Unlocking Biotech’s Potential

Martin GILES: Welcome to The Interconnect, a new podcast series from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Stanford Emerging Technology Review. Each episode brings together experts from critical fields of emerging technology to explore recent groundbreaking developments, what's coming over the horizon, and how the implications for American innovation leadership interconnect with the fast-changing geopolitical environment. I'm Martin Giles, and I'm the managing editor of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review. In this episode, we'll be focusing on biotechnology, innovations from gene editing to synthetic biology are powering economic growth, and pointing towards a future that's even more exciting. To highlight biotechnology's immense potential, and explore how the United States can position itself to win the global race for leadership in this strategically critical field, we have two terrific experts.

Drew ENDY: If you wanted to think about pandemic response, we need to have stockpiles of medicines and diagnostics and and vaccines and so on. Well, what if we didn't have to have just a single centralized stockpile, but you could have anybody anywhere grow what they needed on demand, on demand diagnostics, treatments, vaccines, and so on. 

Luciana L. BORIO: Sometimes we talk about guard rails, and I think that guard rails are for the people that are trying to do good science, but for people that are intent in doing us harm, these guard rails are simply speed bumps.

GILES: Joining me today are Drew Endy, a member of the Review's faculty council, and Martin Family University fellow for bioengineering at Stanford, and Luciana Borio, senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, and venture partner at ARCH, a venture capital firm that invests in life science and physical science technology firms. Great to have you with us today.

BORIO: Thank you so much for having us. It's a real pleasure to be here.

ENDY: Thanks, Martin. Great to be here with you and Luciano.

GILES: Okay. Let's start by getting a sense of how biotechnology is advancing. Can you both share just a couple of examples of state-of-the-art biotech achievements? Drew, do you want to lead us off?

ENDY: Yeah, sure, Martin, thanks. One of the things we're tracking is how biotechnology is becoming more personal or consumer-oriented. For example, over last year I had three bioengineered organisms in my house with my family. One was a bioluminescent petunia, a flowering plant that had been engineered to emit light, and the children were using it as a nightlight. Another was a bioengineered tomato that had genes from the snapdragon family of plants, so the tomato was purple, and it overexpressed antioxidants. First time in my life I grew tomatoes, and they were bioengineered tomatoes, and then there was this other thing, this probiotic that is a microbe that you ingest, and it expresses an enzyme so that you're less likely to get a hangover. I have to admit I never tried that one myself.

GILES: I was going to ask.

ENDY: But so it's really interesting that before 2024, I used to think that biotechnology was hidden away in fermenters or vats or fields, but suddenly biotechnology was coming into my house, and it was something that my family could experience directly.

GILES: That's great. Luciana, you have a particular focus on medical applications in your work. What are you seeing today?

BORIO: Well, first of all, I have to say that it's amazing that Drew is already living in the future. We are waiting for that moment, and he's already in it. I love it. Well, on the medical side, I think that the mRNA vaccines really captured, I think, the imagination of the public and scientists, regardless of how one feels about the vaccines themselves. Because mRNA had been in development for so long as potential vaccines and therapeutics, and all of a sudden they became a reality, and they're scratching the surface, so I think beyond vaccines, we are seeing applications of mRNA to cancer vaccines and therapeutics. Moving forward, we're going to be able to target not just the whole body or specific organs, but very, very specific, like a cell within a body, very targeted delivery of mRNA. And the second, I think, big picture thing, of course, is AI. We can't escape AI, and AI is influencing everything, from how we discover and develop new drugs, how we engage new targets, how we evaluate these drugs in trials, how we continue to monitor drugs after they are approved, and also the delivery of healthcare. And like Drew, you know it's going to lead to a consumerization of healthcare in a way that patients are finally empowered to make decisions, to get accurate information, to get targeted information, tailored information. So there's this revolution in AI and healthcare that is happening now.

GILES: Got it. I just want to go back one thing. Drew, you said a bioluminescent plant, I mean, what is that? How does that work? What did you do to the genes of the plant to kind of make it glow?

ENDY: I want to be really careful. This is not something we prototyped in the laboratory. This is something we bought as consumers.

GILES:

Wow.

