biotech

Today we're joined by Matt Plavan, President of Arcadia Specialty Genomics.

The last time we talked with someone from Arcadia Bioscience, a biotech company working on plant genomics in Davis, California, they were confronting GMO regulatory hurdles.

Which was a pity. They had created these great new strains of rice and soybeans, among other crops, that were being held from market due to regulations in Southeast Asia. This at a time when world population is . . . well, you know what its doing.

That was then. Today Arcadia has pivoted to some new crops with some new technology. They have developed a new fiber rich wheat called GoodWheat(TM) that is also lower in gluten and thus matches our modern diets. (And as the author can attest, it's quite tasty in pasta.)  The other cool thing about this wheat is that it is not GM according to most regulatory agencies.

Developed with a technology called “tilling,” the wheat is considered “gene-edited” but not genetically modified and therefore not regulated by most countries. For example, see the ruling made by Australia in the last month.

The company has also set up a division to improve the cannabis seed which, because of its illegality, was bypassed by the two crop revolutions of the past fifty years. You might be familiar with THC and CBD, two main cannabinoids in the plant. But did you know there are 250 such cannabinoids that might prove . . . well, interesting?

Earlier this year, the California Life Sciences Association (CLSA) launched, becoming the first statewide policy and advocacy group for biotech. The new nonprofit, a merger between BayBio and the California Healthcare Institute, is led by CEO Sara Radcliffe, former Executive VP of Health at the international Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) in Washington.

Sara steps into this new role at a time when biotech is booming in the state and in the nation. Yet she will face some difficult challenges ahead:  drug prices are going through the stratosphere,  drawing increasing ire from the general public and state and national goverments while diagnostic test makers see their often patchy reimbursement being further reduced.  Facing a new statewide ballot initiative that aims to fix drug pricing and an upcoming drug cost transparency bill scheduled for the next legislative session, how will Sara defend CLSA members, such as Gilead and Celgene, who are charging ever higher drug prices? And what will she do for a promising yet underpaid diagnostics industry?

Welcome to California, Sara.  How does she like the Bay Area so far?   “It’s a much more laid back environment,” she says at the end of the interview. "Washington can be quite a staid environment. So I’m enjoying the entrepreneurial atmosphere."

We were off last week, so there’s plenty to talk about.

The big news has been about human germline modification.  Do you know about this?  MIT’s Tech Review put out an article early in the month that was kind of an expose suggesting that scientists around the world are beginning to modify the human germline.  Now, this is not the germs you pick up in a public restroom.  No, we’re talking the reproductive cells, our sperm and eggs.  We’ve been changing human genes before, it’s called gene therapy,  but never the germline because then the changes get passed on to future generations.   So it could be a good thing.  But it might be really bad.  Someone might make a mistake and create a new disease. 

And this danger has the scientific community up in arms.  Two groups of scientists took to the prestigious journals last week with papers, one in Science Magazine, the other in Nature.  

The Nature paper came out and said flatly:  Do not modify the human germline.  The Science Magazine paper, however was more . . . you might say optimistic.  This paper said let’s be careful.    If the authors of the Nature paper were setting themselves up as God  writing one of the holy Ten Commandments of Life Science with His finger: Thou Shalt Not Modify the Human Germline, then the authors of the Science paper were playing the loving gentle father who takes his son aside one day, and puts his arm around his shoulder, and says, son, or daughter, there’s something I should tell you about the world.  Just because you can fly a plane, doesn’t mean you should fly it into the side of a mountain.  And son, or daughter, looks dad back in the eye, and says,  but dad, no one would do that.

Speaking of cold mountains in Europe.  A treasure trove of genomic data was released out of Iceland this week.  Huh? Iceland?  Well yeah, after going bankrupt, the country may have just found their next big hidden natural resource:  genomic data. 

This is a treasure for two reasons:  first, the homogenous nature of the population.  There’s not much genetic mixing going on . . . because who the hell wants to  go and live on Iceland?

And two:  in hoping to benefit from this new natural resource, the citizens have been very willing to consent.  

So we’re seeing some cool stuff in this week's publication of the data.  There's been discovery of new disease causing genes.   For example, the MYLF gene was found in only eight people, and all eight have early onset atrial fibrillation.  There’s also a rare mutation that influences the thyroid.

Unfortunately, they haven’t found the gene yet that explains why someone would want to live on the North Pole.

Daniel MacArthur--he’s a geneticist at Mass General who’s in charge of the genomic data for the whole world--he says the work is very impressive, but completely unfair. He says deCODE, the company that generated the data, has now managed to get more genetic data than he has, and he’s funded by the Broad!  It’s just completely unfair.

No he didn’t say that.  

People in cold country are not the only ones being sequenced.  A report out of Saudi Arabia this week says that marriages are being called off due to genetic incompatibility!  One Saudi prince said that before he takes that fourth wife, he wants to be sure this time that she has no 'dominant' genes.

Speaking of arranged marriages, we attended the Techonomy Bio conference this week.  It’s an attempt to bring together tech and bio folks and see what happens.  One of the pairings was Marc Benioff, you know the tech billionaire and  CEO of Salesforce, interviewing Susan Desmond Hellman, the CEO of the Gates Foundation.  Benioff told Sue that he loved what she’s done with her bio, and Sue told Benioff she loves what he’s done with his tech.  And then they kissed.

No they didn’t.  They’re married--to other people.  But wouldn’t it be great to have one of these tech moguls marry a biotechie and then have techbio babies.  Benioff said that the place where tech and bio will meet is in digital health.  So they would be digital health babies.  But not everyone is on board with that.  One of the most tweeted lines of the day came from an investor, Greg Simon, who said he wasn’t convinced.  He said, “wearing your Fitibit into Dunkin Donuts does not a digital health revolution make.”

And that’s our show for March 27th.  Have a great weekend everyone.

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Just less than a year ago, the national biotech editor at Xconomy, Luke Timmerman, left his post. Yeah, he just left it. Gone was the regular Monday column that helped us all absorb the newest trends in biotech. Gone were the lists of companies to watch out for that made sense even if we weren't up to date on Luke's sports analogies. One day the columns were here, then they were gone. Luke said he was busy with a biography of Lee Hood, the guy who brought us automated DNA sequencing. But we all knew Luke just wanted to go climb more mountains.

This week Luke jumped back into the game with the new Timmerman Report, his own venture. Today he tells us what he’s up to with the new life science media site and why he just couldn’t resist the biotech beat.

Working in a dramatically changing media landscape, Luke favors "old school journalism". Using the tried and true subscription model, he says the new platform offers him ultimate editorial independence.

“If somebody doesn’t like what I write, I just lose a $99 subscription. There’s really not much more to consider than that," he says. "This is a journalist owned and journalist run company, and I’m going to run it according to my own editorial sensibilities."

We wish Luke much success and look forward to having his independent voice back on the biotech beat.