They tried with artemisinin and it was a very notable failure. The science worked but the economics didn't add up. The main reason is because chemical drugs are

They tried with artemisinin and it was a very notable failure. The science worked but the economics didn't add up. The main reason is because chemical drugs are pretty easy to synthesize (even from plants) and that synthetic bio doesnt give you any advantage over traditional methods- if anything you get lower throughput. You cant solve a human supply chain problem with new technology if the same humans are making the same decisions about their operations. Synbio has been overhyped to hell and back as a silver bullet. Tech VCs have eaten it up and donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the cause because the biologists running these companies have gone out of their way to convince people that they can program biology like computers, whatever that means.the big synbio drug manufacturing company is gone, the big biofuel companies are gone, that's hundreds of millions of dollars from the market trying to adopt this. I'm saying all this as the founder of a synbio company by the way- in the past few years we've finally started coming down the hype curve with Joule's implosion and it's wonderful. 10 million dollars invested in promising new approaches and markets will help the field out a lot more than 100 million invested in an overhyped company blowing it all on rent in cambridge and promising to produce more fuel per acre than physically possible with the amount of sunlight available.