BOSTON, November 3, 2021 – GRO Biosciences Inc. (“GRObio”), an emerging biotechnology company leveraging groundbreaking science to expand the amino acid alphabet and deliver on the promise of protein therapeutics, today announced the closing of a Series A financing
Aditya M Kunjapur, Michael G Napolitano, Eriona Hysolli, Karen Noguera, Evan M Appleton, Max G Schubert, Michaela A Jones, Siddharth Iyer, Daniel J Mandell, George M Church. Synthetic auxotrophy remains stable after continuous evolution and in coculture with mammalian cells. Sci Adv, 2021 Jul (27):eabf5851. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abf5851. Print 2021 Jul.
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https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/24/9535Beyond Meat (BYND) was one of last year’s hottest stocks. Shares of the plant-based meat company exploded 859% during its first three months out of the gate.
In the early 2000s, Jay Shendure was a graduate student in George Church’s lab at Harvard University. Back then, he says, there was “hardly an inkling” that the lab would become a hotbed of startup activity.
Glasgow AA, Huang YM, Mandell DJ, Thompson M, Ritterson R, Loshbaugh AL, Pellegrino J, Krivacic C, Pache RA, Barlow KA, Ollikainen N, Jeon D, Kelly MJS, Fraser JS, Kortemme T (2019) Computational design of a modular protein sense-response system. Science, 366(6468):1024-1028. PMID: 31754004.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aax8780“DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”
Bill Gates wrote this in 1995, long before synthetic biology – a scientific discipline focused on reading, writing, and editing DNA – was being harnessed to program living cells.
By altering the genetic code in bacteria, researchers have demonstrated a method to make therapeutic proteins more stable, an advance that would improve the drugs’ effectiveness and convenience.