ENDY: You can go to a website, I'm not affiliated with this company, but I think highly of it, light.bio, and buy bioluminescent petunias. I bought two-hundred of them last year. Jen Brophy and I, we teach Introduction to Bioengineering, we gave every student in our class a bioluminescent petunia. How does it work? It's been bioengineered to take a gene cassette from a wood mushroom, a forest mushroom, that is weakly bioluminescent, think like a firefly, and move those genes into the petunia, where in the flower of the petunia those genes are expressed. All plants take in solar energy, photosynthesis, and they make energy, these plants can also take chemical energy and make photons or light, and so that's how it works. I want to be really clear, all the examples I gave at the open, those are not R&D examples just being prototyped for the first time in the lab, those are all consumer products that I just bought.

GILES: That's incredible. So I can have a greener household, and save on my electricity bills at the same time. I love that idea. I'd like to ask you about AI too, Drew. How do you see that impacting biotechnology? I've heard talk about sort of bio LLMs, what exactly are they?

ENDY: Sure. Well, ChatGPT or other LLMs you might be familiar with can be trained on English language or French, or pick your favorite human language, but others are able to train LLMs on sequences of DNA or RNA and proteins. So you could have foundation models not for the English language or other things, but for mRNA, as Luciano was describing with the vaccines, or for proteins. One of the things we're tracking local to Stanford is an LLM called EVO, E-V-O, which is a genomic scale large language model, but there's large language models in biology all over the place, some of them are exciting, some of them are scary. I just learned the other week of a large language model for snail toxins, marine snail toxins or conotoxins. These have therapeutic implications, and so it's a useful model to have, but they're also very dangerous toxins for which there's no antitoxin.

GILES: Got it. So there's a kind of duality here, and we'll come back to that a little later. Luciana, you mentioned earlier on the medical opportunities here. I mean, we've gone through the COVID-19 pandemic, do you think we'll see another pandemic? And do you think that biotechnology can help us get a, maybe not get ahead of it, but at least respond much more rapidly to the spread of a new virus?

BORIO: Oh, yeah. I think you know we all say it's not a matter of if, but when. We will see another pandemic. It's very dangerous to predict biology, it's very difficult to do so, but if I have to bet right now, I think a flu seems pretty scary with the expanding footprint of H5. And it could get very ugly. So biotechnology, of course, is essential for us to prepare and respond, and we should be leveraging all that. There's so much room for improvement in our current systems. I was very interested to see, for example, the National Health Service in England partnering with the private sector, with Oxford Nanopore Technologies, to improve surveillance across the country so they can actually detect pathogens before they become a problem. I'd like to see more countries you know follow that model. So that's detection, and also, of course in terms of therapeutics, there is tremendous potential.

GILES: So I'd like to stay on the subject of resilience. I've heard you say that we should look to nature for inspiration when it comes to bio manufacturing strategies for the future, Drew, what did you mean by that?

ENDY: I mean this is a dimension of opportunity and ambiguity. We're still thinking through it, but if any of us were just to pause and look at a tree or a bush, and ask, "Where did the leaves on the tree come from?" Right, and it sounds like such a kindergarten level question, but stay with me. They don't come from a factory. They don't await some executive order or central authority or CEO to say, "Start growing." The leaves on trees just grow where the trees are going to be because the energy and materials arrive right where the biology is going to be. And so if you reflect on this observation, what's revealed to us is biology is the ultimate distributed manufacturing platform. This is very complementary to industrialization, centralization, and globalization, and so in principle you could imagine biology unlocked via biotechnology, supporting distributed bio manufacturing. One of the examples of this in the United States was when Jimmy Carter was president, and President Carter changed the regulations around brewing of beer, and because of that, suddenly you got many, many, many, many microbreweries popping up just reminding us that anybody could brew beer. And so now imagine that bioengineers, as we learn how to encode solutions in the DNA, that DNA can be distributed, and then the biology or the biotechnology solutions can be grown locally. So if you wanted to think about pandemic response, we need to have stockpiles of medicines, and diagnostics, and vaccines and so on. Well, what if we didn't have to have just a single centralized stockpile, but you could have anybody anywhere grow what they needed on demand, on demand diagnostics, treatments, vaccines, and so on? So that should give you a sense of it. An then the puzzle is when does a distributed approach make economic sense, or operational sense, or strategic sense compared to a centralized coordinated approach?

