The China question is tearing US biotech apart

Very clever or how China lures biotech companies from heavily overregulated Western countries!

Communists know how to play capitalists! 😊 There is e.g. this famous quote: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them"

Again, was the SARS-CoV-2/Covid 19 virus developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (an institute known for dual use research), which was funded by the federal government of the US under Anthony Fauci!

"The problem is China. [US] Fledgling startups and pharmaceutical giants alike are addicted to Chinese drugs, filling their pipelines with would-be blockbusters developed at enviable speed and bought on the cheap. They’ve spent some $60 billion on Chinese molecules in the first three months of 2026 alone, according to state figures. That’s on pace to double last year’s total, which was already 10 times larger than the one from 2021.

No one disagrees that it’s good business. And more drugs moving swiftly through development means hope for patients around the world desperately awaiting new medicines. ..."

 

America's Chinese biotech question: A road to riches or ruin? (behind paywall) "Its ascent is forcing U.S. firms and investors to pick a side: Is the country an ally or an existential threat?"

Scientists engineer E. coli to monitor arsenic in rice paddies in Southeast Asia

Good news!

How serious of a problem is this arsenic pollution of rice paddies in this region?

"Cornell scientists have engineered E. coli to act as a sensitive biosensor for monitoring environmental arsenic, a toxic pollutant most notably found in rice paddies in Southeast Asia.

A new study provides a proof of principle for a potentially cheap living sensor that can record even transient arsenic exposure under anaerobic conditions, preserve this information in the genome and allow delayed readout later in the open air of the lab.

The ability to detect and record arsenic exposures under both aerobic and anaerobic conditions has been a challenge for other types of arsenic biosensors. 

At the same time, the mechanism within this sensor has the potential for use in other bacteria species and to detect other toxins. ..."

From the abstract:

"The ability to induce heritable genomic changes in response to environmental cues is valuable for environmental biosensing, for experimentally probing microbial ecology and evolution, and for synthetic biology applications. Site-specific recombinases provide a route to genetic memory via targeted DNA modifications, but their high specificity and efficiency are offset by leaky expression and limited tunability in prokaryotes.

We developed a tightly regulated, titratable Cre recombinase system for Escherichia coli that achieves low recombination rates and minimal basal activity. Implemented on both plasmids and the chromosome, the latter showed superior retention of genetic memory across generations. These features make the system broadly useful for environmental biosensing and other applications. To demonstrate applicability to environmental biosensing, we developed a whole-cell recombination-based biosensor for arsenite, a toxic and ubiquitous pollutant that is primarily mobilized in anoxic environments, such as flooded soils, sediments, and aquifers. However, existing arsenite whole-cell biosensors face limitations in sensitivity and workflow in anaerobic settings.

Our biosensor reliably recorded anoxic arsenite exposure as a stable genetic memory for delayed fluorescence readout in aerobic conditions, with detection sensitivity comparable to conventional wet chemical methods.

By decoupling exposure from measurement, this approach offers a foundation for arsenite biosensing under field-relevant conditions, including redox variability and other physicochemical gradients, without the constraints of anoxic measurement. More broadly, the ability to induce low-rate, heritable genetic changes expands the genetic toolkit for environmentally responsive systems, with applications in environmental monitoring, bioproduction, and bioengineering, as well as experimental studies of microbial ecology, evolution, and host-microbe interactions."

Scientists engineer E. coli to monitor arsenic | Cornell Chronicle

Tunable low-rate genomic recombination with Cre-lox in Escherichia coli: a versatile tool for anoxic environmental biosensing and synthetic biology (open access)

Fig 1 Schematic of the Cre-loxP reporter system in E. coli on a plasmid.

Fig 4 Schematics of arsenite whole-cell biosensors and endpoint fluorescence measurements collected by flow cytometry.

China’s biotech industry booms

Good news!

"Last year, Chinese biotech firms developed over 1,250 new drugs: more than companies based in the European Union and around 200 shy of those in the United States. International restrictions on the region’s fast-growing sector — such as a US law that prevents federally funded pharmaceutical companies from working with certain Chinese companies — are prompting some in China to argue that the country should go it alone. That would be a backwards step — for China and the rest of the world ..."

"In biomedical science, China still lags behind the United States and Europe when it comes to fundamental research and conducting clinical trials involving investigators and participants from several countries. But the nation is now a global leader when it comes to drug development and manufacturing. And it is becoming increasingly important in frontier science. 

Industry analysts estimate that China now accounts for 70–95% of the global supply chain for many essential pharmaceutical products, including ibuprofen and paracetamol.

In 2024, Chinese biotechnology firms developed more than 1,250 new drugs, surpassing the European Union and approaching the US total of roughly 1,440 ... 

In 2018, China conducted only 9% of the clinical trials conducted by companies around the world. Now, it is responsible for about one-fifth of such trials ... And in the past few years, it has achieved several therapeutic milestones. ..."

