188. Which Came First: Chicken, Egg, or Medicine? Neion Bio Turns Evolution into a Precision Factory

Sam our inputs are chicken feed and water. Our outputs are life-saving medicines.

Erum Hey, Carl. How's it going?

Karl Hey, Rem. Welcome to the Grow Everything podcast, where we talk about how biology is making the world a better place. What's going on with you?

Erum a lot. I'm very excited for 4th of July this year. It's America's 250th birthday, the semi-quincentennial.

Karl You're celebrating that in New York City this year, right?

Erum Yeah. Yeah, I usually go to Montreal on 4th of July 'cause of the Jazz Fest, not because I don't like the US. I love America, and I'm American. but yeah, I'll be here and in New York City observing all the fireworks. There's so many celebrations. I was just looking it up, and there's, like, block parties. There's, this skywalk on- in Times Square, musicians coming out. It's gonna be a big party.

Erum But yeah, there's a lot of events. And then they're, in Los Angeles. Queen Latifah's gonna be performing with the Smashing Pumpkins, and I'm like, what?

Karl Oh, wow.

Erum That's a nice combo. I feel like I would [00:01:00] definitely go to that. so a lot going on for the 4th of July. I'm just very excited for it. I just love fireworks, hot dogs, red, white, and blue. I'm wearing a little bit of that right now.

Karl Yeah.

Erum Um, and it's, great. I mean, I... Remember I was telling you about in fourth grade when I wrote an essay called What the American Flag Means to Me? It was, like, an essay contest.

Karl I remember, and you won an award.

Erum Yeah, I won. I won it, and it was like... I went to a school in the suburbs, I was the only Indian person in my school. everyone was white. but, it was just, meaningful that I won it, Because of that, I was Miss 4th of July, and I was, like-

Karl Amazing.

Erum Walk... I was in the parade, and I was, like, giving my little, like, hand wave, and I had flowers. it was really fun. I just wish I had that essay 'cause, like, I always had deep, perspectives, even when I was young, and my father watched the news a lot, you know, I had a very, strong vocabulary when I was younger. and so then I was just probably like, " it means, freedom and the ability for my parents to come here and- Right ... [00:02:00] start a life and..."

Karl It's all good, you know?

Erum Liberty.

Karl Yeah.

Erum The pursuit of happiness. Yes. I probably used all the cheesy phrase- not cheesy- Yeah ... but, like, the actual, like, phrases that are in the Constitution, in the Preamble, all of it.

Karl Yeah, I think it's an interesting time, for the celebration. I was very young when we did our 200th anniversary, so I don't really remember it, but, I'm looking forward to this one.

Karl I'm gonna, stick around, be upstate, and I'll watch the the fireworks there at the lake, and we'll just see how that goes. so I'm excited for this celebration, and I think To me the big thing about celebrating, America is just as a reminder that our democracy is something that constantly needs to be reinvented for the time. It's not a static, thing, and I think that that's what makes it really exciting to me. It's, ever-changing and it's evolving, and there's a lot of opportunities for us to make it better

Erum Yes, absolutely. And it's evolving and changing to grow the [00:03:00] bio-economy. You shared some news on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. What's going on with that?

Karl So for listeners of the podcast who might remember that a few episode ago, we had an interview with Senator Todd Young of Indiana, and he talked about the America's Living Library Act of 2026. National Security Commission on Emerging Biotech just reminded us that the National Defense Authorization Act, that's a mouthful, it's the NDAA, is up for a vote in the House of Representatives. And it includes that America's Living Library Act, but it also includes several other provisions that are important for biotechnology, and it's really an opportunity for all of our listeners to let their voices be heard.

Karl So let your representatives know that you support biotech and that you support this National Defense Authorization Act, and that we want biotech to really be a central part of our growing economy. we'll leave a link in the show notes, but I think it's very important for us to let [00:04:00] our representatives know. It's something that I've probably said more than once on the podcast, and I'm a big believer I tell every entrepreneur, get to know your representatives. You wanna demystify what we do, help them understand that we're growing the economy in a positive way with advanced technologies and advanced biomanufacturing. So I'm super excited about this.

Erum Yeah. Same here. And to remind listeners or those that are new to the podcast, The America's Living Library Act is about, sampling US parks for all of the plants, animals, and microbes, and getting that information, sequencing the DNA and putting it in a shared database which AI can analyze and see what type of wonderful things that are happening in our parks here on American soil, to see what type of, drugs could be discovered amongst microbes and plants in our parks. And then, of course, there's gonna be ownership of that. You it's going to help grow our economy. If turns out that the next [00:05:00] longevity drug is in Yosemite. And all of a sudden, people could, monetize that, but then, some ownership would go, perhaps fall back to the, the United States. I would love to learn a little bit more about what the financial mechanisms, ownership, the provenance, how that's all being tracked. But I think those are the details that come after we all collectively vote that it's really good to have a living library that we can learn from.

Erum and then as a reminder, there are trillions and trillions of microbes on our planet, and we've only studied about 120,000 of them And of those, study, we've come up with such amazing, amazing innovations like insulin, citric acid, other drugs. the list goes on. it's a very long list. I'm sure you can ask your local AI these questions. But ... And you could probably ask it to write a very compelling note to your congress people and have them [00:06:00] support America's Living Library Act. So let's grow. Yeah.

Karl So there's a couple of other news items we wanted to cover before we get into, today's podcast. But Erum, did you see this Midjourney, announcement?

Erum You shared with me, and then all of a sudden I was getting all these texts from people, like in our group chats, about what's going on with Midjourney and this idea of them getting into body scanning?

Karl Yeah. So, Midjourney is known as being this, graphics, AI. You put in a prompt and it gives you an image. We use it a lot for Grow Everything. And they had Midjourney Con that last week, The thing that they showed off that got the most press was their MRI that they've been working on. And what I understand is the guy who runs Midjourney has done hardware before, so it didn't really come out of left field. I thought it was really, a fascinating thing when you have, an AI company going into hardware, and hardware that is really so specific. MRI scanning is something that is very specific, and it's imaging, just like, you produce [00:07:00] AI images of them. So I thought it was great news.

Erum Yeah. this h- idea of, multiple modalities when it comes to data, right? Like, a lot of what we use when it comes to ChatGPT and Claude is, text-based, and And then of course with Midjourney and, Adobe Firefly, you're generating images, and it all has to come from some type of understanding, you prompt, Generate a picture of a dog in a park." And so it's gonna do something that's somewhat, accurate. Of course it, it'll look great, but it's just gonna pick whatever dog and, unless you add more specifics.

Erum When it comes to biology and the human body, it's very complex and you need a level of accuracy. And having an imaging, especially an MRI scan, and you can see things happening real time, imagine what this AI is learning. And if you could do it across different people with different, body types and experiences, and then you can have this, population level data this could be really interesting for clinical trials. Be like, if it, went down that route. and obviously the people opt [00:08:00] in, and, also for researchers. But for, again, this is something that, we talk about and I, talk about a lot offline with a lot of founders in healthcare is that if you're getting data from a patient population to do research to develop a drug, they should be compensated somehow.