BORIO: You know, Drew, so this idea of access to products in an emergency, of course, is so critical, and we saw that tremendous inequities during pandemics, and I think that we are far from resolving them, and I like that biotechnology can offer some hope there. And we also need to resolve, however, we still have needles and syringes, we still have the know-how, the talent acquisition, and raw materials, so I'm a total optimist, but I guess because of my work in government, I'm always looking for where are the bottlenecks to making a great idea really happen. So let's say that we resolve the scientific aspects of distributed manufacturing, what else needs to happen to make it a reality?

ENDY: Yeah, I think that's a great question. Just because you can make one thing with biology, as you're pointing out, the needles and the syringes, the metal and the plastic, that has to be manufactured centrally. I think on that aspect of things, biology has more to offer. So for example, Michael Fischbach and his team at Stanford have been doing neat work using microbes that live on the skin as a platform for vaccination. And so basically you have a bioengineered microbe that tickles your immune system, if you will, to create an immune response, and in this case, there is no needle or syringe, you just could have a living skin cream. So I believe in the long-term biotechnology can obviate some of the supply chain needs, but underneath all of this, to your point Luciana, is people have to be able to trust and want these types of public health capacities, and biosecurity capacities. So I think ultimately from a practical perspective, and from a government and leadership perspective, how do we get right into the thick of addressing things like vaccine hesitancy, false information around public health measures, and so on and so forth. I'm curious how you think about those aspects of the puzzle.

BORIO: Oh, boy, that is a really hard one. I like to think that extreme positions are not great and not helpful, and we saw this play out very much so in the last couple of years, where, you know some people say, for example, "All vaccines are terrible," and then some people say you must be vaccinated, even if it's forcefully. So I think we have to find in a better way, one that respects people's individual choices, and autonomy, and values. For some person they may say, you know I'd rather take this risk than be vaccinated," and I think we should find a way to respect that, and also stick to the facts, you know be able to really convey what are the risks and benefits to an individual, to a cohort. And again, going back to AI, I think it really can help people understand what is the risk in a way that humans are just very, you know, very bad at. But yeah, I think the days where just because a scientist said something, it was true and relevant to the individual, are over.

GILES: Got it. I'm super excited about this vision for the biotic future. You've got bioluminescent plants. You've got targeted medicines. You've got skin cream, microbial skin cream. I mean, it sounds fantastic, and I've seen some estimates that say up to, I think it's like sixty percent of the physical inputs to the global economy could, over future decades, come from biotechnology. That's a very bold prediction. Drew, do you think it's realistic or is that just hype?

ENDY: That's a good question. Just to calibrate, so best guesses right now is maybe about ten percent of the physical inputs to our economy are bio-made. So if the consulting side of the house is saying, "We think we can get up to sixty percent," how do you go from ten to sixty? That's an extraordinary claim to your point, and there's a lot in between here and there. The way we're thinking about it is a couple of things have to come together. You have to be able to get flow of materials and energy just from the physics of it all, the physics has to work. How do you get your feedstocks? How do you power the biomanufacturing factories? So the materials and energy have to flow, and that has to make sense, and then in order to get to the economic impact it has to make economic sense. And so the cost of goods, and the value of the goods, that side of the equation, the materials and the dollar values have to align. What I'm observing right now is that there's a lot of well-intended, but wishful thinking going to market, where people are organizing tremendous amounts of capital to do biomanufacturing in new ways, but they tend to be making right now, more often than not, low-value products. Like the alternate protein for food, important thing to do, but the margins aren't very big there, and so you get pretty big movements of capital, but then boom-bust cycles from return on investment. I think it's going to be important to take lessons from other types of transformations in manufacturing, whether it's the transition to electric vehicles, where the first market offerings are the higher-value products, where there's bigger margins, and you can get the economic flywheel spun up and go, go, go. I think medicine and health has a lot to offer, because the value of the medical products is oftentimes higher than the bulk commodity products. Luciana, I'd be very curious to learn if you're seeing anything like that. But I think, Martin, the physics looks pretty good, but we've got to map this to reality, and that reality has to include economic reality, and we have to be smart about how people can learn to make money as we go from this ten to sixty percent of the global economy inputs.

BORIO: I totally agree with that. I think that displacing legacy systems is really hard, and the economics need to work, you know it's like the big E, the economics. Scientists sometimes get carried away, it's a great idea, and we should, why wouldn't anybody do this or want this? But you have to really create something that offers significant added value for it to displace the legacy. I like the example of mushroom leather, which is so sophisticated now, but it's really hard to discuss-

GILES: Mushroom leather? What's mushroom leather?

