Closing Gaps in the Biotech Industry

While attending this year’s Commercializing Industrial Biotechnology (CIB) conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I was struck by the incredible variety of products that can be made using a few fundamental technologies. At the conference, held in May 2025, engineers discussed their biobased techniques for producing low-carbon fuels, fertilizers, cosmetics, and everything in between.

Industrial biotechnology may be a young field, but its roots lie in the long history of pharmaceutical manufacturing. For example, fifty years ago, insulin was primarily harvested from the pancreases of pigs and cows. Vaccines could only be grown on animal cell cultures. Processes like this were messy, unpredictable, and slow to manufacture. It was Genentech that found a way to translate recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology into a commercially scalable method for producing insulin, creating the first recombinant pharmaceutical. Their method of growing genetically modified bacteria in enormous cultures under precisely optimized fermentation conditions remains the model for industrial biomanufacturing, and their breakthrough allowed industrial biotechnology to explode into a versatile industry with applications much farther reaching than pharma.

Start-ups across all industries face a few ubiquitous hurdles — e.g., the need for capital investment, high research and development (R&D) costs, difficulty attracting top talent, and...