Nature Briefing: Translational Research

China’s biotech boom: why the nation must collaborate to stay ahead "Increased geopolitical tensions are prompting some in China to argue that the country should go it alone in biotechnology. That would be a backwards step — for China and the rest of the world."

Taiwan's strategic embrace of biotechnology

Good news!

Soybeans that glow when stressed and have optical sensors for fungal infection

Amazing stuff!

"A biotechnology company called InnerPlant has developed soybeans that glow when stressed, allowing farmers to intervene early and avoid crop losses. Recently, their system, which pairs the fluorescent soybeans with optical sensors, detected a fungal infection weeks before it would have been visible to the naked eye."

"CropVoice costs $6 per acre."

Doomslayer: Progress Roundup - by Malcolm Cochran

(Source)

California Startup Savor launches first butter made entirely from air and water

Call me skeptical!

"A California-based biotechnology startup has officially launched the world's first commercially available butter made entirely from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, eliminating the need for traditional agriculture or animal farming. Savor, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, announced the commercial release of its animal- and plant-free butter after three years of development.

The revolutionary product uses a proprietary thermochemical process that transforms carbon dioxide captured from the air, hydrogen from water, and methane into fat molecules chemically identical to those found in dairy butter. According to the company, the process creates fatty acids by heating these gases under controlled temperature and pressure conditions, then combining them with glycerol to form triglycerides. 

First Commercial Deployments

Several high-profile restaurants and bakeries are among Savor's first customers, including Michelin-starred establishments SingleThread and ONE65, as well as Jane the Bakery in California. The company has been quietly collaborating with Bay Area culinary partners over the past year, allowing chefs to test the product in commercial kitchens. ..."

Startup launches first butter made entirely from air

Credits: Thursday, August 14, 2025 - Join The Flyover

Moss Medicines: The Next Revolution in Biotech?

Food for thought!

"... Unlike bacterial or yeast culture systems, mosses can produce complex glycosylated proteins that are often needed in biomedical applications. Another attractive feature is that moss species like Physcomitrella patens use homologous recombination to repair breaks in DNA, making it ideal for gene insertion.

Because of its favorable glycosylation profile, moss yielded a recombinant version of the human alpha galactosidase protein (aGal), which is used as an enzyme replacement therapy in the treatment of Fabry disease, a rare genetic disease. This moss-aGal protein, the first moss-produced drug, entered clinical trials in 2015. It even had a slight competitive edge over its human cell line-produced counterpart when tested in mice; by interacting with a different receptor, it was better able to target the kidney as well as the heart. ..."

Moss Medicines: The Next Revolution in Biotech? | The Scientist "Plant biotechnologists are favoring moss factories over other models to produce certain valuable proteins."

Physcomitrium patens is a species of moss frequently used in applied biotechnology to culture valuable compounds at scale.

Responsible AI for Biodesign and protein development

This is a commendable effort by over 160 scientists worldwide! The more scientists around the world pledge not to develop and/or abuse ML & AI for nefarious purposes, the better!

A great responsibility rests on these scientists! Will they remember the responsibility and courage of e.g. Robert Oppenheimer? Pray and hope!

If the global SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 pandemic (most likely caused by a lab leak) was any warning, then the potential for mass harm by very pathogenic, infectious and lethal engineered pathogens etc. created with ML & AI is much greater.

Compared with the Global Warming hoax and the Climate Change religion, then this propaganda and demagoguery about climate is child's play!

Forget about other so called and popular criticisms of large models like hallucination, misinformation, and/or bias or adversarial attacks etc.. These are distractions at best.

The danger is comparable to the development of nuclear weapons beginning in the middle of last century! Maybe even greater!

"Toward Managing AI Bio Risk

Scientists pledged to control their use of AI to produce potentially hazardous biological materials.

What’s new: More than 150 biologists in Asia, Europe, and North America signed a voluntary commitment to internal and external oversight of machine learning models that can be used to design proteins. 

How it works: The scientists made 10 voluntary commitments regarding synthetic biology research. They promised broadly to avoid research likely to enable harm and to promote research that responds to infectious disease outbreaks or similar emergencies. ..."

The Batch by Andrew Ng

Responsible AI x Biodesign Community Values, Guiding Principles, and Commitments for the Responsible Development of AI for Protein Design

A new computational technique could make it easier to engineer useful proteins

Good news! This is only the beginning! Smoothing helps, but not glossing over! 😊

Interestingly, it appears this research did not rely on very large artificial neural networks.

One of the authors, i.e. Tommi Jaakkola is a well known ML researcher!

"... “Protein design is a hard problem because the mapping from DNA sequence to protein structure and function is really complex. There might be a great protein 10 changes away in the sequence, but each intermediate change might correspond to a totally nonfunctional protein.  ...

They began by training a type of model known as a convolutional neural network (CNN) on experimental data consisting of GFP [green fluorescent protein] sequences and their brightness — the feature that they wanted to optimize.

The model was able to create a “fitness landscape” — a three-dimensional map that depicts the fitness of a given protein and how much it differs from the original sequence — based on a relatively small amount of experimental data (from about 1,000 variants of GFP).