BORIO: It's, you know, leather made out of mushrooms, so they're resilient and they're beautiful, and they can easily replace cowhide, but one is a byproduct of meat consumption, it's readily available, it's been around for a long time, and the other one is going to be a pricier alternative. So what is it really offering in terms of the big economic sense for it to displace the legacy product?

GILES: Just how far could this go? Drew, I've heard you say, "One day, maybe, maybe in the future we could grow computers." Grow computers? Really?

ENDY: Yeah, that's a bold idea. That idea actually comes from not me, but the Semiconductor Research Corporation. The Semiconductor Research Corporation back in 2018, I think, put out a roadmap for synthetic biology. And it was a twenty year roadmap calling for foundational investment in R&D that would, if you deployed five billion dollars a year for twenty years, you could unlock biology as a general purpose technology, and result in a complimentary approach to manufacturing that does bottom-up self-assembly. So think about computer manufacturing today. Computer manufacturing today derives from what it's like as a kid to go to the beach with a stick and draw a pattern in the sand, right, and you use top-down control to make a shape. Lithography, and patterning, and electronics manufacturing is basically that same idea still, but with much more sophisticated tools.

GILES: Got it. Lithography, that's putting the circuits on the wafer.

ENDY: Basically it's like the hand of God or the hand of the engineer is making the pattern from outside, it's incredible, but never has there been an example of an entrenched industry that's made the problem of manufacturing their product so grand. I mean it's really ripe for disruption, if you want to use the Silicon Valley cliche. So just to flip it around, but by the way, because it's hard to make computers, then suddenly we feel like we're at risk with respect to supply chains for computers. We need to have CHIPS and Science Act. It's really created quite a mess. What would be the opposite? So when I was growing up in Pennsylvania, we had a little plot garden and we tried to grow lots of things, and the thing that grew no matter what was the zucchini. Zucchini was the easiest stuff to grow, I don't know why. We just always have zucchini, we'd have to make zucchini bread. So what if making computers was like growing zucchini? So like, "Huh?" Could that ever be true? Be patient with me. Actually, the mushroom leather example is kind of interesting. There's a company, MycoWorks, that has a new factory in South Carolina, and they just posted a video on LinkedIn that shows the AI robots operating their mushroom leather factory. And what I find amazing is they're basically making a replacement for animal leather, and we'll see if the economics works out. I think it's a good thing to question, but they're also making a type of wafer, like a one by one meter square wafer, and what is inside this wafer is atomic scale precision manufacturing of the mycelial networks. Then within that you've got molecules that can self-assemble on angstrom length scales, and so the biology is already as precise, if you will, as the things that we're doing with top-down manufacturing. We just have to make this interface between the biotic world and the abiotic world, meaning the things you think of as biology, the goofy stuff, and the stuff of hardware right now, but think about your teeth, or the skeleton of a sponge, or other things, so there's a lot of work. What I like about this idea of growing a computer is it's technically impossible today, but it's physically imaginable. And the difference between what is technically possible and physically imaginable is a drive or a pull that would really help us focus our attention on how to unlock biology as a general purpose technology.

BORIO: Drew, this is reminding me of one of my favorite books, Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke. Where, you know, it's a very simple book, but he really talks about how you need to ... to create the future you have to first imagine it, and you need to imagine what it would look like for it to actually exist. Science fiction has contributed tremendous amount to shaping what was yesterday's future, but today's present, and then he also talks about that sometimes things don't happen because of a failure of imagination or a failure of courage. So that's the other two things that we need to have, and I love the future that you imagine, but just encouraging to keep up imagining, and building, and having the courage to imagine something better.

GILES: I'd just like to move us across a little bit to dive deeper into the national security, and geopolitical dimensions of the biotech revolution. Now, clearly biotech has immense upsides, but we also need to think about the potential risks that are associated with it, and how we should guard against them. Luciana, this is a complex area. What are some examples of core principles you think we should be applying here?