Erum And there are, know, obviously DAOs and crypto they've been looking at this, like how do you tokenize data from individuals, and then when that data is used for research to develop a drug and that drug is sold, that money comes back to the people that, had given their data So I think that there's a big opportunity here. I don't know if that's what they're thinking

Karl Yeah, so this is an ultrasonic scanner, and a patient or a person would sit in it surrounded by water, and then it's gonna create an image of your body. their idea is to create these Midjourney spas where they'll have 50,000 scanners worldwide.

Karl they will be able to do a billion scans a month, they're not doing it alone. Again, I said that the CEO is a hardware guy, but [00:09:00] they're also partnering with another company that is known for doing, these things.

Karl But it's super interesting because, again, it's like you think of Midjourney, and the first thing that comes to mind is generative AI this is, a very specific type of image generation that, as you said, Erum, could be used, to keep people healthy and for longevity and to really understand what's going on in your body. I think it's super exciting.

Erum Yeah. Yeah, and I just love the fact that this is, commercial direct-to-consumer and allowing consumers to have their data. And if the consumers decide that they wanna share it with some research entity, they can, as long as they get compensated somehow but just that I really believe in this patient first medical establishment or, this medical system where, they get personalized medicine. They're a part of it. They have ownership over it. They're not just a number or, their data's just being used without their consent, which has, has happened, for a long time. But I love when companies that are consumer-minded, thinking about the individual, [00:10:00] helping the individual, and then this opens up opportunities for larger healthcare institutions to participate if, patients want to or people want to.

Karl So a couple more kind of, related news items. yesterday I read this article about NVIDIA saying that they believe that AI scientists are gonna become the norm in biotech, and they've got a model that's called BioNeMo. But this was in the news yesterday, again, because one of the executives from NVIDIA was presenting at the Bio International Conference, which is taking place as we record this in San Diego. And the idea is that this stack is gonna turn generic language, large language models into AI scientists, which they believe will become the norm in, biotech.

Karl I'm not convinced. I think, this human AI, um, model where humans are working with AI is really gonna be the norm for a while because we're still tapping into that, and I think the AI really needs the scientists, but I'm happy to be wrong. [00:11:00] I've been wrong many times.

Erum Well, the article does say an AI co-scientist.

Erum So it's like a scientist to work with human scientists. we know that this is happening. Our friend Nick Edwards from Potato AI is creating a AI scientist that really syncs with lab automation and really help with hypothesis generation because, one individual can come up with a hypothesis, but if that's wrong, you're just going down the wrong rabbit hole and your experiments aren't set up correctly.

Erum and then it's like the whole unknown unknowns, like you might not know how to frame the hypothesis because there are probably things missing that just aren't in your purview. So this is something I see a lot actually. A lot of people are creating AI scientists for a very specific field.

Erum So, I know someone's creating an AI scientist for microbial electrochemistry systems and that's a very specific discipline and requires a lot of focus, and there's a lot of research and a lot of modeling that has to happen. So I see it being a standard to [00:12:00] help human scientists and decision makers get to where they're going sooner.

Erum And of course, we just had our, live demo with Roebling CTO Brenton Alexander, but Roboling is an AI process engineer, and, one of the big takeaways is like, yes, it helps, a lot of, you engineers or those that are building manufacturing capacity to understand the economics and what is required to build a manufacturing plant and helps them do all that very quickly, rather something that would take months and months and months and a lot of capital, a lot of money that would go into coming up with these plans, just takes a matter of hours.

Erum So I'm really excited for this, is am glad that NVIDIA and these large companies are talking about it on this large stage at BIO. but we do know that on these small stages and these conversations we have one-on-one with people off the podcast, offline, it's what they're building, and we see how it's happening and how they're doing things, and we'll certainly get more people that are developing AI [00:13:00] scientists on the podcast.

Karl Yeah. And you had flagged this AI value pyramid, Uram, that you saw, I think, on LinkedIn. Sh- tell me about that. What's the AI value pyramid?

Erum Yeah. We'll certainly link to it in the show notes, but this is something I saw from a previous investor of mine, his name's Murat. Murat is a investor, at ERA, which Entrepreneurial- Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, and also he started a new fund called Remarkable Ventures.

Erum And he posted this, AI value pyramid, and it really resonated with me because what they say is that the value goes up the stack. So on the bottom of this pyramid, they have compute and infrastructure. So think of the GPUs, NVIDIA, data centers, networking, everything that is required to build AI.

Erum And then you have above that models, so, ChatGPT, Gemini, all the things that we use. And then they have, the harness. So how do you harness those models? You could use agents. You use memory and, evaluation methods, orchestration, on the AI level, different workflows. [00:14:00] And then above that, of course, you finally have applications.

Erum how is this AI being used? There's AI native products, and a lot of people are now positioning their startups as AI native, so that's above it. But the top, the top, I just was, like, blown away what they find as the most defensible moat, the most unique assets is, of course, data, but then it goes relationships, distribution, brand, and customer access. That's amazing. That's what we do here on the Grow Everything podcast at Messaging Lab. You know us, you know we're, we show up in the ecosystem. We're developing relationships with a lot of people, the guests that we have on our podcast, and also the people in the ecosystem, because we know that that's valuable because we learn. We like to give back when we can, and I think the new IP is your customer base the--

Erum And when we were talking about, you know, the whole 23andMe, situation that happened, and, they were [00:15:00] taking the data and giving it to pharma.

Erum Pharma was like, "This isn't the data that we need. It's, like, not enough for us to develop a drug." And, like, they were, like, snowballing out of the value. And they actually then they ended up creating a nonprofit and acquiring 23andMe because things were just kinda sitting dormant.

Erum But I said the most valuable data that 23andMe had was the contact information for the customers. And developing that relationship and being honest with them, and also giving them rewards for, like, continuing to give data, right? Like, yeah, we all know, like, your genomic information which is-- They didn't have y- your whole genome sequence.

Erum They only had little bits and pieces of it. It gives you some information, but not everything. It's just a blueprint. It doesn't tell you three-dimensionally what the actual house looks like. So it wasn't enough, but you could paint that picture if you continue to have a relationship with the customers.

Erum So in the end, in sum, I was like, okay, wow, just having relationships, having your customers, and then between that instilling trust and loyalty to then, for if you wanna talk about business, to have that [00:16:00] recurring revenue come.

Karl I was just gonna say, and, also at the top of that pyramid is brand, which, brand is something that, we aim to build. Every company is aiming to build a brand and a reputation. And brand has a lot of value, and it continues to have a lot of value. And the fact that it's up there with relationships and data just shows how important building a brand that people can trust, that is consistent, and that delivers on what it promises is super important. I love this pyramid. I'm gonna share it with a lot of people, and it'll be in the show notes.

Erum and so the next piece of news, which is a big piece of news in the world of biotech, biopharma, which, we touch on a little bit here on the podcast, but when it's this big, we gotta talk about it. So AbbVie acquired Apogee for close to $11 billion. And we were like, "Wow, look at this." We do work with a company in the, immunotherapy space, so we were really excited to talk to them about it. But what's your takeaway, Karl, from, about this?

Karl so people have been predicting [00:17:00] that, biotech has been ripe for mergers and acquisition or M&A activity for a while because the whole industry has been somewhat depressed. It's been really hard for people to get investors. seeing a deal like this I think just gets the market very excited. we're gonna link to an article that I read that talked about what are some other potential targets, that could be acquired. And some of these are companies like Nectar Therapeutics, it's been around for a really long time, that could be something that, a big company like an Eli Lilly, which is now a trillion-dollar company, could acquire if it helps them expand their portfolio.

