🔥 Week 40! 68 Bay Area Bio-economy events, Sept 28-Oct 4 🔥 🔗 docs.google.com/spreadsheets… 🔗 𝗕𝗬 𝗧𝗢𝗣𝗜𝗖 14 🚀 Startups & Ecosystem 10 🏥 Clinical Care & Health Equity 9 💊 Therapeutics & Drug Development 7 🤖 AI & Data for Science 6 🌱 Food, Ag & Climate 5 🧬 Genomics & Protein Design 5 🔬 Lab Tools & Automation 5 ⏳ Longevity, Metabolism & Wellness 4 🧫 Cell & Molecular Biology 3 🧠 Neuroscience & Brain Health 𝗕𝗬 𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗠𝗔𝗧 17 Seminar / Lecture 9 Webinar 9 Panel / Salon 6 Mixer / Social / Outdoor 5 Vendor Lunch & Learn / Expo 4 Conference / Symposium 4 Pitch / Demo Day 4 Info Session 4 Workshop / Hands-on 3 Grand Rounds (CME) 3 Patient & Community Day 𝗕𝗬 𝗟𝗢𝗖𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 21 Berkeley 18 San Francisco 17 Virtual 5 Oakland 3 San Carlos 2 Foster City 2 South San Francisco

If you work in bio x tech in the Bay Area, Boston, NYC, San Diego or Minneapolis, there's a free Slack posting 7+ jobs and 25+ events every week. Almost 14,000 people are already in it. It's @bitsinbio, and it's the most active I've seen it in three years. Events per week, last two months: - Bay Area: 4+ - Boston: 4+ - NYC: 2 to 3 - San Diego and Minneapolis: 1 to 2 - Everywhere else: about 6 more in #events, plus new chapters in Dallas and Nashville The jobs: - 4 in 10 are computational (ML, data, software) - 1 in 3 are wet lab and bioprocess - The rest are BD, ops and partnerships - Lots of founding roles: founding scientists, a CSO, co-founder searches - Mostly Boston and the Bay Area, plus remote, London and Copenhagen Your gateway to the nexus is here: join.slack.com/t/bitsinbio/s…

🚨 Exclusive: Saku Biosciences and Sable Fermentation, Inc. have signed an exclusive US strategic alliance agreement, putting strain engineering and scale-up under one contract. @SynBioBeta has the story:👇 Most microbial products pass through four stages on the way to market: 1. Strain development: engineering and screening a microbe for titer, rate and yield. 2. Upstream processing: fermentation development and scale-up. 3. Downstream processing: recovery, separation, concentration and drying. 4. Formulation: turning the material into something a customer can apply or ship. Different vendors usually handle these stages, and each handoff means a new MSA and a new tech transfer. The costliest gap is between stages 1 and 2. Strains are usually screened in well plates or shake flasks, where oxygen transfer, mixing and substrate feeding look nothing like a stirred-tank bioreactor. The best performer on the bench is often not the best performer in the tank, and that mismatch shows up months later at pilot scale. Saku (strain development) Saku's PicoShells, developed in @dinodicarlo lab at @UCLA and published in PNAS, are picoliter-scale hydrogel particles with a porous shell. Each one holds a single cell and its descendants, fenced in but exposed to the surrounding media. That means more than a million clonal colonies can grow together in real production conditions and be sorted on standard equipment, up to 10 million in a day. Mark van Zee and John Alden picked Sable specifically because they knew what was missing was the scale up peice. Sable (upstream, downstream and formulation) Sable's Wake Forest, NC pilot plant runs submerged fermentation from 1L to 200L, with downstream processing including tangential flow filtration, centrifugation and spray drying, plus formulation and analytics. Its team comes largely from ag biologicals, including AgBiome, Marrone BioInnovations and Pasteuria Bioscience, Inc. Put together, Saku selects strains in the kind of environment Sable will run them in, and the results from Sable's runs go straight back into the next round of screening. "We saw an opportunity to solve one of the biggest inefficiencies in bioprocess development: the disconnect between strain selection and the conditions a strain will ultimately face at scale," said Toni Bucci, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Sable Fermentation. Sable manages the customer relationship end to end. Neither company takes back-end royalties or claims on customer IP. They are paid through success fees. The arrangement is aimed at food, agriculture and industrial biotech companies moving from lab scale toward contract manufacturing.

🚀 @ycombinator. 🤝 An acquisition. 💰 $2.6M+ in funding and fellowships. That's our 2026 @SynBioBeta Next-Gen Bio-leader alumni just 4 months post conference; 2027 applications just opened 👀 🔗 synbiobeta.typeform.com/to/B… Next-Gen BioLeaders is a one-day program at SynBioBeta for students, postdocs, early-career academics and pre-seed founders in programmable biology. You spend the day with biotech investors and founders who have built companies from scratch: VC masterclasses, small-group mentorship, a founders lunch and curated introductions. Here's what the 2026 cohort has done since May: ☘️ Nitroduck | Matej Zámečník, Matúš Grieš, Miroslav Rosputinský Just got into Y Combinator (F26). 🛡️ TwentyTwo (YC S25) | @_harm0n, Evan Seeyave Acquired by @LatchBio. They now lead Latch Biosecurity. 🧪 @cypherbio | @yaoyuyang $2M seed led by @MaCVentureCap for an AI operating system for lab work. ☀️ Solio Bio | Nathan Paumier Came out of stealth backed by Replicator VC. @jaykeasling just joined the scientific advisory board. 🫧 Flux Bio | Marika Ziesack Launched as a @Harvard / @wyssinstitute spinout to fix gas transfer in fermentation. 🦠 Outpost Bio | Jenny Yang Released Waypoint, a foundation model for microbial communities. 💾 BioCompute | @anagha_dna Moved from Bengaluru to San Francisco to build DNA data storage chips. 🧬 LUCAI Bio | Joaquin Ortiz Masllorens Won the South Summit pitch competition and Best Entrepreneur at the Puentes de Talento accelerator. 🐛 Yeast Bay Bio | Nazzy Pakpour Raised from the California Innovation Fund for yeast-based pest control. 🔬 On the research side: Sam Oliveira won a $302K @DARPA Director's Fellowship, one of seven awarded. 🪴 Nolux | Elizabeth Hann joined @activatefellows with her company Nolux and leads a Wyss Validation Project. @YeshDoctor was co-first author on a @NatureBiotech paper. If you're building in biology and want to meet the people who fund and scale it, this is your day. Selected participants receive a complimentary conference pass and up to $500 travel support. 🔗 synbiobeta.typeform.com/to/B…