biotech

SUNNYVALE, CALIF., - When it comes to splicing genes and replicating DNA, backrooms and basements are not the most ideal labs. The next wave of home hacking appears to be in biotech, and around the country, a handful of collectives have sprung up in the past few years to accommodate these biohackers.

As the members of a loose-knit biohacking group in the San Francisco Bay Area saw the passion for their homebrew hackers club growing rapidly, they decided it was time to expand. What they eventually built opened late last year as BioCurious, the Bay Area's first hackerspace for … Read more

Anonymous continued its ongoing attack on agricultural biotech giant Monsanto today by publishing an outdated database of the company's material. This is the newest in a barrage of strikes from hackers aligned with Anonymous who operate under the "AntiSec" banner.

In a statement posted with the database on a Pastebin site, the hacktivist group wrote it was aware that exposing the database would not do much harm to Monsanto but warned it would continue to target the company for what it sees as wrong.

"Your continued attack on the worlds food supply, as well as the … Read more

Thanks in no small part to Moore's Law, engineers and entrepreneurs now have incredibly powerful tools at their hands, creating a fertile environment for invention.

In the year ahead, we're guaranteed more powerful supercomputers and smartphones from the tech industry's basic building block--the microchip. But in a world where the amount of information doubles every year, computers' ability to make sense of it has never been more vital, touching every field of scientific research from robotics to satellite imagery.

Meanwhile, advances in very different fields--materials science and biotech--are paving the way for better batteries, biofuels, and cleaner … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The best route for green technologies to have their own Moore's Law of rapid technological progress is by harnessing the steady advances in IT and, increasingly, synthetic biology, investors said here today.

Combining different engineering disciplines can breathe new life into decades-old technology and help solve environmental and energy challenges, according to speakers at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference.

Moore's Law has led to a steady increase in computing power for decades, but that rate of progress is now being matched in the life sciences, said Steve Jurvetson, managing director at venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, during a … Read more

MEDFORD, Mass.--In this densely populated city outside Boston without a farm in sight, agriculture researchers are engineering corn and other crops to become better biofuels.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack last week visited Agrivida, a small company working on a method it hopes will help deliver on the biofuels industry's promise of economically making fuel and chemicals from non-food crops. Vilsack toured the lab of Agrivida to draw attention to federal investments in renewable energy research and development.

Cheaper biofuels will help lower fuel costs and provide economic development in rural areas of the U.S., … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--To reinvent the fuel business, engineers at biofuel start-up Joule Unlimited tinker with tiny life forms all day.

The four-year-old start-up is on the front lines of a branch of biotechnology that taps into the wealth of knowledge from genome sequencing and powerful computer tools to start from scratch and ask: if you wanted the ideal fuel, how would you make it?

The answer they've come up with is a diesel secreted by a genetically engineered microbe in flat plastic bioreactors. The only inputs for its "biofactory" organism are sunlight, pumped-in carbon dioxide, and some … Read more

You forgot to feed your gerbil. In the middle of the night, it escapes its cage and gnaws off your ear. Who you gonna call? Your local 3D print shop. It'll run off a perfect copy of your ear in no time flat.

This is the kind of futuristic scenario that Cornell University's Hod Lipson and colleagues have been painting while discussing "bioprinting" at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

Bioprinting refers to the practice of using 3D printing to make biological tissue such as skin, bone, and cartilage.

The technology has been around for two decades, but researchers recently began using it to create biological structures. The idea is to make custom-designed tissue and organs from a patient's own cells, perhaps eliminating the need for donated organs.

Companies like Organovo are already developing bioprinted blood vessels, which will be essential for artificially grown organs.

"The next big thing and next logical step is [the] development of robotic methods of functional human tissue and organ bioassembly," Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina wrote in a meeting abstract. Mironov has been trying to grow meat in his lab for a decade.

One study has shown how tissue engineering was used to repair a calf's femur. Printing organs such as livers could be next. … Read more

Qteros, which has a method for creating ethanol from naturally occurring microbes, has signed a partnership to bring its technology to market in India.

The Marlborough, Mass.-based company is expected to announce on Wednesday a joint product development deal with Pune, India-based Praj Industries.

In two years, Praj and Qteros aim to develop a system using Qteros technology which can be licensed to companies that build cellulosic ethanol plants.

In addition, Qteros said it has raised $22 million, which is the first tranche of a series C round of funding.

Qteros was started as a University of Massachusetts spinoff … Read more

Synthetic biology company LS9 has raised $30 million to help fund commercialization of its process of turning plants into diesel fuel.

The funding was led by giant global private equity company Black Rock. Money also came from investors Flagship Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and CTTV Investments, the venture capital arm of Chevron, according to LS9.

LS9 has developed a fermentation-based process for converting sugar in plants into petroleum replacements using genetically engineered e. coli bacteria. The same process can be modified to manufacture different chemicals as well.

Earlier this year, researchers at the San Francisco company published a paper … Read more