ur collaboration episode of Synversations, a podcast that explores the depths of synthetic biology from various multidisciplinary standpoints. I'm Tess King and I'll be your host for today. I'm a third year student at the University of Toronto studying physics and physical geography.

Synversations, is a 5 episode long podcast created by the University of Toronto Policy and Practices division of its iGEM team. iGEM is a student association dedicated to the practice of synthetic biology and dissemination of its scientific foundations.

Joining us today is Jordan from Ontario Genomics, and Katariina, one of our iGEM leads interviewing him.

K: My name is Katariina Jaenes, and I'm the co-president of iGEM Toronto. 

J: My name is Jordan Thompson and I'm a manager of strategic planning at Ontario Genomics. 

K: Can you give us a little bit of an idea as to what you do at Ontario Genomics as a strategic planner?

J: Sure, so I guess us as an organization, we focus on, we don't do research ourselves, we focus on helping researchers, so helping them formulate projects and ultimately get access to money so they can do the cool stuff that they do. We also work with businesses, so some are startup companies that really get to understand genomics and biotechnology, and we try to help them add business expertise, help them get funding, that kind of thing. Other times we go to large companies, that maybe don't understand how genomics or biotechnology can benefit what they do, and we try to help them see that, and then connect them with an academic researcher that could bring that expertise. 

K: Do you do any liaison with government agencies to try and explain synthetic biology is and the value of synthetic biology?

J: For sure, so a lot of work is talking about the value of genomics, the value of synthetic biology, for Ontario, so economic prosperity, we're talking about the potential for us to have scientific excellence in this area, that kind of thing. We do quite a lot, especially myself, do quite a lot of that work. 

K: Can you give us an idea of what the current state of synthetic biology is in industry and academic [settings]?

J: Sure, so in Ontario, you look at, as you probably know, synthetic biology is very multi-disciplinary, so when you look at what's happening in Ontario if you Google 'synthetic biology Ontario', you probably see iGEM teams come up for sure, you might see a few professors kind of talk about themselves that way, so at first glance, you might think there's not very much going on. When you kind of dig a little bit deeper and ask people 'what are you actually doing?', you see there's a lot more people that are really interested in this and doing good work in this, so you know, for instance you might see someone who is a yeast geneticist that is looking at understanding fundamental biology, but then from that they get an interest and say 'well, hey, can we tweak how the yeast works to make us a biofuel, or a specific renewable chemical', that kind of thing. I think on the company side of Ontario, you see some established companies, so I think one area is in Sarnia, they have a, they call it the 'biohybrid chemistry cluster', you have a large company BioAmber, so they have engineered yeast that produces a renewable chemical and they produce something like 30000 metric tons of that a year, so that's pretty cool. You also see a lot of startups in that space as well, that hopefully could one day grow and be in those larger companies as well. 

K: On the same note as the companies and synthetic biology, how is the translation rate of synthetic biology research into companies right now?

J: That's a good question. I think, you look at, say from an investor's perspective or just general perspective about time to commercialize an app, right. You just need some smart people and computers and you can do that really rapidly. I think science has always been seen as a really long, expensive path - for one, all the understanding you need to have of biological systems, it's complicated and a lot of the past work has been focused on drugs - a very long and regulatory path to get there. A lot of drugs fail, as everyone knows. You look at synthetic biology and I think things have just really sped up a lot, so on the technical side, the throughput that you can do is pretty amazing with new tools for manipulating DNA. You look at companies like Ginkgo Bioworks or Amyris in the US, and you know, you talk to them, they produce 100,000 yeast strains a month. That's unfathomable ten years ago, so really really cool. Just with that throughput, not just on the actual biology and manipulation, but then the fact that we can interpret all that data so you know, you can sequence those strains, you can look at protein production and transcription, all those things, get all that data. Use things like machine learning and AI to go and inform your next round of what do you want that organ to look like, and with that you just get to your solution a lot quicker. I think that gap is really closing, and I think you see it too, opening into new areas that aren't just therapeutics as well, producing synthetic leather or gelatin from an engineered yeast, or bacteria for instance. Stuff like the Impossible Burger, with engineered heme to make it look like a bleeding, real beef burger - these types of things you can just get to market a lot quicker than you could a drug. 