BORIO: Right. Well, this is a complicated area because I think that the risks are, of course, real. I think core principle number one is that we have to be able to understand what they are, and be clear-eyed about them. Ultimately, I think that we have to be very careful not to overregulate and curtail progress, scientific progress. We don't want to let these super safe systems hinder progress. I think sometimes we talk about guardrails, and I think that guardrails are for the people that are trying to do good science, but for people that are intent in doing us harm, these guardrails are simply speed bumps. And I think we need to continue to build a culture of responsibility within the biological sciences community. I think people need to make sure that they don't do silly experiments, we don't do risk. We need to continue to build resilient systems to respond, but I would just be very careful that we don't stifle innovation because the future is actually less suffering. It's medicines that can really help alleviate tremendous human suffering, and other innovations, of course. So sometimes it's easy to just kind of over-index under risk.

GILES: So it's getting the balance right, yeah?

BORIO: Right.

BORIO: Others may feel very differently.

GILES: Drew, what's your take on this?

ENDY: I think Luciana's comment about courage is important from a moment ago. I really like National Security Memorandum fifteen and it's vision statement. You know, o paraphrase, it declares that the United States of America creates a world free of biological catastrophe. So what do we need to do to fill in behind that? There's a lot to do. I would observe that right now, I don't think we take biosecurity very seriously, although as a nation, I think a lot of individuals do. But when I observe what's happening, we have some capacity to respond to recurring threats like seasonal flu, and then basically we have a boom-bust cycle around anything else, meaning if there's a pandemic, or some accident, or something, like hurry up and respond, and then forget about it. And so we don't treat biosecurity like we treat other security threats. We don't have sustained investments. We don't really deploy resources and create a cadre of professionals that are as well-equipped as I would want to see. There's some-

GILES: Why do you think that is true? Why is that the case?

ENDY: Again, I think it's because ... Well, there's a couple of things. In cases where we have recurring issues, like seasonal flu, you do see the establishment of sustaining capacities, but even those are very fragile, and then we just wait for biology to happen to us, and then we scramble to react to it. As great a success as Operation Warp Speed was, it was a reactive approach. What general has ever won the battle by just always waiting for the next attack and then responding? You need to complement that as good as you are at responding, you have to have other capacities. So we just haven't grown up, if you will, in terms of, and I mean this collectively, we haven't grown up to prioritize biosecurity, in my view, as being something that we just have to do on the regular, and we have to sustain it in a calm and strategic way. And again, not to take anything away from all the hard work of a lot of individual people, but just over and again, we get these boom-bust cycles and people reacting.

BORIO: Yeah. No, absolutely. I think, for example, just take the vaccine example, where you see a lot of government officials saying that, "Oh, it's going to be okay because we know how to make vaccines for flu in case there's a pandemic." But when you do the math, let's say that you get a vaccine that is sixty percent effective for a healthy adult population, and it requires two doses, in a pandemic, that's a lot of people dying, despite what is deemed to be an effective vaccine. So we do need new therapeutic modalities and I think it's totally within reach given new technologies.

GILES: That's a great point and I want to come back in just a minute to talk about what we'd like to see the new administration due, but before we do that, I just want to talk a little bit about China. China has identified biotech as a key strategic domain, and it's devoting significant resources to it. Drew, you recently testified, I think, to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, what did you tell them about China's activities here or how did you characterize Chinese efforts?

ENDY: China is a powerhouse in biotechnology. They've taken an all out all-of-nation approach in biotechnology, in my view, going back to around 1999 or 2000, so for the last twenty-five years, and I think it's important to understand why. One of the reasons why is China has roughly four times as many people as the United States, but three-quarters as much farmland, and so you got to feed four times as many people with not as much farmland. Instead of thinking about how to tap the brakes on emerging biotechnology, if you're the agricultural minister in China you might be thinking about, "How do I push the go pedal?" It's a very powerful motivator, food security, but it's more than that. What we've observed is across biotechnology stack, which I think of as education, research, entrepreneurship, and translation to full-scale manufacturing, our Chinese colleagues have been working incredibly hard, and they've made ridiculous progress because they've been all together, without apology, seeking to advance biotechnology. I think primarily it's internal interest, but they also see it as a domain of power and power projection, rightly so. You know is your country a cyber power or a nuclear power? Or a bio power? Is the United States of America the world-leading bio power or declining bio power? We don't usually use language like that, but I think it's relevant and appropriate going forward. And so to summarize what I told the commission a few weeks ago, China's pacing the United States in emerging biotechnologies, if not leading, in critical areas. We see this with data coming from our colleagues in Australia and elsewhere, and the United States is still sort of tapping the brakes, and not holding the steering wheel, and certainly not pushing the go button. And if we care to compete, it's a very dangerous situation, I would say.

