"It now costs less to build a biotech startup than an app startup," entrepreneur and venture partner Bill Liao tells the audience at Pioneers Festival in Vienna. As the man behind Indie.Bio, a synthetic biology accelerator in Ireland that funds startups using biology as a basis for technology, Liao understands the costs better than most.

He also knows why synthetic biology is worthwhile investing in. He became interested in the subject when his daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, meaning that she became dependent upon insulin produced by reprogrammed cells.

Biohacker and entrepreneur Ryan Bethencourt has also noticed the vast shift in price his work entails. "The cost of doing biology has dropped dramatically," he says. "In tech were saw Moores Law disrupt everything, in biotech we're beating that curve."

Both Bethencourt and Liao are keen to see more people -- both computer scientists and biologists -- think more about the entrepreneurship options that could be open to them. "You go to the existing labs and see people with strings of letters and they are working on validating a single molecule and they've been doing it for five years," says Liao. These are seriously smart people, he adds. "With all that skill, would you like to just take that skill and do something? A big part of what we are doing with our accelerator is inviting someone who has operated under a different covenant to start behaving like an entrepreneur."

He acknowledges though that it's not always an easy leap to make. "Biotech has had a lot of broken promises. All of that's still very hard, but there's a lot of stuff that's easier -- there's low hanging fruit." At one end of the spectrum there's the work that the people like Andrew Hessel are doing, attempting to create 3D-printed cancer-fighting viruses. But at the other end of the spectrum are the less controversial technologies that are more likely to actually make money.

"Commercialisation is going to come first in areas that aren't heavily regulated, because regulation always sets things back," he says. As an example he points to the startup Muufri, which is making milk without cows, using instead the key proteins and the fatty acids to build it from the bottom up.

"The stuff they make is not genetically modified," says Liao. "What you end up with is a liquid identical to that that comes out of cows." This technology could mean that vegan milk is widely available on shop shelves in less than two years. "It's about looking at things from the perspective of what can I make without genetically modifying organisms."

Liao doesn't come from a biology background and neither he nor Bethencourt believe that you have to be to get involved in biotechnology. "I want to democratise access to the tools. I want everyone to do biotechnology at home, and I don't want the government to be able to stop it," says Bethencourt. The fact that you can do biotech for under the cost of developing an app, means that anyone can do it, he adds. "You just have to teach yourself how to use science."

Originally posted here:

Indie.Bio: it's cheaper to biohack than develop an app startup