Synthetic biology: Cultural divide

Illustration by Thomas Porostocky

A Canadian futurist named Andrew Hessel has an unorthodox idea about how to cure breast cancer. He asks: what if volunteer researchers, working cooperatively from their garages and bedrooms, could rival the efforts of multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies?

His crowd-funded venture, the Pink Army Cooperative, is trying to do just that by tapping into open-source tools springing from synthetic biology an emerging field that designs biological products using engineering principles and a modular approach. Since the cooperative launched in 2009, nearly 600 people have invested in it. The cost to join? A mere US$20.

This radical idea faces considerable hurdles but even so, it has attracted plenty of attention from industry groups and the media. The cooperative, launched by Hessel and two co-founders, hopes to start cell-culture studies this year and is considering a therapeutic trial in dogs.

Currently based at the software-design firm Autodesk in San Francisco, California, Hessel represents an increasingly impatient and outspoken faction of synthetic biology that believes that the patent-heavy intellectual-property model of biotechnology is hopelessly broken. His plan relies instead on freely available software and biological parts that could be combined in innovative ways to create individualized cancer treatments without the need for massive upfront investments or a thicket of protective patents. He calls himself a catalyst for open-source synthetic biology.

This openness is one vision of synthetic biology's future. Another is more akin to what happens at big pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Merck and Roche, where revenues from blockbuster drugs fund massive research initiatives behind locked doors. For such businesses, the pursuit of new drugs and other medical advances depends heavily on protecting discoveries through patents and restrictive licensing agreements.

Tight controls on intellectual property are necessary to encourage promising medical developments, says the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) in Washington DC, the sector's dominant trade association. On its website, BIO calls intellectual property imperative for innovation around the world. Societies that protect inventors with patents are the world's most advanced scientifically and technologically, it says.

It's not just return on investment. It is also about doing good in the world.

How synthetic biologists resolve the conflict between open source and patent protection could determine whether the field delivers on its ambitious goal of transforming medicine, agriculture, energy, environmental remediation and other industries through precision engineering. It's not just return on investment, says Linda Kahl, director of the legal programme at the BioBricks Foundation, a non-profit organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that advocates for biological engineering in the public interest. It's not just commercial applications. It is also about doing good in the world.

Although its roots extend back to the early twentieth century, synthetic biology started sprouting as an organized field just over a decade ago. In 2003, only 3 peer-reviewed articles listed in Elsevier's Scopus database used the term synthetic biology; in 2013, more than 800 did. Last year, the field also marked one of its biggest developments. Capitalizing on a discovery by biochemical engineer Jay Keasling of the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris-based pharmaceutical firm Sanofi began large-scale production of a partially synthetic form of the malaria drug artemisinin, which is normally derived from plants (see Nature 494, 160161; 2013). And more big advances are in the pipeline: at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, for example, researchers are creating synthetic fungal enzymes that can convert sugars from broken-down plant biomass into fuels and other industrially useful chemicals.

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Synthetic biology: Cultural divide