an open source product, DNA secure. That's based out of Switzerland, but The people behind it are from Harvard and M. I. T. and then, Kevin mentioned there's open source products. So there's a lot of ways that this stuff is being put into practice. But we also know that

[00:47:37] Karl: there are hackers that are looking for ways to get this information out of companies. And this really came to a head last year when chat dpt Was making the news and then the Biden administration put in place this, AI executive order and that included this talk of biosecurity and being able to really monitor the way people are ordering DNA.

[00:47:58] Karl: What do you think you run?

[00:48:00] Erum: Yeah, it was a great crash course in biosecurity, especially understanding that there is a value chain of security from the earliest sequences and DNA synthesis to then using inner products to the concept of release, which we didn't really talk about much, but what does that look like?

[00:48:18] Erum: so coming at it from the very earliest stages, which is super important. how does it evolve is another topic.

[00:48:23] Erum: I know when we spoke with Alexander Titus, he was saying it's really hard to create something nefarious. so I would love to dig into that a bit more, but I just love the fact that Kevin came from computer science came from the software world. And. Is bringing that to our industry of biotech, bio industrials, this very specific point and niche that's important.

[00:48:48] Erum: He saw the need that there needs to be software to screen. DNA synthesis and, and also, put some pressure on these companies to make sure that they have the right processes in place.

[00:48:59] Erum: Aclid and companies like them are providing that service of being like, Hey, look, you need to comply, get ahead of this, don't just, wait for something to happen and all of a sudden you created a multimillion dollar mistake.

[00:49:12] Erum: And not only is it financial, but you're causing harm to living things. the fact that, Kevin has been been working at this intersection of DNA synthesis and security I just applaud him from coming from the outside, seeing this and sticking with it. he's doing God's work that regard.

[00:49:31] Karl: Yeah, I mean, I think it's also just worth saying that, Kevin was one of the organizers of this biosecurity meeting that we've talked about a couple of times. and it really brought together a really diverse group of people that maybe had never been exposed to biosecurity.

[00:49:46] Karl: And I was lucky to run a panel a couple years ago with Rene Wigwerson, who's now running ARPA H and then Jamie Yassif of the, Nuclear Threat Initiative, which I probably butchered the name of, and, this is a topic that comes up regularly. And like I said at the beginning, it shows up in the news, on a regular Basis, but then it quickly fades away unless it's something major like Cove it and it's just one of those things that we want people to be more aware of and I think Kevin is doing a great job in terms of bringing awareness to this and really putting in place security measures that are going to be very, very important as the bio economy continues to grow, which is something that we're going to continue to cover here on grow everything.

[00:50:28] Karl: yeah, absolutely. So we'll continue bringing on people that are experts of biosecurity and biotechnology in general, because that is what we love to learn about. We really are excited to grow. Everything shift away from our dependence on petrochemicals and look at biology as a way to sustaining human life and the Other life. I not just humans on this planet. a lot of damage. So let's try to figure out ways to fix things. thank you so much for listening. Please check out our show notes, reach out to us and we look forward to the next episode of grow everything podcast.

[00:51:03] Karl: All right, that's the pot.