These landscapes contain peaks that represent fitter proteins and valleys that represent less fit proteins. Predicting the path that a protein needs to follow to reach the peaks of fitness can be difficult, because often a protein will need to undergo a mutation that makes it less fit before it reaches a nearby peak of higher fitness. To overcome this problem, the researchers used an existing computational technique to “smooth” the fitness landscape.

Once these small bumps in the landscape were smoothed, the researchers retrained the CNN model and found that it was able to reach greater fitness peaks more easily. The model was able to predict optimized GFP sequences that had as many as seven different amino acids from the protein sequence they started with, and the best of these proteins were estimated to be about 2.5 times fitter than the original. ...

The researchers also showed that this approach worked well in identifying new sequences for the viral capsid of adeno-associated virus (AAV), a viral vector that is commonly used to deliver DNA. In that case, they optimized the capsid for its ability to package a DNA payload. ..."

From the abstract:

"The ability to engineer novel proteins with higher fitness for a desired property would be revolutionary for biotechnology and medicine. Modeling the combinatorially large space of sequences is infeasible; prior methods often constrain optimization to a small mutational radius, but this drastically limits the design space. Instead of heuristics, we propose smoothing the fitness landscape to facilitate protein optimization. First, we formulate protein fitness as a graph signal then use Tikunov regularization to smooth the fitness landscape. We find optimizing in this smoothed landscape leads to improved performance across multiple methods in the GFP and AAV benchmarks. Second, we achieve state-of-the-art results utilizing discrete energy-based models and MCMC in the smoothed landscape. Our method, called Gibbs sampling with Graph-based Smoothing (GGS), demonstrates a unique ability to achieve 2.5 fold fitness improvement (with in-silico evaluation) over its training set. GGS demonstrates potential to optimize proteins in the limited data regime. ..."

A new computational technique could make it easier to engineer useful proteins | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Improving Protein Optimization with Smoothed Fitness Landscapes (open access)

Figure 1: Overview. (A) Protein optimization is challenging due to a noisy fitness landscape where the starting dataset (unblurred) is a fraction of the landscape with the highest fitness sequences hidden (blurred). (B) We develop Graph-based Smoothing (GS) to estimate a smoothed fitness landscape from the starting data. (C) A model is trained on the smoothed fitness landscape to infer the rest of the landscape. (D) Gradients from the model are used in Gibbs With Gradients (GWG) where on each step a new mutation is proposed. (E) The goal of sampling is for each trajectory to gradually head towards higher fitness.

Coming to a shoe store near you (in the next five years) – footwear made of lab-grown leather

Not bad, but can humans not develop materials better than leather for e.g. shoes?

Coming to a shoe store near you – footwear made of lab-grown leather Biotech company in the North East successfully creates a sustainable version of the material – without the need for animals

South African Biotech firm in a quest to make Africa’s first homegrown mRNA jab

Good news! Lot's of success for Afrigen Biologics & Vaccines!

Finnish researchers aim to bring lab-grown coffee to the markets in around four years' time

Are we already in the middle of the next agriculture and husbandry revolution? From nature to lab! 

"... It’s actually grown from a cluster of coffee cells in a bioreactor, under the ideal temperature, light, and oxygen conditions to allow them to thrive. As an approach, it’s not that different from the way lab-grown meat is being produced. ..."

"... The work was started by initiating coffee cell cultures, establishing respective cell lines in the laboratory and transferring them to bioreactors to begin producing biomass. After analyses of the biomass, a roasting process was developed, and the new coffee was finally evaluated by VTT’s trained sensory panel. ...
Currently all coffee material produced in laboratory conditions represents experimental food and would require regulatory approval by the FDA to be marketed and sold to consumers in the United States. In Europe, the lab-grown coffee should first be approved as Novel Food before being marketed. ..."

The whole idea is not exactly brand new (no pun intended):

Production of Coffee from Plant Cell Suspension Cultures (appeared 1974 in the Canadian Institute of Food Science and Technology Journal)

Finnish researchers aim to bring lab-grown coffee to the markets in around four years' time

Sustainable coffee grown in Finland – the land that drinks the most coffee per capita produces its first tasty cup with cellular agriculture VTT has successfully produced coffee cells in a bioreactor through cellular agriculture. The innovation can help to make the production of coffee more sustainable. The first batches produced by VTT in a laboratory in Finland smell and taste like conventional coffee.

Wie ein Wunderschuh Zwei-Stunden-Mann Kipchoge beschleunigt

Schmu mit Schuh? Technologie oder meschliche Leistung? Die Grenzen verschwimmen immer mehr. Von Doping ganz zu schweigen.

Wie ein Wunderschuh Zwei-Stunden-Mann Kipchoge beschleunigt: Der 1:59:40-Marathon von Eliud Kipchoge hat in der internationalen Laufszene heiße Debatten ausgelöst. Dabei geht es auch um die Frage:...