Karl The name of the game in biopharma has always been acquisition or licensing and marketing of assets by big pharma. And a lot of big pharmas like the Novo Nordisks and the Lillys, Eli Lillys of the world have these gigantic valuations. I think they've been sitting on a lot of cash. And while, biotech valuations have been depressed, it creates a lot of buying opportunity for, companies that will expand those [00:18:00] portfolios. So I was excited to see this news, and I'm really excited to see where this is gonna go.

Erum Yeah. There's a difference between investors investing in early stage biotech versus acquiring a company that's completely de-risked the asset, and they did all the h- heavy lifting 'cause either they raised money or they figured out how to, orchestrate different, CROs and other, supporting systems to de-risk the asset. And so if a company gets that far, and, like, there's companies that have been around for 20, 30 years that have s- I guess, I don't know if you want to call it biopharma. I I don't know how far back you want to go, but let's say like, we'll call it 1.0 from like the '80s and '90s,

Karl That is, biotech 1.0, yeah.

Erum Yeah, yeah. And so, like, they're still around. they had a lot of value. They knew how to manage money, and then they're finally getting to a place where they can now leverage all this technology and the relationships they've built over 30 years-

Karl Yeah. ...

Erum and then they're like, "All right.

Erum We, now we have all the data here," and, and maybe they were even sitting on it to de-risk and de-risk and de-risk, [00:19:00] that at this point, $11 billion did make sense, right? So, there's still a lot of funding that's needed for some of the early-stage biotechs that we talk to. and I don't know how that's going for them.

Erum and, there's, early-stage biotechs that are making assets, but then, of course, there's biotechs that are making software, so that's a different beast. But it's great to see. So yeah, and it's great to see that. Apogee's an American company, so this is a win, within America. We know that there's been a lot of assets being purchased from China. That we can save for another conversation, but great. It's great to see success and innovation happening here in biopharma world, and there's a lot more to come and a lot more that's being spearheaded, like what our guests today are doing.

Karl All right. So with that, I think we should maybe just a little tiny bit of background. we joke around that we've got this Brooklyn biotech crew, which is growing. There's a lot of people that we meet. we continue to meet new people that we add to our biotech mafia, [00:20:00] and Sam Levin is an early member of, the, Brooklyn Biotech Mafia because we knew him from his previous startup. After finishing with that startup, he ended up joining forces with Dimi Kolari to start Neon Bio. And so we are very excited to have them come on the podcast to talk about biomanufacturing of biopharmaceuticals and using a very special, very unique, natural, I don't know, incubator. Can I say it that way?

Erum Yeah.

Karl So I think- All right ... with that, let's let Sam and Dimi take it away.

Karl Dimi and Sam of Neon, we are so happy to have you on the "Grow Everything" podcast.

Sam We're so happy to be here. Thank you.

Karl Awesome. I'm gonna kick it off by, just dropping us into a big question. What we've seen is this massive push in the last few years to use AI to discover new drugs, but the infrastructure [00:21:00] to actually make those drugs hasn't changed in more than 50 years. Do you think that tweaking traditional steel bioreactors is a viable evolution, or are we on the edge of something completely transformational in biomanufacturing?

Sam I think you probably know our answer to this, so it feels a little bit like you're leading the witness. obviously we believe we are on the, verge of, a revolution. the, incremental improvements that have happened over the last 50 years or, and are still happening today are exactly that. they're incremental. And when you actually plot improvements in traditional manufacturing of, complex proteins using, mammalian cell culture, we've hit diminishing returns.

Sam And so, at Neon Bio, we believe that we need a bigger change. We need something bolder, and we need to begin truly harnessing biology in a way that unlocks its full, full potential

Dimi the reason we needed sort of complex hardware [00:22:00] for all this, um, traditionally and, all these media formulations, it was to make up for the fact that we were stripping away biological complexity.

Dimi so hardware compensated for our lack of ability to harness biology. I've built hardware my entire career and, you know, nature, evolution just does a much better job of making things efficient. and so evolution's already created things that are better than we could ever think of, so why not try and harness those or use those?

Erum Yeah, absolutely. Deming, let's talk a little bit about your background. It spans aerospace engineering at Airbus and you were at Google X. And Sam, your background, you focused on evolutionary biology and automated bioreactors. So would love to hear from each of you, starting with Deming. What was the moment that broughtbrought your worlds together to rethink drug manufacturing?

Dimi for me, you know, manufacturing and the world of hardware, it's always been constrained by, the manufacturing technologies that are possible, not necessarily by what's possible to [00:23:00] build, right?

Dimi I worked at CERN for some time, and there, we had millions and millions of dollars to build a part that would only ever be used for one single purpose and only ever be used once, maybe. Maybe not ever. and we did things that, you'd never see commercially done.

Dimi And in aerospace engineering, on the other hand, at Airbus, the reason why planes look the way they do is not because it's necessarily the most efficient design, it's mainly because that's what we can manufacture efficiently. And so, when you start to look at biopharma with that same lens, you sort of have a similar pattern.

Dimi Um, so one of the questions that, my naive aerospace engineering self came at this problem with was, how could it ever be the case that one single cell type could produce all, possible proteins, all biopharmaceuticals? we have such a diversity, on Earth. nature produces complex proteins for pennies.

Dimi and so it didn't really add up. and then, layered on top of this, catalysts like artificial intelligence and precision genome engineering and stem cell biology and all the things [00:24:00] that we're sort of piggybacking on top of, that form those foundational engineering tools of biology just opened up this opportunity window.

Dimi but I-- obviously, I needed someone who knew what they were talking about when it comes to biology. And when I met Sam, he was approaching this from, and, you'll learn about this in a second, from, his perspective, which is very different to mine, but we converge on sort of the same problem space.

Sam You at least found someone who knows 50% of what they're, talking about o- on a good day, so. Hopefully that was enough. yeah, I mean, my, background is, I am a biologist. I am an evolution biologist, although my PhD was on the origin of life, on Earth, which is pretty different than, what we do now,

Sam My history of biology has been sort of working forwards in, the tree of life. but what, I had previously built a company you guys knew called MelonFrost, in Brooklyn. it was part of the Brooklyn biotech mafia. Uh, and we built traditional--bioreactors, and we worked with customers who built traditional bioreactors.

Sam And I remember the first time I went to a [00:25:00] commercial biotech company and saw, these-- If you've ever been, right, these look like giant factories, right? They are giant factories. These huge steel tanks and, it just, just didn't feel right, right? It felt like something was missing, that the vision of harnessing biology was, that trees are out there turning sunlight and water into sort of complex, giant 3D, three-dimensional protein factories, and they do that, without any hardware. And yet we spend a billion dollars constructing, these factories, to make up for our inability to engineer complex organisms is really what it boils down to.

Sam So I think although dimi and I came at it from very different directions, where we found our intersection was a belief that the way we do things today are not the best way we could do them, that there's sort of a better possibilities out there, and that the future lies, despite the fact that Jimmy's [00:26:00] background is in hardware, lies not in better hardware, but in better biology.

Karl I love that. Better biology for sure, and we're gonna dig into that. So Neon Bio just recently emerged from stealth with about $11 million in seed funding, which is a great funding round, and congratulations to you guys. You also have a major multi-product partnership to supply three monoclonal antibodies.

