Honey — I Shrunk the Factory

Sustainable manufacturing now begins at the cellular level.

Our story begins with an understanding of and the breaking of Eroom’s Law as explained in a Nature article from a year ago by several Boston Consulting Group analysts.

Whereas, Moore’s law, describes the fabulous productivity due to the doubling of the number of transistors that can fit in an integrated circuit every two years, Eroom’s law (which is Moore spelled backwards) describes a phenomenon in the opposite direction — the steady grinding decline in Pharma R&D productivity that has plagued the industry since the 1950’s.

I became fascinated by this relentless trend and its directional flip thanks to a great 2019 year-end review by Bruce Booth, Partner at Atlas Venture, an early-stage biotech focused Venture Capital firm.

Source: Adaptation from the Nature Article here along with my green arrow adjustment 2020 forward

At the core of this 50-year quagmire is the Pharma Industry’s 10+ year Probability of Technical and Regulatory Success (PTRS) for FDA final approval as explained by Dr. David Berry, General Partner of Biopharma VC Flagship Pioneering who said, do the math, “We’re in an industry where one in 4,000 is considered successful,” (and) “The bleeding edge wants to make this two or three in 4,000. That’s just not good enough. Our health and lives are at stake.”

Berry, currently CEO of FP’s new startup Valo, co-founded more than 30 companies at Flagship, goes on to say, “It turns out that an innovative company can come in, construct the right sort of data foundation from scratch, apply infinite-scale computing, and effectively break free of historical dogma about how drugs are developed.”

Paraphrasing Flagship Pioneering, Artificial Intelligence enabled Machine Learning algorithms, analyze hundreds of millions of known proteins, looking for statistical patterns linking sequence, structure, and functions. Those patterns are springboards for the design of custom protein products of any variety.

We are at major inflection point — not only reversing Eroom’s Law but driving it exponentially in the upward direction — propelled by the application of AI and ML that will revolutionize not only Biopharma but it will go way beyond that sector to rapidly and disruptively improve a host of other industries.

VCs like Atlas Venture, Flagship Pioneering, PureTech Health, Third Rock Ventures, and Arch Ventures are already nurturing these non-pharma non-drug companies, and a search for “fermentation” on Crunchbase yields results on plant and animal cell-based foods and biochemicals in the hundreds.

And, why not?

In the past, Pfizer’s squeezing lemons morphed to fermentation for penicillin creating a Pharma giant.