Meet The Companying Bridging Synthetic Biology Innovation With The World Of Insurance To Ensure Safe Food Production

Vishaal Bhuyan was part of the gig culture before it was big. In 2016, he was working in hedge funds on Wall Street when he decided to co-found a snack food company as a just-for-fun side project. His company’s product was made out of lotus seeds and shipped in from India, eventually making it to Facebook and Google offices to feed employees there. When they weren’t being held up at the Canadian border, that is.

Tired of repeated trips to destroy thousands of pounds of lotus seed snacks due to contamination with chemical sprays or pests, Bhuyan’s frustration came to a head. Why couldn’t anyone figure out where these contaminants came from? Six months later, up at night with his newborn son, Bhuyan watched a TED Talk by Ellen Jorgensen, the founder of GenSpace. He was intrigued—could synthetic biology be the solution to his problem?

As it turns out, it could and it was. But, as Bhuyan told me when we caught up ahead of the SynBioBeta conference in May, he never imagined that he’d also provide the synthetic biology community with an enabling product they never knew they needed.

Leveraging bacteria to detect contamination sources

After taking a Biohacking 101 class at GenSpace, Vishaal managed to get Jorgensen on board to develop a way to quickly identify point-of-contamination along the food product supply chain. The result of their partnership? A Bacillus spore that cannot germinate and expresses a unique nucleic acid barcode that can be quickly identified via qPCR.

The spores are incredibly sticky: once you apply them to a crop, such as lettuce or avocados, you can’t get them off—which means that you can detect them even after a crop has survived processing, packaging, and shipping hundreds or thousands of miles from where they originated. This is critical during an outbreak.

Usually, crops from up to a hundred different farms are combined, packaged, and distributed. So, when an outbreak occurs, it can take months to confirm the originating farm. If, however, a crop is treated with a spore tag, it can be quickly exonerated if a simple qPCR test of contaminated product fails to identify the tag.

But what if the tag is detected? How can farmers be protected from the consequences? The answer is the secret sauce of Bhuyan’s company, Aanika Biosciences.

Not just another cool technology

While Aanika’s spores certainly solve a very important problem impacting the food supply chain, Bhuyan quickly felt like his company’s solution was an incomplete one. He felt like Aanika could offer more than “just another cool technology.” For someone with a past on Wall Street, it didn’t take long for him to determine what might be a better value prop for Aanika’s customers: insurance.

The average food recall costs $10 million USD in direct costs alone, and if a company experiences one, it could define the life (or death) of the company. Yet despite this, insurance in the foods and beverages industry leaves many companies hanging, either to foot the bill themselves or to downsize or even close their doors completely. Insurance is expensive, it can take years for payouts to be distributed, and often, insurance companies are resistant to even insure the product. This leaves many producers to self-insure or to purchase cheap plans that leave significant coverage gaps. This is especially true for companies developing innovative new technologies.

“What insurance companies are willing to insure is what companies go to market with, plain and simple,” says Bhuyan. As the pace of innovation increases, he sees promising new technologies failing to make an impact not because they don’t work, but simply because they’re viewed as “too risky.” So he made a radical move: he married Aanika’s spore tags with his knowledge about insurance. Aanika doesn’t just make the spores that help track food outbreaks, it also partners with insurance carriers to provide a safety net for food producers if and when a problem does occur.

Educating insurance companies about synthetic biology

It sounds simple, but achieving this was an incredibly difficult endeavor. Bhuyan and his team spent years working with insurance companies and educating them about science—and synthetic biology.

“When we asked insurance companies if they’d ever thought about biology the way they think about software, we quickly realized that no one had thought about it,” says Bhuyan. “Our initial investment—the hours and hours educating insurers—is starting to pay off now. Aanika is making this market viable.”

Not only can Aanika offer premiums up to 30% cheaper than what’s currently available, but their payouts will occur within 48 hours of an FDA notification of a problem. Determining whether a crop treated with Aanika’s spores is at the root of an outbreak is quick and easy: either a simple qPCR assay or an on-site isothermal test developed by Aanika that delivers results in just 10 minutes. This alone saves producers about 30-40% of the claim just by cutting down investigation time and costs.

Aanika further cuts insurance costs by reducing the risk that a recall will even happen in the first place: their spores can be engineered to produce not just molecular tags, but also secondary molecules such as antimicrobial peptides, delivering a complete food security package.

Food recalls are only the beginning

The applications for Aanika go far beyond just food recall. Bhuyan has assembled a team of scientists and financial engineers that identify not just demand but also get a good sense of what the market is willing to accept.

“If we see that there’s an edge biologically, we can look at that edge, really understand it, develop our own technology around it, and then structure an insurance product around it,” explains Bhuyan. “I think there’s a future where Aanika will insure companies using cutting edge technology because we understand what people are doing. If you’re using RNAi to silence a gene in a crop that we think will make it more robust, other insurance companies won’t get that, so that’s our opportunity area. We can be the bridge between innovation in synthetic biology and this world of insurance and reinsurance that has a lot of capital and that drives the decisions of every major corporation on this planet.”

Aanika’s product can also make a huge dent in issues surrounding regulatory compliance, banned substances or agricultural spaces, food label integrity, and validation of food quality—all problems that are on the rise as the costs associated with producing and distributing food increase. It could even aid in countermeasures against agroterrorism, which has been on the United States government’s radar for decades.

A household name that happens to use synthetic biology

When asked what his long-term vision for Aanika is, Bhuyan is quick to clarify that he isn’t trying to create the next synthetic biology company. He uses ChatGPT as an example to explain what he means.

“ChatGPT is cool not just because it uses AI, but because it’s so mainstream now that even my mom is talking about it. I can see that happening with synthetic biology. If we can build a really successful company that happens to use synthetic biology, that would be a major win.”

The company is well on its way to achieving that goal. Bhuyan says he’s already had several synthetic biology companies approach and ask whether he could create an insurance policy around their product. He thinks Aanika’s model could even extend to health, which has its own set of debilitating issues caused by the health insurance infrastructure in the United States.

Reflecting on the immediate horizon, Bhuyan reminds me of something I’ve said countless times before: it’s the era of biology. But now when I think about the technologies and companies that are going to realize everything this era has to offer, I have one more company to consider. Aanika Biosciences is already a household name in my book.

Thank you to Embriette Hyde for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.