Karl Why was it critical for you to keep the platform quiet for as long as you did? meaning you had to have validation from a major global pharmaceutical player. Why was that important?

Dimi Yeah. being in stealth really allowed us to advance the technology, develop our own intellectual property, get ahead of potential competition without sort of noise around us.

Dimi there are companies that come out the gates really flying and, lose momentum, and momentum is really important, when it comes to doing something transformative. You don't always have the, early stage growth that an AI [00:27:00] company might have, right? You don't have $100 million in ARR after a year.

Dimi and so you need other forms of momentum. We knew we'd need to cut through the noise and find the right partner, early on. and doing that on our own terms was really important as opposed to, un-stealthing early and losing some of that momentum

Sam I also think for me personally, having, been in this space that you guys know so well for a long time, where there have been, companies whose technological progress, let's say, have, outpaced their commercial progress.

Sam So I think it was important for us to, be part of setting a new standard in that our first announcement was a commercial one, and that was intentional, right? even though we've built a bunch of incredible technology, we could've announced, technology milestones earlier on. We wanted to be commercial first and help set that as precedent for this, industry.

Erum Yeah, I have a lot of respect for you both for doing that. I remember when I would see you guys at events and like, "Well, what are you working on? What are you working on?" And you're like, "Shh. Can't say." [00:28:00] Exactly. and I was like- And you did it. Yeah, but then it also created for, like, the people that in your network and have been following you from, both you guys have, very great experiences, and you have a network, and just created a lot of, curiosity.

Erum And I think, you know, that has worked in your favor. And also, you know, it's probably a lot more, you were talking about the noise that's around you, but, you were able to focus and not have all these people, asking you questions about what you're doing and just, have the space for yourselves to grow and really be strategic here.

Erum And what a great, great, strategy. So commend you for that.

Dimi it was intentional, but I would say, I'd be lying if I said it didn't happen sooner than we expected it to happen. It definitely, the pace at which, we talk about we moved into our lab space in, February of 2025, and within a year, we're signing a really large commercial deal.

Dimi we'd be lying if we said we, would've predicted that at the time we moved into our lab space with three [00:29:00] people. So, there's, planning and then there's some serendipity involved there too.

Erum Yeah. I love it.

Erum I love that. Okay. So let's get into the meat and potatoes a, a bit more. okay. So we were very fortunate to see you guys at SynBio Beta. And Sam, you were on stage sharing NEON and all the glory behind it. So let's talk about that a little bit. you mentioned the pharmaceutical industry has been trying to make Chinese hamster ovary CHO cells out of steel, but NEON has swapped out steel t-tanks for something else.

Erum So can you tell us a little bit about this biological story, and what do you think resonates the most with pharmaceutical companies who are traditionally incredibly risk-averse?

Sam Yes. Well, we can, cut to the meat and potatoes or, and I don't know if you're intentionally teeing this up, but we're the chicken and potatoes.

Karl I was gonna say eggs and bacon.

Sam Okay. There we go. Much better. Much better. so yeah. So we, we at Neom Bio, we [00:30:00] produce medicines inside chicken eggs. We genetically engineer chickens toto lay eggs filled with therapeutic medicines. We then crack eggs and purify those medicines, which means we replace all of that complex biopharma infrastructure from steel tanks, to valves, to pH sensors, to media, with the humble egg.

Sam and doing this comes with a whole host of advantages, which, we can get into. but I, think what has resonated here with, pharma, which as you said, is risk-averse, one is that there's been a ton of precedents for this, right? There is a drug on the market today made in genetically engineered chicken eggs, that, there is 100 years of safety data for producing therapeutics in chicken eggs.

Sam We make our vaccines in eggs. Many people don't know that, but we do. What we're building is a very different technology, but it means that behind us is a pathway, and a precedent for making safe, efficacious therapeutics in eggs. [00:31:00] And that's really been critical for us. I think that, that is, key hump that we didn't have to get over, that we were already sort of over from, jump street.

Sam I think beyond that, at the end of the day, it is cost, scalability, and resilience. So, I think an, issue that has plagued synthetic biology and biotech has been getting things from the lab to commercial reality. And one of the beauties here is that we don't have that scale-up issue.

Sam when, we create a chicken that lays an egg containing, a therapeutic, if we wanna scale up to 1,000 eggs, we can scale up to 1,000 chickens, which will lay 1,000 eggs a day. And we get there not by putting steel in the ground, but by breeding. In fact, our bioreactors, our chickens, are self-replicating, right?

Sam they do that themselves So scalability, I think, has been a huge advantage for our customers and potential customers. And then the last piece is, is onshoring, and resiliency. So the supply chain for biopharmaceuticals today is [00:32:00] incredibly complex.

Sam It's this Byzantine mixture of, growth factors and pH sensors and valves and steel and plastic, all of the things that essentially go into rebuilding a, hamster.

Sam And there are hundreds of inputs. They largely come from outside the US, and yet our system runs on two inputs. It's chicken feed and water. And I think a huge, draw for many of our partners is that we can do this here in the US, on two very reliable inputs that we have in abundance in every state in the country, pretty much.

Sam our inputs are chicken feed and water. Our outputs are life-saving medicines. And that, is important and, it's always important, but I think that's become increasingly important that, we saw during the pandemic what can happen if you don't have the things you need to make medicines, as you need them.

Sam And I don't think we've seen any other approach that can truly [00:33:00] onshore not just the manufacturing, but the supply chain too. And I think that's pretty unusual

Dimi You know, Bio-- Before we started Neon Bio we explored many branches of the technology tree.

Dimi and we definitely didn't start by saying, "Hey, chickens are the way to solve this problem." That became obvious when we saw the, the advantages of, using this system versus others. we have not seen any other way to, both onshore not just the manufacturing, but the entire supply chain, which is quite critical to that, particular issue, and also do that while reducing costs.

Dimi not just keeping cost parity or a slight premium, which is sort of what happens in most other manufacturing domains, but do this at a cost competitive advantage versus doing this in countries that are traditionally, would locate there for cost reasons.

Karl I'm under the impression, correct me if I'm wrong, and well, actually, you guys, you did say this at the beginning, that, biology, [00:34:00] nature already produces these incredibly complex molecules, macromolecules, proteins, and, the pharmaceutical industry is being driven by the design of biologics.

Karl I would imagine that as the need for, more complex biologics, e-evolves, your, manufacturing platform will enable that. Is that a true assumption?

Sam one of the most wild statistics to me about complex molecules and biopharmaceuticals is that something like 40% of the human secretome the proteins that the human body secretes, cannot be made in this one cell type that we use to make all our biologics in these Chinese hamster ovary cells.

Sam So there are a countless number of potential cures and therapeutics and medicines that are sitting on the cutting floor of pharmaceutical companies and biotechs because someone, designed a potential drug, went to try to make it in the one tool we have to make it, which is a [00:35:00] Chinese hamster ovary cell, and that one tool happened to not work, and so it got discarded.

Sam you'll see this as developability issues, and this happens throughout the pipeline. you know... We're, bullish on, on chickens, but I think more broadly, our philosophy is like, "Hey, let's, open up our aperture. let's sort of spread out beyond the tree of life."

Sam Because otherwise, it's not just about cost, scalability, and resiliency. It's also about actually potential, un-unmet medical needs that we could solve just by unlocking new biology

Karl Yeah, absolutely. could you help our listeners visualize your platform?