GILES: Luciana, what's your view here? We talked a little bit earlier about biomanufacturing and the potential there. I understand that some innovative American companies, maybe some that you invest in, basically take their innovations and have them manufactured in China because it's basically more cost-effective, they're more advanced, do you see that? Then, what's your overall take on Chinese strategy here?

BORIO: Well, for a long time I was a skeptic of how amazing their biotech ecosystem was. I had concerns about data integrity, regulatory integrity, capital markets that have served us so well, but like Drew now, I've actually changed my mind, and I think that they are clearly outpacing us, in part because of efforts that they are doing, and we see this now in concrete terms. For example, there are more companies being created that is using Chinese IP, they are a manufacturing powerhouse. Our biotech companies are very dependent on their manufacturing companies, and the scale and speed with which they're moving, so they have taken a lot of ... Clinical trial is another one. We are so slow in our ability to conduct clinical trials, which is required for new products to actually exist. So they are moving at a light speed, and at the same time, we are taking steps in the U.S. that is undermining our own interests. So this is not a time to curtail talent acquisition, and it's not a time for us to disrupt foundational sciences and fund into those. And you know the reality is that biology and biotechnology is more complex than ever. The timelines are, because of these complex products, are longer, and our current system of funding these technologies is being stressed, so we do need to really pay attention and kind of nurture the ecosystem that has served us so well for the last thirty years or so.

GILES: Got it. So we have a new administration, we have a new Congress, Luciana, what concrete steps, maybe top three priorities would you like to see them take to help America seize all the great opportunities that are there in the biotic future, and manage the risks that we've talked about? And how do we kind of advance the strategic stack that Drew mentioned of education, research, entrepreneurial endeavor, and manufacturing?

BORIO: I mean Drew just gave you the answer here. These are the four things that you need to focus. First of all, top priority is for them to actually pay attention to this. I think that people that are around the Oval Office get very anxious when you say the word biology. They don't really understand it, and they just run the other way. So first of all, let's not do that. Let's actually pay attention to this, and then I would follow the script that Drew just provided. I think talent is the second priority, and the third one is actually making sure that we have the right funding, and systems to fund the great science that America is capable of. We have amazing talent here, and we need to continue to nurture it.

GILES: Drew?

ENDY: Yeah, I could jump in. We've got the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology chaired by Senator Todd Young, and vice chair Michelle Rozo, and that group will be emitting a report sometime this year. I'm excited to see what they recommend. In my testimony before the commission a few weeks ago, I had eight recommendations. Let me just highlight a few. I think the key thing is if we're making investments with public treasure, which is precious, we don't want to unnecessarily reinforce entrenched biotechnology. We have to win the future, and have these investments really be high leverage use of public funding for emerging biotech. I'll give three examples really quick, two which could either be reappropriation or new appropriation, and the other, which is just how to access private capital a little bit differently. So the constitution gives the Congress the authority to set the weights and measures of the economy, the kilogram, the meter, the pound or the foot, this is done by NIST under the Department of Commerce. NIST could create a biomeasurement laboratory for setting the standards in the bioeconomy. And it's going to be super esoteric. It's going to cost a couple of hundred million dollars a year, but this gets coordination of labor so that everybody can have increased trust in economic transactions, and medical therapeutics, you name it. So I'd like to see NIST get resourced finally, to advance the standards underguarding the bioeconomy.

GILES: So that's the National Institute of Standards and Technology, right?

ENDY: That's right, under the Department of Commerce out in Gaithersburg, Maryland, get them money to create a BML, a biomeasurement lab. I will go to my grave advocating for that. Number two, this one costs money. The bioeconomy is growing, it's five percent of our economy. It's actually bigger than chips and semiconductors economically, but we don't invest in it like that. I want us to get more money to the National Science Foundation for basic science and biology, and bioengineering, and I think we should increase the number there by a factor of ten. I'm unapologetic about that.

GILES: Are we relying on the private sector too much then?

