Very interesting article; well worth reading the whole thing. Exciting to see startups in the "hard tech" space! Also, complete transcription of the conversati

Very interesting article; well worth reading the whole thing. Exciting to see startups in the "hard tech" space! Also, complete transcription of the conversation with George Church: https://bioengineeringcommunity.nature.com/users/20939-laura-defrancesco/posts/57342-a-conversation-with-george-church https://bioengineeringcommunity.nature.com/users/20939-laura... Some choice excerpts: > Shendure feels the inflection point came in 2010, with the founding of AbVitro by Church and his then-postdoc Francois Vigneault. AbVitro may to this day hold a special place in the annals of startups from the Church lab. After starting from only a little over $3 million in startup funding from a single VC firm, Sante Ventures, in 2012, the company was snapped up by Juno for $125 million four years later. That was followed by Celgene’s purchase of Juno, and more importantly led to several cell therapies now in the investigational new drug (IND) phase, according to Vigneault. “[Church] never had a really big success until we decided to do AbVitro and that one ended up knocking it out of the ball park. That triggered a lot of people to start companies because it looks easy from the outside,” he says. “It’s not,” he adds. [...] Whether or not AbVitro was the bellwether, the pace began picking up around 2015, and reached a fevered pitch in 2018. > [...] biggest change from the past is that lab members are stepping up to take the role of CEO, rather than chief scientific officer (CSO) or chief technology officer (CTO). He sees an upswing in entrepreneurial verve across the university, but especially coming out of the Church lab. “They really have a desire to take on that business challenge of managing the company and growing the opportunity, seeking out the financing, seeking out the collaborations, and really focusing on the business aspect [...] > [...] the current startup environment is different from that of the past in several significant ways. There is a very rich ecosystem of infrastructure for startups to launch into. “Places like LabCentral or Alexandria LaunchLabs are where you have a full BSL2 [biosafety level 2] lab ready to go and you can rent a bench on and have access to equipment for relatively small amounts of money,” he says. Access to capital is high for these kinds of ventures, he says, adding that a new breed of scientific founder is also emerging. “They have grown up in the era of startups, and have technology, multidisciplinary backgrounds across biology, computer science and engineering,” [...] > In addition, the technology may now be catching up with some of the Church “crazy” ideas of years past. Cain McCleary, of KdT Ventures, which has invested in two from this cohort and one a few years back, says, “I feel like he’s consistently been ahead of his time in creating tool sets, but all of a sudden, our analysis and manufacturing has caught up to it, so it’s a particularly special time for folks in his lab,” he says.