K: Do you think moving forward, with regards to companies that focus on synthetic biology, do you see we'll see more commercial applications of synthetic biology? Perhaps in the next 5-10 years.

J: I think so. You see a lot of private venture capital investment going in, like a billion dollars last year, just last year alone. There's lots of excitement on the commercialization side. You look at synthetic biology - I mean sure, when it started out, people are saying 'can we make a cell act like an electronic circuit?', you know, electronic circuits, can we have a toggle switch for these types of things, you know, developing that fundamental concept. But now it's really problem driven. I think any time someone is problem driven, if someone's identifying a real problem that exists and they can develop a solution that's going to mean commercial potential, or at least translation potential anyways.

K: Perhaps taking a step back and looking at bridging off the question as to where we are right now with synthetic biology, based off of what you've seen and what you've heard, where do you think synthetic biology is going to be in Canada, Toronto or in the world 5-10 years from now?

J: Just as a caveat, I'm not a technical expert in this, I just look at how things are moving. I think there's a lot of potential - you look at some of the hype that was generated around synthetic biology was around 2008 in biofuels. The price of oil is very high, so everyone can just have a huge opportunity to make money off of biofuels. Now the price of oil is a lot lower, I think people have pivoted smartly to sometimes more niche applications or more high value applications. I come from a non-bio based synthetic chemistry background, and everyone wants green, everyone wants renewable and I think synthetic biology is one of the best ways to do that. You can look at, and I mentioned BioAmber, just having a chemically equivalent product but produced from renewable resources instead of from oil, and the number of chemical products that are out there in the world, is enormous. I think the sky's the limit for that, and I think you'll see a ton of that, first probably with the higher value flavours and fragrances. Instead of synthetic vanilla, it's produced from petroleum - you'll see vanilla produced from a yeast, for instance, from fermentation. I think we'll see a lot of those applications and then I think as we get better and better at engineering and biology and feedstocks get cheaper so the source of sugar that you are going to use to turn to chemical, that will open up platform chemicals and commodity chemicals and that will be potentially huge. So you can make polyethylene or nylon, or polyesters renewable-ly, using biology rather than from petroleum. That's really exciting for me I think, because there's going to be a huge market and you see companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi interested in having renewable plastic bottles. Imagine every Pepsi bottle is now produced from synthetic biology - that's a huge opportunity. So I think, lots of potential there. 

Within Ontario, I think a lot of that will depend on how much investment we can get into the area. Like I said, we got a lot of cool stuff, a lot of great research happening. One I think is can we show the world that we've got that and attract that investment? A lot of that venture capital is not within Canada, it's within the US or elsewhere, so it will depend on that. Hopefully, us as an organization can help do that a little bit and make people aware of what we've got here. I think it's also building on what we have here - so you look at agriculture, it's huge in Ontario, we grow a lot of food, we have massive fruit processing industries. Can synthetic biology benefit that? Absolutely, so we can tie what we've got in Ontario to our industrial strengths. I think there's really big potential for Ontario, so I think that food processing and ags? -based is one big one. In Sarnia in particular, the biochemical/bioproducts based, as well, is another really big potential area for us.

K: There are a few interesting potential avenues that I've recently learned about. One of them is the clothing industry. There's a company called Bolt Threads, that I really enjoy reading through their mission, which is basically to produce silk threads, or spidersilk through yeast production, and to tie that into clothing production and create more sustainable fabrics for the clothing industry, which I think is very interesting.

J: I love that area, I think it's super cool. I think you can buy adidas shoes now that have that kind of engineered silk put into them, which is really cool. You see less sexy applications too, like Dupont has renewable carpet fibres - so not as cool, but everyone has carpet, so if you can make that renewable, it's huge.

K: I think one that I'm personally, everyone in iGEM knows that I love bio-luminescence and I love applications of bio-luminescence. For a while, there was a growing plant startup that didn't end up panning out, but the idea was that you can try and use bio-luminescence as an alternative source of lighting, or a way to produce light. There's a company that I found out about called 'Glowee', I think it's from France. Their idea is to create lights that could contain bio-luminescence algae in them, and use those as lighting sources. I think that's a very interesting idea of biological lighting. I'm very interested in that. There's a lot of very cool different avenues, and avenues that a lot of people don't maybe know about. If I was something who didn't know about bio, and I heard about these applications I think I would be very fascinated about them. 


