The Future of Synthetic Biology... Dr. John Cumbers, Founder & CEO, SynBioBeta
How would you describe the cutting edge, the scientific and technical frontier of how we can or might engineer biology and understand how living organisms, including us, work? The field is called synthetic biology, and maybe you or your company is already doing it or wants to at least know what's happening. Well, there's one easy way every year to figure it out. Today, I speak with John Cumbers, the founder and CEO of SynBio Beta, the global synthetic biology conference. This year, 2025, it's in San Jose, California, May Fifth Through Eighth, and we're going to talk about what's happening there.
Dr. Moira Gunn:John, welcome to Biotech Nation.
Dr. John Cumbers:Hi, Moira. Thanks so much for having me.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now I have to say I like your leading motto, if you if we can call it that for the conference, biology, technology, plus purpose driven people. I gotta say there are several thousand purpose driven people at this conference.
Dr. John Cumbers:Well, it's been a pleasure curating this community for the last thirteen years in the Bay Area. You've come to the event twice last year. We gave you a Lifetime Achievement Award for your services to Biotech Communications, so it's an honor to be on the podcast for the first time, but the reason we included the people in the tagline for the conference is because, yeah, we love the technology. Yeah, we love the business, but what we really love is the community and the people who are actually making this stuff happen.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, you have a number of tracks and a number of focuses. Let's go there. What are these? I see four here. Human health, tools and technology, planetary health, and the business of biology and society.
Dr. Moira Gunn:What's in them? These are these are very broad categories.
Dr. John Cumbers:I describe Synbio Beta as being at a software conference in the 1980s, because they are broad. The conference is so broad. You come to Synbio Beta and you might chat with Rick Doblin, who's the founder of MAPS, talking about psychedelics and you might chat with the CTO of Microsoft, Kevin Scott, who's going to be talking about bio and AI and you might chat with Kim Branson, who's the head of machine learning and artificial intelligence at GSK, so it's like this eclectic mix of people and we really can simplify it into human health, planetary health, and then the latest track that we've announced, which is called hyperscale biology. And that's all about the intersection of AI and bio and the huge impact that that is having on the field and is gonna continue to have on the field.
Dr. Moira Gunn:I love this hyperscale biology. I didn't even know about that.
Dr. John Cumbers:It's a term that I stole from Illumina Ventures. Nick Niclera came up with it and I said, that's an amazing term. He said, yeah, we're investing in hyperscale biology. We are looking for people who are going out there and thinking about bigger data sets than we've ever been able to think of and feeding those big data sets into biology. Of course, Illumina is a sequencing company, so they think about lots and lots of data.
Dr. John Cumbers:But I said to him, that's an awesome term. Can I take it? And he said, sure. So I went and registered the domain name, Hyperscale.bio and created this new track because, you know, if you don't keep moving with a conference and a community, then you become stale and old. So we have about 20 different AI companies who are coming to talk about what they're doing at this year's event.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So we have not only companies, we have individuals who are from both the industry and academia. We even have students.
Dr. John Cumbers:Yeah. We, we love to bring the next generation on board. And if there are any students listening, then they can email infosynbiobeta dot com and offer to volunteer. They can also buy a student pass if they want to join the student program. Because again, if you don't innovate, you know, I'm already old, I'm 45 Moira, so we need to bring the next generation of biotechnologists in, and we have a partnership with Nucleate, which is an organization all around the world that brings their leadership to the summit as well.
Dr. John Cumbers:So, yeah, forget about the next generation, which is easy to do, you know, you won't have a vibrant community, so that's definitely a big part of it.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, I wanna thank you. At least one of my former students is actually leading a track. That would be Sarah Ives.
Dr. John Cumbers:I didn't know Sarah was your former student. Sarah's fantastic.
Dr. Moira Gunn:She's not only a former student, she's a former producer on Biotech Nation.
Dr. John Cumbers:That means that I know three of your producers then. That's amazing. Well, Sarah is leading the track on engineered human therapies and she's really been doing a great job at bringing in some of the most innovative speakers. And one of those really interesting people that we have who's doing cell therapy manufacturing is Dean Kamen. And you may know Dean from Inventing the Segway.
Dr. John Cumbers:He's founded First Robotics Competition, but for the last few years, he's been working on an organization called Army, which is a regenerative manufacturing institute funded by the Department of Defense. And so Dean is gonna be coming and talking all about cell therapies and how we can scale the manufacturing of them for things like organ replacement and some really interesting applications around. He's also going to be talking about vaccine development with Jake Glanville, who's another friend of ours.
Dr. Moira Gunn:He hires every student he can find from me. He even said to me once, if you can believe this, can you give me maybe the names of the people who applied to your program, but you had to reject because there just wasn't room? I said, thank you, Jake. I'm sure they'd love to meet with you.