Karl It's called Raptor. If someone walked into a Neon biofacilities today, what would they see or hear? What looks radically different than the steel in the ground that a traditional pharmaceutical facility has?

Sam the first thing is what they wouldn't see or hear, right? most things would be missing, right?

Sam All of that steel and plastic and complex machinery and parts and skids and... I these are, big, complex operations that we don't have any of that, right? We have chickens, basically. Our [00:36:00] entire bioprocess is the chicken. And, these are, incredibly clean, biosecure chicken farms.

Sam so these aren't necessarily, look exactly like what you would find at your... you know, my dad keeps chickens, and so it looks a little different than what, he does. but, one beauty here is our margin profile is very different than, a traditional sort of, commodity chicken farm, so we, can afford to have abundant space and all of that.

Sam you know, at the end of the day, it really is chicken farming. It's clean, biosecure, uh, but, you would, you know, really hear, clucking.

Sam And roosters are loud, by the way. roosters are- I was going to ask that ... are very loud.

Erum gets everyone awake.

Erum Oh my gosh, there's so much to do in terms of marketing for you guys with the egg and the chickens and the farm. Oh my God. Which

Karl came first?

Erum Oh, no, no.

Dimi Yo, Frida dropped the ball. I, I would say- Oh my God ... we've probably heard them all, but every now and then we get someone who, really, comes up with something creative. [00:37:00]

Erum Yeah. Yeah. No, that's great. And I, during this, Sid Bhaigida presentation, Sam, you had this, image up you know, what can a farm look like?

Erum And maybe not a traditional chicken farm, but having a lot more greenery and really resemble that biology is working here, not mechanics and not this, just electricity and steel. So I'm sure... And I would love to come see it. Maybe we'll bring our cameras when you're ready, to have people see it.

Sam One of our long-term visions here is also to build the sort of farms of the future, right? And be a place where we can test out concepts that are at the forefront of animal welfare research that maybe today are outside the cost curve for a traditional food production farm, but they could be sort of tested and proven out, at one of our farms, and then kind of make their way into the broader...

Sam Because, at the end of the day, the amount of total chickens we will ever farm is a tiny drop in the ocean, compared to the amount of chickens that are farmed for food, right? So we like to point out [00:38:00] that we could produce the global supply of every biopharmaceutical on the market today with less than 0.01% of the chickens farmed in the United States each year, right?

Sam you know, but if we can do things that ultimately make their way out into the broader, uh, food world, they will have a big, welfare impact as well.

Karl are you guys able to put that into perspective? Like, how many football fields of chickens are grown in the United States?

Karl I mean, is there, like, that kind of image that you can create for our listeners?

Dimi we can hopefully paint the picture here. So let's take one of the top-selling drugs of the last few years, Humira, as an example. billion-plus, gross sales.

Dimi We could produce the global supply of something like Humira using a very, very small chicken farm. So specific numbers would be under 4,000 birds. to put that in perspective, a small chicken farm that your grandparents or parents might run is a [00:39:00] couple hundred birds. A large food chicken farm could be in the hundreds of thousands or millions of birds.

Dimi The USDA would classify a small farm as anything under 25,000 birds. So under 4,000 is really a small, tiny operation. and that's for the global supply of one of the blockbuster drugs. So really, I mean, this is testament to, evolution and just how efficient it is at being a great protein factory, and producing this great protein factory inside the chicken oviduct

Erum yeah, that is incredible.

Erum Okay, so now can you walk us through what happens after the egg is laid? How do you get clinical grade monoclonal antibody out of it? and how does that compare to the downstream side of traditional CHO process?

Sam I think actually it's useful to start there just to level set so that people understand how it's done today with a traditional mammalian cell culture process.

Sam in a traditional process, you [00:40:00] have this bioreactor. You have your steel tank. It's filled with these cells. They are making your protein, your medicine. and then what you have is this big batch, this big sort of brew of cells and protein and, gunk, let's say. and you then have to get your medicine out.

Sam And the first step is to, clean up that process and sort of, try to take out some of the big debris that's formed during your fermentation. so you take that liquid through, let's say, a series of filters. And then you typically do, a step that's called capture, where you run it through a column, and that column has something in it that will grab your protein of interest.

Sam And in that step, you get rid of a lot of the extra stuff, and you end up with, mostly just your protein of interest. And then you go into what's called polishing, which is cleaning up the remaining, debris that kind of slipped through the cracks. That's for a traditional process. We do almost exactly the same thing.

Sam the, [00:41:00] key difference is we start by cracking eggs, which you do not do in a traditional process. And we separate whites and yolks, which you don't do in a traditional, pharma, operation, but you do in, like a mayonnaise factory. and so there's actually equipment for automatically separating, yolks and, and whites that exist for the food industry.

Sam So we separate yolks and whites because mostly we make our medicines in the egg white. From there, we have a liquid that contains our protein of interest, and we have to purify it out, and that sort of follows the same steps. We put it through a column that grabs our protein of interest, and then we do some sort of final cleanup.

Sam I would say the biggest difference other than the egg cracking, might be that The egg white compared to that, I specifically called it gunk because a, mammalian cell culture like liquid, is actually a pretty messy environment. There's thousands of background proteins, there's bits of cell membrane, there's DNA, there's RNA, and you have to get rid of all of that.

Sam In [00:42:00] comparison, egg white is a very clean protein matrix. There's no cells, a cell-free system. there's no DNA or RNA that you have to get rid of. and compared to 5,000 background proteins in a CHO cell lysate, there are just a few dozen major proteins in egg white. And so, we actually have an easier job of doing that sort of purification process than you do for a traditional process.

Karl that's just amazing to me. I mean, we, earlier in the year, we did this, report, with this advanced biotech for sustainability coalition, and, they talked about which of the molecules that should be produced via biotechnology. And one of the things that we talked and spent a lot of time exploring is how expensive downstream processing is, because you end up with all this junk when you are producing things in cells.

Karl So just the fact that you guys can do this way more efficiently in egg whites is a mind-blowing, statement and something that I find to be super [00:43:00] exciting. Since your bioreactors are living animals that replicate and run on grain and water, how do you navigate regulatory conversations with the FDA when your manufacturing facility is an avian egg and not a steel tank?

Dimi We're quite fortunate that we are not the first people to conceive of using genetically engineered animals as a way to produce biologics of various kinds. There are at least four drugs that we know of on the market in the US today produced using living bioreactors. Not all of them are chickens. one is a chicken.

Dimi and they've really paved this pathway for us. so there's clear precedent. we know what that pathway looks like. It also helps us, as Sam mentioned earlier, we have 100 years of safety data on using chickens in the vaccine supply chain. So everything from the protocols for raising clean chickens for human therapeutic use to the actual infrastructure itself is already in [00:44:00] existence, and that further bolsters our case to regulators.

Dimi it also helps that we have advantages in terms of protein stability and, lack of immunogenic reactions and things like that when it comes to expressing proteins in the system. I think a common misconception is that regulators want to stifle our innovation. they actually want innovation, but you know, they're there to make sure that it's safe, and so they work with us.

Dimi we have these incredible benefits of the system in terms of accessibility and affordability and co- and performance of, producing critical life-saving therapeutics. So it's important to have those dialogues and not, think of the regulator as a police force that's there to, to tell us off before we've done anything, right?

