How Deep Tech Can Help Shape the New Reality
On January 10, 2020, China published the complete genome of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 from specimens collected in Wuhan. Less than a month later, on February 7, the biotech company Moderna completed the first clinical batch of a candidate vaccine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On March 16, the US National Institutes of Health announced that the first participant in its Phase I study had been dosed—marking a total of 63 days from virus sequence selection to initial human dosing. A month after that, on April 16, a Boston-based synthetic biology company, Ginkgo Bioworks, announced that it will support Moderna with process optimization for the raw materials needed in manufacturing mRNA vaccines (Moderna’s underlying technology), using its high-throughput automated tools for biological engineering.
We do not know whether the candidate vaccine will prove successful, and researchers have a long road to travel before we find out. But a few facts are already notable. First, Moderna developed its candidate vaccine with unprecedented speed, and it is now in Phase II trials. The company is hardly a biopharma powerhouse, although it does have 21 drugs in development, including 13 in clinical trials. It was founded by Harvard and MIT professors in 2010 with venture capital backing from another Boston-based firm, Flagship Pioneering. It went public in 2018 and has raised $3.2 billion, making it a so-called technology “unicorn.” Since its inception, it has partnered with multiple other biopharma companies (including AstraZeneca, Merck, and Vertex), government agencies (BARDA and DARPA), and universities, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Ginkgo Bioworks has a similarly impressive history. Founded in 2009 as an MIT spinoff, it uses a combination of hardware and software to deliver rapid prototyping and high-throughput screening for new biotechnologies. Funded during its early years by government grants and awards, Ginkgo Bioworks started raising external capital in 2014. It achieved a valuation of more than $4 billion in its latest funding round in 2019—making it another unicorn. It also started partnering from an early date with established corporations such as Cargill, ADM, and Bayer, as well as with other startups.
Moderna, Ginkgo Bioworks, and the technologies behind them are high-profile examples of the deep-tech ecosystem at work and of the role that deep technologies and the companies that develop them can play in the future of society and business—a role that the current coronavirus crisis could accelerate for everyone’s benefit. (See Exhibit 1.)
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The Dawn of Deep Tech
Typically developed by startups (often university spinoffs), deep technologies are notable for their novelty and potential impact, for the time and scale needed to develop them, and for the level of financing required to move from laboratory science to viable commercial product. In those respects, Moderna’s mRNA technology and Ginkgo’s biology engineering approach fit the bill perfectly, but in some important ways these companies are more exception than rule.