Dr. John Cumbers:So this is Jake Glanville at Centivax and he's going to be talking about universal immunity and we're actually doing a very special event with him and Dean Kamen and Raj from Flagship Ventures. So, you know, that gives you a sense of the breadth of the event, just from the people that we've mentioned.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Everyone's doing many things, interconnected many ways. I mean, Flagship, of course, was the funder of Moderna and about 30 other companies in a very interesting way how they do that. And and, of course, Jake's, just mother is a gun. So you know?
Dr. John Cumbers:That's right. You're related. Yes. I forgot that.
Dr. Moira Gunn:He got all the brains. I hate that part. We have that argument many times, many times. But, anyway, the it is interesting in the sense that there are so many different things. When you're getting to a certain point, you're talking about tools that could drive many different types of technology, biotechnology.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And I do have to say so many times these conferences seem to be about biopharmaceuticals or just diagnostics simply because that's the largest market sector. So, you know, frequently, that's what happens. The big money drives that. But in fact, you're also talking about, consumer products. You're talking about chemicals and materials.
Dr. Moira Gunn:You're talking about food and agriculture as well as space. Where does space come in?
Dr. John Cumbers:Space comes in because I'm so passionate about settling the solar system. I worked at NASA for seven years in the bioengineering program and I dreamed of being able to design organisms that could produce food, design organisms that could purify our water and recycle it and produce materials, send engineered cell to the surface of Mars, but also send a DNA synthesizer. So when you figure out that there's too much perchlorate on the surface of Mars, you can do a hot swap of that genome and design a new bug that's going to be able to metabolize that perchlorate or do something else with the CO2 or nitrogen that it finds there. So biology is this most versatile manufacturing technology and it's, as Craig Venter said in his book, Life at the Speed of Light, you don't need to take everything with you when you settle the solar system. You just need a DNA synthesizer and biology and you can recreate everything that we have here that's biologically produced anywhere you go in the solar system.
Dr. John Cumbers:So that's the connection between synthetic biology and space.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, doctor Cumbers, I have to say, you know, you had a career being a synthetic biologist at NASA. You know? Why did you make the leap over to creating this?
Dr. John Cumbers:Well, NASA should be the most innovative place to work in the world, but unfortunately, it's put inside a box called the federal government.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Oh, those guys.
Dr. John Cumbers:So I had the opportunity to start Synbio Beta to start my own company and I'm in Silicon Valley. I'm living and breathing the startup environment, so all of my friends around me were starting companies or raising funds, so after seven years there, I was like, okay, I think I can make a go of this and pulled the rip cord and never looked back. It was definitely the right decision for me at the time.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Like all the best conferences, you have an exhibit area. What's in your exhibit area?
Dr. John Cumbers:That's right. We have over 80 exhibitors come into the conference and mostly these are the geeks who are making equipment, making automation. So you can go around the expo and look at a lot of these machines in action like automatic pipettas or machines that move plates around. So there's just a lot of automation that happens, but there's also a lot of the companies that you mentioned, the chemicals companies, the materials companies, the food companies are bringing their wares and showing people what these things do. In the past, we had the company EcoVative come and they brought a car with them and the car was aligned with leather that had been grown from mushroom mycelium.
Dr. John Cumbers:So that's just one example of some of the materials that you can see there. We have the company Arzada, which is using machine learning to design enzymes. And you can taste sugar, a sweetener, an artificial sweetener that they've made using, so it's a stevia, so it's not actually artificial, but they're using these engineered enzymes to convert one form of the Reb protein into another, which gives it that sweetness. So you can literally taste the products of the bioeconomy. And then we have another company called LightBio and LightBio was on the front page of Time magazine in December because they have the glow in the dark petunia, and we actually premiered that at the conference a couple of years ago.
Dr. John Cumbers:And you also have another company called Living Plants, NeoPlants, which are making plants that can suck out, pollutants from the air. They're based in Paris. So that just gives you a sense of the diversity of the kind of people that you get in the expo at the event.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Which reminds me, you're also talking about climate tech and the environment.
Dr. John Cumbers:Yeah, that's a huge piece of it and we have a whole track on that in terms of scale up and manufacturing. Mark Warner from Liberation Labs is the person behind that track and if you think about synthetic biology as a manufacturing technology, yes, it is great for producing drugs, but what it's also really good at is for producing anything that is made from carbon. So if you think about a carbon molecule in the air and you think about how we've got too much of these carbon molecules in the air because we're sucking up oil from the ground and we're burning coal and natural gas, well, what if you could have a technology that sucks out that CO2 from the air and puts it into something useful? And of course that technology is all around us. This is what photosynthesis does all the time.