ENDY: Well, it's very strange, the government is very good at appropriating money in biotechnology for applications, "Cure the disease right now," because it's easy to get that through Congress because we all understand how urgent it is to cure disease. Because of that, we underinvest in the foundational public stuff, and you want to take the public money and unlock the basic science, and the foundational engineering stuff. We celebrate the RNA vaccines that pulled our hide out of the fire during the pandemic, but look at the story of how desperately difficult it was for the heroes doing that foundational work to get their work funded for the decades before. Right, it's super distressing, so we got to flip that script. One last thing, and this isn't an ask of the public treasure directly, we've got to scale by manufacturing domestically. It does not matter if we have the world's best bio innovations and they're all brewed somewhere else, brewed in China. Right, is the bio future brewed in China, like batteries and solar panels are manufactured in China now? So how do you get a trillion dollars of capital flowing over the next fifteen years or twenty years to do onshore development of factories that make economic sense for biomanufacturing? And here's where ideas like tax-free bonds at the state level, that might put the private sector in the position of making capital allocation decisions, but increase returns or allow returns to spread out over longer periods of time so that we have onshore manufacturing. 

GILES: Awesome. We have about a minute left, time for a quick lightning round of questions. When you were in high school, did you already know that your future was in biotech and medicine, Luciana?

BORIO: Yes.

GILES: You wanted to be a doctor.

BORIO: I wanted to be a doctor since, I think, eighth grade. I was obsessed with it.

GILES: Awesome. Drew?

ENDY: I was mostly just skateboarding, and not very well.

GILES: Okay. If you could have dinner with one historical figure from the fields of biology or medicine, who would it be and why? Drew.

ENDY: Mm. I'd say Barbara McClintock. She's a researcher who studied jumping genes in maize.

GILES: Jumping genes?

ENDY: Jumping genes. If you look at a ear of corn, and the kernels have different colors, why is that? So she's just an extraordinary biologist, what I love about her work is it's described as she had a feeling for the organism, having a type of empathy for biology. I'd love to talk with her.

GILES: Fantastic. Luciana?

BORIO: I would love to have dinner with my former mentor, D.A. Henderson, who was, you know, a super courageous person with great imagination. I miss him dearly in these challenging times, and I would love to be able to have another dinner and say, "Let's talk about all these things."

GILES: Why was he courageous?

BORIO: D.A.? Well, he led the smallpox eradication program for the world, and a former Dean of Public Health at Hopkins. He was somebody of great conviction in his ideas, and he dealt with many different presidential administrations, and he never compromised his positions, his integrity, to convey what he thought was the right thing to do at a given moment.

GILES: They both sound like fabulous choices. What's your go-to piece of advice for someone thinking of launching a biotech start-up. Luciana, you are in the investment business, what's your number one piece of advice?

BORIO: Communicate the vision very clearly, and be very clear about the capital requirements and value creation.

GILES: Got it. Drew, when people come to you and say, "Love your vision, really want to launch something," what are you saying to them?

ENDY: Why are you creating the organization? Are you creating the organization to bring a new product to market or to create an organization itself that the world needs? Either answer is valid, but depending on how you answer that question, your path will flow differently.

GILES: Got it. One last one. If you could bioengineer one organism, what would it be and why? Drew.

ENDY: This question is antithetical to my entire existence.

GILES: Forget it, but answer it anyway.

ENDY: I'd probably stick with what's going on with the flowers these days. You know, I'd like to see some pretty nice upgrades to the bioluminescent garden.

GILES: Right. Luciana?

BORIO: I don't think I'm too serious about this, but sometimes I wish I had a baby whale and like a little fish tank.

GILES: A baby whale in a fish tank?

BORIO:Awesome. Love it, love it. Now there's a challenge. You were both wonderful. Thank you so much, absolutely fantastic.Really appreciate your time.

BORIO: It's been wonderful. Thank you so much. I learned so much.

ENDY: Thanks, Martin, for having me.

GILES: For resources used in this episode and more information, visit CFR.org/the Interconnect and take a look at the show notes. If you have any questions or suggestions, connect with us at [email protected]. And to read the new 2025 Stanford Emerging Technology Review, visit SETR.Stanford.edu. That's SETR.stanford.edu.

The Interconnect is a production of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Stanford Emerging Technology Review from the Hoover Institution and the Stanford School of Engineering. The opinions expressed on the show are solely those of the guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy, nor do they reflect the opinions of the Hoover Institution or of Stanford's School of Engineering.

This episode was produced by Gabrielle Sierra, Molly McAnany, Shana Farley, and Malaysia Atwater. Our audio producer is Marcus Zakaria. Special thanks to our recording engineers, Laurie Becker and Elijah Gonzalez. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your audio. For the Interconnect, this is Martin Giles. Thanks for listening.