Sam I would add too, I think it's, it's actually, 'cause you mentioned that we're doing this in animals, right? As opposed to a kind of, a steel bioreactor. I think a really common misconception, that we've come across [00:45:00] is that, the steel bioreactor is like fine and controlled and consistent, and the animal is messy and variable.

Sam It's actually the opposite, for us, right? Because if you think about it, with the steel bioreactor, when it comes to a, a Chinese hamster ovary cell process, it's basically trying to recreate the, the hamster, right? So you have all these valves and sensors and mixers and spargers, and all of them are there to try to, let's say, get nutrients to all those cells at the right time, at the right moment.

Sam You know what does that, really well? The vascular system of a, hamster, right? and so we have the same thing where, the batch to batch variability from egg to egg is actually much lower than you get in a fed-batch mammalian cell culture process. there you have proteins that are made on day one of a 12-day process that are sitting in the tank for 12 days, and then you have the proteins made on the last day.

Sam Whereas, our, this, our chicken system has been finely [00:46:00] tuned by 200 million years of evolution to produce the same exact amount of protein with the same exact post-translational modifications in every egg. And so, we've had to work to kind of educate the, folks about this, but, it's like one of the most common misconceptions we come across.

Erum Wow. Yeah. I just wanted to say that that's incredible. I just love how you guys are framing this as like, this is so obvious and much a better solution than the traditional way of making drugs or other biologics. I just, think that it's like, okay, it's very commonplace and like there's so many other things I want to use chickens for now because, our podcast is called "Grow Everything," and you can make, you know, anything.

Erum and you, you need better bioreactors, so I see why people are giving you money. Take my money. Like, let's do this.

Karl Yeah.

Sam Sounds good.

Karl So Sam, at Synbio Beta, I floated this idea that I keep coming back to, which is building on what Hirum just said, that maybe we should be moving towards a world where engineering plants and animals is actually easier than forcing microbes to do [00:47:00] things that they never were evolved to do.

Karl , But at Mellanfrost, you built automated bioreactor systems that were driven by machine learning, but now you're working with the genetic architecture of a chicken. What does that shift look like?

Sam it's, it's quite different I would say, um, as you can imagine. I mean, I think first of all, I agree, Carl, right?

Sam That's, that's our-- said this before, but, at the core of our-- of Dimi and I, our philosophy is, I think the last 50 years is that synthetic biology has been there's a handful of organisms we know how to engineer, E. coli, cerevisiae, Cho. let's try to shove them into to try to get them to do our bidding and work really hard to go against evolution.

Sam and I think the next 50 years of synthetic biology are going to be, let's go find the thing that is already good, you know, that has 3.8 billion years behind it of optimization that's already good at the thing we need, and then, make smaller tweaks to, to get it to, do our bidding.

Sam I think, the shift [00:48:00] from MelonFrost to, Neombeio for me was one where our challenges were hardware engineering and, and software engineering primarily. and here, all of our challenges, all of our work pretty much is in tinkering with the genome of the chicken and taking a system that's already really good at what we want it to do, which is making a ton of complex, abundant protein, and then making one small tweak where we swap in a, a, a therapeutic protein for one of the native proteins.

Sam And that's just, a very different task. I think Dimi, Dimi often, reminds us that biology is getting to be more and more of an engineering discipline. I mean, we can our, our team pulls up on the screen their design for the genome, and then they, pull promoters from a database, and then they order, the parts, and it gets synthesized, and it gets sent to us, and then we send it off to Plasmidsaurus or wherever, and it gets sequenced.

Sam All of that is making it more like an engineering discipline. And yet it is not quite the same as hardware or software. There is [00:49:00] still systems operating underneath there that means there's still a, unpredictability that, we haven't fully mastered and, may not ever. that can, I think, lead to sort of challenges, frustrations, surprises.

Sam If you're wanting it to just look exactly like, how you designed it and have it come out that way, you're in for, rocky road, I'd say

Erum that's incredible. Yeah. I mean, I just would love to see more, um, research and understanding happening about what's happening across biology writ large across all organisms, and to be able to pick the right, pathways or right organisms to use.

Erum and hopefully, AI research is helping with that and helping us hone in on things a bit faster. but it remains to be seen But I do want to sh-shift gears and actually go back to the drug supply chain.

Erum And they are incredibly fragile and geographically concentrated today. And Dimi, given your background in tech policy, can you talk to us a little bit more about how farming [00:50:00] medicines locally in eggs inherently strengthens national health security? And I think this is very important to talk about, particularly because your episode's gonna come after our conversation with Senator Todd Young, who's the chair of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotech.

Erum So you guys are the perfect poster child for that organization. But, um, we'll love to hear some more thoughts around policy and, how we can, strengthen national health security.

Dimi Yeah. We, we, we love what the commission is doing. They actually visited us here, at our offices a couple of weeks ago.

Dimi And so, this is all top of mind for us. I think the issue we have in biomanufacturing is mirrored across, manufacturing writ large. if you look at silicon chips, right, the US started to address this, call it eight years ago, six, eight years ago. I think only recently in the last couple of years has biomanufacturing really entered the zeitgeist here.

Dimi and I think what's important is that we, try to control the supply of these critical life-saving [00:51:00] medicines. And for that, it is not enough to onshore the manufacturing when the supply chain is exposed, to potential adversaries, example. Um, we've seen this with rare earth metals, right?

Dimi And that supply chain has been weaponized, y- time and time again, I think. you know, further, I think, Sam mentioned this earlier, we saw the dislocations that can occur in times of pandemic. and I don't know that we're more prepared than we were in twenty twenty for this, with sort of single points of failure and things like that.

Dimi and the problem with the supply chain is we don't actually understand what's going on in most of it, right? we may understand where a, active pharmaceutical ingredient is manufactured. We don't understand where those ingredients or inputs come from necessarily. It's been estimated, twenty-five to eighty percent of global API ingredients directly and indirectly are, in the control of China, for example.

Dimi Another incredible statistic is 58% of manufacturing facilities registered with the FDA are actually [00:52:00] overseas. And when it comes to generics or biosimilars, that's, 87% plus. I think in biosimilars it's actually close to, 100%. And so locating factories overseas is not a problem in and of itself, right?

Dimi if it's friendshore, of course. but, you know, if these get inspected less frequently than the ones that are located here in the US, that can create a sort of double standard. and that's, I think, a situation we don't want to find ourselves in. It's led to some bad things happening in the past.

Dimi and so I think the issue with sort of traditional manufacturing is it just takes billions of dollars and many years to build these facilities, and then once you've built them and onshored them, they still rely on these global supply chains. And that's, where we think we're flipping that on its head, and we're doing this in a fundamentally different way can help to solve a bunch of these challenges.

Dimi I mentioned earlier, we don't just onshore or friendshore or [00:53:00] nearshore, manufacturing itself, but the entire supply chain. And I think that's unheard of when you look at the, potential options here for controlling, bio manufacturing

Karl Yeah, that's amazing. one of the things I've heard you guys say is that your North Star is to drop end-to-end production costs of monoclonal, antibodies below $10 a gram, which is an order of magnitude.

Karl How do you think that price drop changes the global landscape for medicines and healthcare equity?

Dimi I think it's important to say where the $10 a gram came from as well. that was actually set by the Gates Foundation, I think a couple of years ago. super ambitious target, but we think we can get there.