Dr. John Cumbers:So now if we could engineer these cells to now produce a chemical that we want or a surfactant that we want or a cosmetic that we want or a food product that we want, then we can enable what's broadly called the bioeconomy to flourish. And McKinsey put out a report a couple of years ago that shows that 60% of global inputs could be made using biology. And right now we're at about 5%. So if the policies are right to reconfigure our economy, there's a huge growth boom that's gonna happen around biomanufacturing and that's why we've got the whole track and the whole segment on climate change and planetary health.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Now there are all kinds of specialized luncheons, you know, CEOs, oh, of course, one for the media, senior tech leadership, investors, marketing and messaging, and women's luncheon. How do you decide who gets a luncheon and why are they getting these luncheons?
Dr. John Cumbers:We have a meeting at the company and we look across the whole ecosystem and we're about 2,000 people that come to the event and so some big trade shows you go to and you just feel lost. You just feel it's too big. It's like a zoo. So these smaller events that we put on, we have one for the AI and biopharma people to meet on the Wednesday night. We have one for, as you said, the women's luncheon on the Thursday.
Dr. John Cumbers:So we just identify groups that we think are really interesting and groups that should be brought together and might not otherwise have the chance to connect and we put on these special events throughout the conference. And some of them are, we put them on as SymBio Beta. Others are put on by our sponsors to group together. You know, we have one particularly around drug discovery, another one around planetary health. So once people sign up for the event, our BD team reaches out and helps to slot them into the right special events that they might be a fit for.
Dr. John Cumbers:And the investor one is a big one. That's always a popular one. And then we had Vinod Khosla speak at our CEOs event for all of our CEOs as well. So yeah, we just try to find these small pockets and do what we can to promote people coming together.
Dr. Moira Gunn:I'm glad you mentioned Vinod Khosla because there were two Lifetime Achievement Awards and for those of you who don't know who Vinod is, he is a very, very famous biotech venture capitalist. So I was as thrilled to get the award as to get the other person who got the award was Vinod Khosla, which I always mention. Clashed my award up as well. It was very nice. It was very nice.
Dr. Moira Gunn:So you're going to have awards again this year?
Dr. John Cumbers:We are going to have awards again this year. I can't quite say who's going to win them yet, but we're going to be announcing them very shortly. But Finode has been coming to Synbio Beta for over ten years and he's one of these amazing guys that's done the successful crossover from tech into biotech. So, you know, he founded Sun Microsystems back in the day. That's earned him the billions of dollars that he has, but he just keeps reinvesting in it.
Dr. John Cumbers:And he's invested in a number of companies in our space and really helped out some of the entrepreneurs to succeed and put them on this stable path to revenue and profitability, which is fantastic.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Well, it just goes to show you, you don't have to have a billion dollars to get an award from SendBioBeta. I just wanted to point that out.
Dr. John Cumbers:I've been listening to you since I arrived in the Bay Area in 02/2008. I remember driving my car home and you're one of the few people that I would just, it was always on a Sunday night and I would just get glued to it. I was like, you are speaking to me, you know, like the Geek Squad was coming out and I was just like, I can't believe only in the Bay Area could we be so lucky to have Moira Gan who produces content directly into our ears for the tech community, so it's a special privilege to have you.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Oh, that is so great. And, of course, it it's always gone all over the world. So all these people everywhere are like, I hope they feel local. They're they're family for us. They're all family.
Dr. Moira Gunn:And and, actually, and in the run up to this, you were telling me that they could use Biotech Nation to get a discount.
Dr. John Cumbers:That's right. If people wanna come and join our community, they can go to the website and register. And if they just type in Biotech Nation, then they will get a discount code to register for the event.
Dr. Moira Gunn:Can't buy a house with it, but it's something, I wanna say. It's a recognition.
Dr. John Cumbers:But you might be able to meet your co founder at the conference or meet the investor that will fund your startup, and then in, you know, five or ten years' time, then you can buy a house with that.
Dr. Moira Gunn:There you go. And by the way, you might just get that idea or the completion for your current idea, and, it all comes together. This is not easy stuff. We all know that. So John, thank you so much for joining me.
Dr. Moira Gunn:I'm so sorry it's the first time you've been on. I hope you come back and see us again.
Dr. John Cumbers:I would love to come back. Well, we're continually driving new topics and new information and bringing new people together, so if there's new ideas that I have or particular trends, I'm happy to come on and discuss them with you.
Dr. Moira Gunn:My guest today is John Cumbers. Find out all things Synbio Beta at synbiobeta.com. That's Syn,syn,bio,bio,Beta,beta,.com. And, of course, when you register, you could use the discount code BioTechNation at this year's twenty twenty five SynBioBeta conference. It's in San Jose, California, May Fifth Through Eighth.
Dr. Moira Gunn:All things SynBioBeta at SynBioBeta.com.
