What Happens When Deep Tech Meets Synthetic Biology

The Belgian chip maker imec may seem like an unlikely source of innovation for the synthetic biology industry. But as the branches of biology expand into nearly every aspect of our lives, so do the areas of knowledge that it draws its power from. And the semiconductor industry is no exception. I caught up with Peter Peumans, CTO of Health Technologies at imec, ahead of the SynBioBeta conference in May in Oakland, CA, where he will be speaking, and he told me about some fascinating stuff happening at the intersection of synthetic biology, health, and technology.

Peumans is one of the smartest people you will ever meet. His education in science and engineering spanned a wide gamut of topics, from quantum mechanics to solar energy conversion technologies. As a result, he has an uncanny ability to come up with out-of-the-box ideas by connecting seemingly unrelated disciplines. Peumans was a professor at Stanford before quitting it all and joining imec. The reason for the move was that he felt like it was difficult to do the kinds of projects he was interested in within the confines of academia. A place like imec offered an opportunity to push the envelope for him.

You may be wondering what kinds of projects are too out-there for even the most cutting-edge academic institutions. The answer has less to do with specific technologies and more with the way of doing research. Peumans thinks significant breakthroughs can be made by building technologies on top of existing progress in other disciplines:

“I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that you can take a technology that’s quite advanced, mature, and cheap, and try to figure out ways to leverage it in a different application,” he says. “This way, you can start from a powerful platform to do something meaningful quite fast. Doing that kind of work is hard in the academic setting because you just don’t have access to these technologies.”

The technologies he is talking about are often referred to as “deep tech.” Deep tech focuses on long-term solutions to big problems like climate change, resource and land use, health, energy, and many more pressing issues coming to the forefront of society. These solutions require operating at the convergence of technologies and creating ecosystems that can collaboratively tackle these problems. The most important thing – they require thinking outside of the box by bringing innovation from seemingly unrelated fields to tackle these complex problems.

“It’s the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants: you can get a lot further in your ability to actually impact people’s lives,” thinks Peumans. “When we speak to the synthetic biology folks, they know what they want to do. And on our side, we know what is possible with chip technology today. Billions of dollars have gone into that platform, so how can we reconfigure it to get somewhere, without having to invest hundreds of millions more? It’s about leveraging the existing pieces as much as possible. We can put them together quickly and do something completely new.”

Facilitating the next wave of innovation

Investment in deep tech more than quadrupled over a five-year period, from $15 billion in 2016 to more than $60 billion in 2020, and the progress in this area is not slowing down. The big advantage that imec has is the ability to spot emerging technologies and help turn ideas into solutions. This is one of the reasons they are eager to work with U.S.-based customers as a part of the effort to create a global network of innovation:

“We’re interested in taking promising concepts proposed by either a company, big or small, or from academia, and then figuring out how to turn this idea into something that’s scalable, manufacturable, and affordable by essentially making it our way – the semiconductor way – using our foundry to get to scale,” says Peumans.

The ideas that imec is investing in include platform technologies that can have an impact across many areas like healthcare, mobility, clean energy, and food tech. Within the synthetic biology realm, they are looking to develop solutions in everything from next-gen sequencing and imaging to manufacturing advanced therapies:

“We are in a position where we can actually use both the know-how and the infrastructure – not just to enable the making of the next microprocessor or the next memory device, but to enable the next generation of life science technology and health technology – and that’s what we’re doing. It’s about leveraging the position to use both the existing tools and the competencies to build new tools that you cannot make using commercial engineering,” says Peumans.

Peeling away the layers of biology

“We are interested in helping build the tools that will allow us to peel away layers of biology to understand what’s happening inside cells,” says Peumans. You can think of it as a molecular microscope. In the same way that genome sequencing has transformed the way we are able to engineer biology, so will other ways to probe the cell. Imagine how much information can be uncovered by looking not only at the genome, but also the proteome, lipidome, and metabolome of the cell – and doing it at the level of spatial resolution? With an enhanced understanding of biology, it will become much easier to manipulate it.

One of the programs imec has played a significant role in establishing is the development of the Neuropixel probes, which are thin brain implants that can record brain activity. The Neuropixels probes were developed for an international brain research consortium (International Brain Laboratory (IBL)) that includes researchers from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and Wellcome. The probes were developed in collaboration with those research institutions and fabricated on imec’s advanced nanotechnology silicon platform.

With this technology, scientists can study one of the most complex systems of the universe – the human brain – and understand how our behavior is formed, what leads to addictions or disease, and as well as expand the limits of cognition. It is possible that one day these kinds of probes will help people who are completely paralyzed to move prosthetic devices using brain activity.[KT1]

Envisioning what the next generation of technologies will look like

This is by far not the full extent of the applications that can emerge at the intersection of nanotechnology, semiconductors, and synthetic biology. Researchers at imec and their collaborators are also interested in technologies like lab-on-a-chip, biosensors, ultra-fast diagnostic technologies, wearables, spatial imaging, and other tools that can help us understand biology.

“At imec, we help companies like Intel
INTC
, Samsung, and many other companies in this space figure out what the next generation of technologies will look like,” Peumans shares the company’s vision. The same principle applies to biology: “Domains like next-gen sequencing, diagnostics, manufacturing of advanced cell and gene therapies, and synthetic biology need new tools because the tools that are being used today are decades old, so they urgently need an update.”

The potential of these new kinds of technologies is enormous: from treating people living with chronic diseases to tackling sicknesses that were previously thought to be incurable, like cancer. Sensors developed by the synthetic biology industry could be incorporated into wearables for real-time monitoring of biological data. Organs-on-chip could provide better pre-clinical models for studying diseases and testing new therapeutics. Miniaturized PCR chips that you can breathe through could provide faster diagnostics for infectious diseases that are as sensitive as classical PCRs using swabs[KT2] . Nanopore technology could revolutionize sequencing and lens-free imaging could allow us to look at cells without disturbing them.

This is just a slice of what is possible when deep tech and synthetic biology worlds collide.

[KT1]The thin-silicon chip was developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Florida, as part of the IMPRESS project funded by the DARPA’s HAPTIX program to create future-generation haptic prosthetics technology.

[KT2]into a spinout company miDiagnostics. They have even developed chips that you can breath through.

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