Dimi my personal sort of story here is, I spent the first 12 years of my life living in Zambia, a small mining town in the north of the country in the '90s. And access to cheap and abundant medicines were-- it you know, that access wasn't available to, things that you could buy over the counter here in, here in the US and in the Western [00:54:00] world back then.

Dimi That's fortunately changed, but now that we have more biological medicines that cost tens or hundreds of thousands per treatment or dose, those are still way out of reach. So I think the largest impact of that $10 per gram number would definitely be felt in countries like Zambia. and it would fundamentally change who could be treated, where they could be treated, and where the manufacturing could happen as well, just because of the nature of the manufacturing.

Dimi But I think even in high income countries, there's still poor equity, right? here we probably need another episode to talk about the healthcare inequities here in the US. But, our first, targets are in the generics, the biosimilar space for that reason.

Dimi our core, the first sort of large advantage we have really is, cost, and it's felt most, acutely in the biosimilars and generic space. And so, we do plan to move beyond just being a lower cost and more scalable and more resilient to [00:55:00] unlocking, um, new medicines.

Dimi But that $10 a gram number will guide a lot of the, day-to-day decisions we make. If we have an opportunity to improve our yields or, remove a step in our downstream processing for the reasons that Sam mentioned that that drive us towards the $10 per gram, that will be a priority in terms of resource allocation.

Sam and actually to bring that back all the way to your first question, Carl, about incremental improvements to, things like hardware for traditional processes. Dimi, Dimi's saying end-to-end. That is truly end-to-end, right? So I think it's important to note that a lot of times you hear reported breakthroughs in mammalian cell culture where they've increased the yields or titers, or they've removed some component, or they've got a better bioreactor system that's cheaper.

Sam The problem there is they're often not reporting the hardware costs and the capital costs. And those need to be calculated in the full end-to-end cost. And no matter what you do, if [00:56:00] you're building bioreactor facilities, that's gonna make up half your costs, or something like that.

Sam So, I think that's, really critical here is when we're talking about $10 a gram, that's end-to-end including amortized capital costs for the entire, operating, uh, system. And I just think that that's ambitious because I don't think there's any other approach right now that's gonna get us there.

Erum It's ambitious, it's powerful, it's very exciting, and, can't wait for you guys to get down to that number. You guys have, strong heads on your shoulders. and I wanted to s- you know, wrap up the main question section of this interview, to do a little visioneering and think about the future.

Erum Demi, you mentioned a little bit about, going into different, um, drugs and manufacturing drugs through your platform. would love to hear a little bit about that. And then also what really needs to happen to make eggs a default production system rather than an alternative?

Sam I think, us, this will become the default, and I think they're-- the first customers who are taking that leap with us are, gonna be the [00:57:00] beneficiaries of that. And as people start to see this built out and scaled out and our drugs on the market, it's going to be a pretty rapid, spread, across the industry.

Sam I think there are technologies that we are building that we need to build to broaden, the markets that it makes sense for us to enter and the products that, we can make. but, I think we feel pretty confident that the next decade, we will be farming our medicines

Dimi maybe I'll add on that.

Dimi one of the reasons we're starting with biosimilars is, our first advantage is our cost and scalability and resiliency. Ultimately, how this moves beyond biosimilars into every novel therapeutic and becomes a default is speed and performance. and, the cynical view is, if you're bringing a new drug to market, you don't really care about how much it costs to manufacture it.

Dimi And that's true because, what you charge is so much more than the manufacturing cost for a drug that's first coming to market. what does really [00:58:00] matter is that it performs really well, and you can get it there really quickly. The difference in a month for a blockbuster drug at the billion dollars plus is, hundreds of millions of dollars, right, over a, over the lifetime of a, uh, drug.

Dimi And so the, the ability of the system to just scale that much faster and get to production that much quicker is what will, what will drive this to be the default. It will-- I think it will come to a point where we don't have to convince folks that this is the right way to do this. It will just be evident from the fact that it costs less, it's more resilient, it scales, much more risk-free, and is far quicker for you to get there.

Dimi When it comes to novel therapeutics, we've sort of touched upon this throughout the conversation, but it's true that there are many drugs that you simply can't make or many proteins you simply can't make using mammalian cell culture today. Those will be the tip of the spear for us in, novel therapeutics.

Dimi those [00:59:00] will be the first things that we bring to market, with partners or ourselves. that's also a potential option. and there it's really the fact that we're unlocking new biology. Similar to how, although, you know, we don't wanna make this comparison too many times, similar to how Genentech did that with E.

Dimi coli, right, or Regeneron did that with the mouse, we think we can do that with, chicken biology. Any time you give biologists a new tool to work with, there's so much you can do with that. and so I think beyond, being a manufacturing platform that can do things, cheaper, more resiliently, more scalably, faster, we can also do things that have never been possible before.

Dimi And I think that's really one of the things that excites us most

Karl That's awesome. So we're gonna move into the quick-fire part of this interview where we're gonna each ask you, some simple, maybe complex questions and want you guys to give us some, simple, perhaps [01:00:00] complex answers. But I'm gonna kick it off.

Karl What's the single most unexpected thing that can go wrong when you're trying to genetically engineer a chicken?

Sam Yeah, the, the boring answer here is that the putting, you know, a gene in a particular place in, in, we've largely de-risked that. Um, I think for us, we're just starting to get into some more, let's say, out there or moonshot engineering problems.

Sam And I mentioned this earlier, but there at the end of the day, the challenge is it's biology. And so until you see it, made, you, you just don't know what you're gonna get. but one of the reasons we're so excited about this technology is for making proteins in egg whites. That part's already been, done enough times to be de-risked.

Erum If your engineered hens went on strike, what would be their number one union demand?

Sam I think now it You know, actually, so they get a lot of enrichment. These are, as you can imagine, very pampered chickens. And, we've recently given them wiffle balls, and they're really [01:01:00] into the wiffle balls. for whatever reason- ... they seem to love this enrichment.

Sam So I think if they went on strike right now, they'd be asking for more wiffle balls.

Dimi More wiffle balls, more, broccoli. They love to eat broccoli and things like that,

Sam Yeah, it's a good point. We've, give them broccoli, we give them lettuce, and we sort of ir-irradiate these things so they're sterile.

Sam And, um, we recently stopped giving them worms because we weren't happy enough with the biosecurity status of the worms. So I think they, if we can figure out better biosecure worms, they'll be very happy.

Erum Oh, th-there's a company.

Karl There you go. Biosecure worms- Biosecure worms

Karl or chickora crickets. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam If you're looking for a partnership and you make biosecure worms, contact us at Neom Bio.

Karl I've got some very young entrepreneurs looking for projects that- Oh. There we go.

Sam Great.

Karl What's the single funniest misunderstanding a biopharma investor had when you told them you were manufacturing drugs in eggs?

Dimi Yeah. There have been some very interesting ones. Well, I'll share one. had [01:02:00] one investor who, who basically said something along the lines of, "We get the genetic engineering part, makes a ton of sense, recombinant proteins and egg. But farming, that sounds really tough. I have a cousin who farms, and he tells me how tough that is."

Dimi And, we basically agreed to disagree, but what we did agree on was the fact that, it would cost about 10 cents to produce a food egg. So it might, might all be tough in there and challenging and, all of that, but at the end of the day, the output is still pretty affordable.

