SynBioBeta

SynBioBeta 2027 Super Early Bird pricing is available through Friday, June 15.

Join the AIxBio founders, biopharma leaders, investors, and startups building the future of biology.

Presenting sponsor: Pumpkinseed

May 3–6, 2027 | San Jose, CA
Lock in your pass early.

syntheticbiologysummit.com/2027/early-bird

@saakohl and @Latent_Labs are on a run, and we have had a front-row seat.

Ahead of his SynBioBeta keynote in San Jose in May, Simon said he wanted the room to leave knowing that a threshold has been crossed in drug design, shown with lab-validated results today and not as a future promise. Five months later, Latent Labs is back with more evidence.

A quick profile of the man behind it:

• Co-led @GoogleDeepMind's protein design team and set up its wet lab at @TheCrick
• Senior research scientist on the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold2 team, where he developed the pLDDT confidence metric
• Founded Latent Labs in 2023 and launched with $50M from @radicalvcfund, @SofinnovaVC, @8vc and @kindred_vc, with angels including @JeffDean and @aidangomez
• Keynoted CVPR 2026
• Took the SynBioBeta stage in 2025 with @alex_pentland, @RichardSocher and @nabihasaklayen, then keynoted in 2026

Now the news. Latent Labs released Latent-Y, which it calls the first lab-validated drug design agent. It runs on Latent-X2, the company's frontier model for antibody and peptide design, and it automates the literature review, target analysis and epitope selection that used to need a specialist. It scales on @nvidia Blackwell B300 GPUs through the partnership with @nebiusai.

What Latent Labs reports:

• 56x faster computational antibody design than independent estimates for expert protein designers
• Roughly 4,300x faster on literature review and PDB structure analysis
• Roughly 350x faster on structural analysis and epitope selection
• Confirmed nanobody binders against six of nine targets across three campaign types
• A campaign that started from a single peer-reviewed paper and ended in confirmed binders against human transferrin receptor

The ion channel result is the one I would not skip. @vyy_sf's team at @ucd_physiology used the Latent Labs Platform to design new nanobodies against a human ion channel. Four of five designs inhibited the channel's current, and the strongest reached an IC50 of 30 nM in the first round, with no further lab optimization. Ion channel blockers have often started from natural toxins. De novo design lets researchers build around the channel they actually want to block.

The bigger shift is who gets to do this work. Researchers with clinical or biological expertise and no machine learning background can now design de novo binders for their own targets. If design gets this fast, the constraint moves to wet-lab testing, target choice, and the data used to judge candidates. Latent Labs expects people to run dozens of targets in parallel, test several epitope hypotheses at once, and design for selectivity between close relatives from day one.

These figures come from Latent Labs and have not been independently verified, but the direction is hard to ignore.

Neion Bio makes biologic drugs in egg whites. Now it has hired a #BioMarin veteran to go after the proteins nobody finds easy to make.

Neion started with biosimilars. Maga’s job is to take its Raptor platform further, into complex therapeutic proteins that are hard to express in any system.

John A. Maga joins as Head of Biologics and CMC after nearly 15 years at BioMarin Pharmaceutical.

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“The natural biology of the chicken and egg also gives us a remarkable production environment, with characteristics that are especially valuable for certain complex and innovative proteins.”

Partnerships like the ones Neion wants to build start with a conversation in the room.

Visit the SynBioBeta website to read the full article:
synbiobeta.com/read/neion-bio…

Oompa Loompa, doompa-dee-doo
There's something fascinating in candy for you 🍬
Oompa Loompa, doompa-dee-dee
It's made with a little biotechnology 🧬

What makes your sour gummies tangy and bright 🍋
Aspergillus gets the chemistry right!
It ferments the sugar, makes citric acid for your sweet,
The secret little fungus behind every treat!

Oompa Loompa, doompa-dee-doo
Look at what else nature and science can do!

What gives your candy that beautiful red 🟥
Cochineal insects are the source instead 🐞
Carmine's the pigment, a brilliant display,
From Dactylopius coccus all the way!

And what makes your candy coating gleam?
Kerria lacca makes shellac for that sheen!
From insect to ingredient, isn't it neat?
Biology helps make the candy we eat!

🎃 Happy Halloween from all of us at @SynBioBeta 🎃

Necrotic enteritis is a $6 billion problem for the chicken industry.

It starts with a microbe that belongs there. Clostridium perfringens lives in every healthy chicken's gut. But when a bird gets stressed, from a feed change or a vaccination, it turns into a gut-punching parasite. It starts making two toxins that break open the gut lining and pull nutrients out for itself.

On Sept 29, BiomEdit got @USDA approval for the first engineered microbe that engrafts in the gut and secretes an antibody to stop it. Not by killing C. perfringens, and not with an antibiotic. By neutralizing the toxins and stopping its mechanism of action in its tracks.

That mechanism is where the $6 billion comes from, and it hits farmers three ways:

- Feed conversion. Most birds don't die. They just absorb less of what they eat and need about 11% more feed per pound of meat. Feed is 65 to 75% of the cost of raising a broiler, so this hits the bottom line directly.
- Weight. Birds with the subclinical form run about 12% lighter at market.
- Mortality. In the worst cases, the birds die.

So does it work? In a challenge study with Southern Poultry Research Group, mortality fell from 13.1% to 6.6%, a 48.7% reduction. Treated birds also converted feed better and gained more weight. Same 42 days, same feed bill, more chicken.

The product is already in more than 35 million broilers across three major US producers. That data comes in around January 2027.

It's also proof of concept. You can deliver a microbe, have it engraft, and have it make a therapeutic right where the disease is.

This is just the first of many potential applications for BiomEdit's microbe engineering platform for drug delivery. Next up are rumen strains that cut methane, gut enzymes that break down inflammatory factors, and dogs with IBD, where an antibody made inside the gut can stay out of the rest of the body.

Our correspondent @AaronBlotnick spoke with Aaron Schacht earlier this month to learn about what BiomEdit is building and where they see this technology going. Schacht's take:

"We have an N of 1. If you think back to the first antibody that was ever made, this might be the same moment for this modality."

Aaron Blotnick has the full story on our website, link in the comments.