J: Ginkgo Bioworks and Bayer CropScience just announced this joint venture to produce nitrogen fixing bacteria for crops, so like row crops like wheat, corn and soybeans. You're talking about areas that people don't understand, so global fertilizer use, especially nitrogen use, is a huge consumer of energy, massive greenhouse gas emission both when they make it and then also when it's also in the fields and you have nitrogen oxide being produced, so to be able to do that, people might not see much of a difference in food that they get, but the impact that growing food would have could just drop so much, so I think that's a super exciting one, it seems like the right team to be able to solve a pretty big challenge too.

K: What are some of the challenges trying to communicate synthetic biology to organizations and companies? Because you talked early about how a lot of synthetic biology is tied into the research of multiple different disciplines, but they don't really acknowledge or call it synthetic biology.

J: Yeah I think part of the challenge I look at, I mean I'm someone who likes technology, it's interesting to me, I don't know if I'm still a scientist - I was a scientist at one point. Coming at it from a technology standpoint, it's so cool, you can make something glow or you can have a toggle switch in a bacteria that turns on and off. Wow that's amazing. But no one cares about that, really. People want to solve problems, so I think a big thing to do is to always think when you are communicating - ok, you want people to understand the technology well enough, but you really want to emphasize what problems that they have can it solve. If you're looking at government, what are priorities for government, and the climate change, economic growth, these types of things - so you need to tie what that technology can do to help those areas. Companies, it's the same thing. You're not selling them on technology, you're telling them on what could they say to their customers that's going to help them generate more revenue, or be more sustainable, whatever's important to them. So I think really understanding what are the real problems that are out there, and then framing the cool technology that you have around that, rather than saying 'look at this technology, why don't you get that it's so cool?'. Because that's banging your head against a wall.

K: One thing with multi-disciplinary community, the way we've thought about science traditionally, within universities or funding agencies is really more a single discipline. You look at chemistry department, biology, physics, that kind of thing. And that's not the way science is being done as much anymore, especially in synthetic biology, as you know, it's spanning all of these different areas. It's a real challenge for how do you organize within the university to make sure that you are bringing all these disciplines together in a constructive way, and I think for funders too, some of it the funders might want to actually fund this work, but I look at it at our own work, and if you're typically working with people working in the genomics field, molecular biologists, bioinformatics people, but someone from electrical engineering could do a really cool project that would fit under that. We just don't know them and they don't know us, and so that's a big challenge and I think that's something that, I mean our job is to help tap into Ontario's research potential, and to help them get money, and so I think that's something that could really be built on, and it's tricky because there are just so many moving parts in different fields, so how do you bring them all together? And then have the right expertise on a project, convince a funder that it's the right thing to do and then get money to do it. That's a big challenge and I'm sure not something that we're facing, but you see it in other fields as well, like AI or anything like that. 

K: After the conversation that you had about? the university, I felt that too, is how engrained the structure of the university, because it is such a big institution here. It's very hard to be able to fit such an interdisciplinary group into one even division. There's arts and science, and engineering, and to try and explain that we're both is quite the challenge. And people understand it, but one person can't do anything about that. 

J: It's true, and you see there's lots of moving parts, and large organizations have to be slow because there are a lot of things that need to happen. Part of the challenge is too, how fast innovation is happening now. By the time, say, you figure out how we're going to bring a specific group together, say through a new department, or even a new faculty, 7 years from now, things could be completely different. We're just seeing that shortening right, in these big leaps forward, so that makes it really hard for universities. I think it makes it really hard for regulators too, because how do you - you heard the example about Uber, so how do we regulate Uber compared to taxi cabs? that kind of thing. By the time we figure that out, autonomous vehicles will probably be here. And now there's a whole new question. So I think you'll see the same thing with biology as well, and that's tough. 

K: Thanks so much for joining us and for sharing your insight.

J: Thanks very much for having me.

That concludes the final segment of our five episode long podcast, Synversations. Don’t forget to check us out on facebook, instagram, twitter, and igem toronto.ca. But wait - there's more! We have a final, bonus collaboration episode with input from iGEM teams from around the world, so we'll see you next time.