Erum Oh, wow.

Erum That's interesting. Yeah. I think farming wouldn't be as challenging as genetic engineering, but- ... you know, everyone- It was ... has their own truth. Yeah. Some- someone had a

Sam bad experience. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Okay.

Erum So speaking of genetically engineering,

Erum If you could secretly genetically engineer a chicken to do one non-medical chore for the company, what would it be?

Dimi I mean, as the-

Erum Farming?

Dimi The hard part. That would, that would be- [01:03:00] Sorry. That would be really, as Priyam was saying is, maybe leading the blind in this case. But, I think if we could, yeah, personally, if I could get a chicken to run my calendar, that would be amazing. Um, but- ... um, if we could teach chickens to carry out, the, delicate microsurgeries that we have to do to do the genetic engineering, we could just, like, close that, loop.

Dimi It would be chicken, egg, genetically engineered chicken, you know. It would be a different loop, but that might be, something we'd want to do.

Erum Yeah. The-

Erum You

Sam know,

Erum there was a- ... chicken and the omega ...

Sam there was a famous chicken in Chinatown, in New York City, that played tic-tac-toe. I don't know if you guys know about this- Yes

Sam this chicken.

Erum Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Yeah.

Erum That's another marketing, like, u- use that chicken as an influencer. For you guys.

Karl Okay, so final question. Settle the ultimate debate for all of us once and for all. What actually comes first, the chicken or the bioreactor egg?

Sam Well, Carl, w- at, Neom Bio, we like to say that, that it's the wrong [01:04:00] question. The right question is, what comes next? That's my last, chicken pun for the day. Chills.

Karl I'm like, no.

Erum Oh, wow. Well, this has been an incredible conversation. I'm so happy that you guys are finally out of stealth and we could talk about this openly. It's a big lift off my shoulders, because I was always wondering. But, I wanted to know, is there anything you want to ask our audience? I know that you had some, a call to action, Sam, when you're on stage or you're looking to hire, looking for customers, of course.

Sam Yeah. I think those are, right now, the, two biggest things for us are, one, if you are making proteins, need proteins made, developed, supplied, uh, reach out.

Sam we're excited about what this, can do, and we're commercial now. We're working with partners, and we want to expand that pipeline. And then we're always looking for talent right there. what we're doing is bold and ambitious and requires the best talent in the world. If you're a brilliant engineer, uh, scientist, [01:05:00] uh, yeah, reach out.

Sam You can go to our website, find our contact, and, we're excited to keep expanding our team.

Karl Love it. I love this conversation. I can't wait to check back in with you guys, and then also to see you guys at a soon to happen Brooklyn Biotech Mafia event.

Sam Let's do it.

Sam Can't wait. Would love that.

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Erum Carl, what'd you think about that episode?

Karl I'm a huge fan of Sam and Dimi and what Neon Bio is doing. I agree with them that drug development is very challenging and manufacturing infrastructure is very expensive. So this idea of, trying to reproduce, Chinese hamster ovary cells in steel doesn't really make a lot of sense, and going to [01:07:00] nature as a biomanufacturing facility, I guess is what I would call it, is something that is really unique, and I'm sur- surprised no one's done this before. I'm very excited for them. What do you think, Erum?

Erum Yeah, I mean, I love it. we've known Sam for quite some time, and I've met Dimi, and when we were, talking they were in stealth, and then they finally came out of stealth, and I was like, "Wow, this is such a breakthrough idea." And I just love that it's, under-engineering, you know?

Erum I feel like a lot of pharma is so over-engineered to create one molecule when biology's complex, there's multiple biological processes happening, and requires multiple molecules. And that's like food, right? when you eat, spinach, it's not just one molecule that's coming out of the spinach, right?

Erum There's multiple molecules working, and that has multiple benefits. So I just love that this idea of, looking at biology to create, a product, right? Is this a beautiful thing. I mean, hello, grow everything, right? this is wonderful. And this idea of, using synthetic biology to [01:08:00] genetically engineer these chickens to lay eggs that contain the therapeutic proteins is incredible. It's this biologically native production system that it's way cleaner, it's simpler, and clearly more scalable.

Karl Yeah, and it harkens back, and harkens is a word that I, rarely use, to, we had, Josh Robinson of Cocoon Biosciences on. They were using moth larvae as a biomanufacturing factory.

Karl And, we had worked with a company called Core Biogenesis that was using a very specific plant. And so we've seen a couple of companies do this, in the past, and I think we're gonna see a lot more of it because nature solves a lot of the problems that we're trying to solve in fermentation tanks. yes, it might make the downstream processing more challenging, but I think if you do it the right way, it could actually make the downstream processing a lot easier and cheaper. for listeners, what this shows is that this isn't something that's gonna happen in the future. These guys are doing it [01:09:00] right now. they, at Neon it's like they've already thought about the downstream purification. It's gonna be faster. They can scale up faster. they don't have to wait to build these huge facilities. and they can start making proteins that CHO cells can't make. So very excited for them.

Erum And of course, this connects to bigger industry themes. So this conversation that we had with Sam and Demie, it talked about, of course, how do you model cost? What does supply chain resilience look like? it's something that we talk about in industry level, but also on the, governmental, national level. How do we have the supply chain resilience? And of course, means the national health security, what does that look like? So this is an idea that's truly domestic biomanufacturing. It requires onshoring, both manufacturing and its underlying inputs. So I, just love this.

Erum And I also want to appreciate the decision that Sam and Demie made to be stealth until they had partnerships. Even they raised money, they made that quiet until they got more money. And [01:10:00] they made this, it was a beautifully orchestrated startup where it was, both on the technical side, the partnership side, the narrative side, the fundraising side, all of it. And so this is a wonderful playbook, right? Some people have these large campaigns, and they don't have anything. And I get that that could work for some type of products. You know, you could do that just to prove out that, if you're trying to create, a skin cream that has a unique brand. You might wanna do the branding first to see if people would even buy it, and then can develop perhaps later. I don't know. But I just liked the fact that this company that has this product went stealth and worked and worked and worked, and then bada bing, bada boom.

Karl Yeah.

Erum They come out.

Karl Yeah. I love that too. and I'm super happy for Sam and Dimi, and I can't wait to, number one, see them around, and number two, have them come back on the podcast or in 6 or 12 months and really talk about their progress. I think as soon as we had [01:11:00] recorded, Sam took off and got married. Congratulations, Sam. And then they announced a very substantial fundraising, so congratulations to the team for that. And we're just very excited for you.

Erum Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. so that's our episode. We wanted to point you to our Grow Everything LinkedIn page. So if you're on LinkedIn and you wanna get amazing biotech content delivered to your feed, definitely follow and like.

Erum the link is in the show notes. Our LinkedIn is very good, very interesting. The best.

Erum and then finally, of course, we wanna point you to the direction of World Biomarkets. They've been a great communication partner. we will be going to Omaha in September. Join us. Get your tickets. we do have a promo code. Use promo code GrowEverything for 25% off your ticket to World Biomarkets.

Erum If you're interested in commercializing and scaling up biomanufacturing, this is the conference for you.

Karl Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. All right, [01:12:00] well thank you for tuning into the Grow Everything podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us. We love when our audience reaches out.

Karl Our contact information is in the show notes, and don't forget to subscribe to our Substack. Let's grow.

Erum Let's grow.