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Synthetic Biology Events & Industry Information
🌍 Global Synthetic Biology Conference
📅 May 4-7, 2026 in San Jose
Join us!

tinyurl.com/2uc677rn Built With Biology is the premier innovation network for biological engineers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors who share a passion for using biology to build a better, more sustainable planet. We provide our community members with personal and professional development support, as well as valuable opportunities for networking, partnership, collaboration, and education. Every year we host The Global Synthetic Biology Summit which showcases the cutting-edge developments in biology that are transforming how we fuel, heal, and feed the world. In addition, we stage a variety of other conferences, thought leader retreats, and local meet-ups throughout the year, in both the United States and around the world.

11/10/2026

Most skincare gets tested on skin. Very little gets tested on what lives on it.

Elsa Jungman built HelloBiome to change that, and some of the biggest names in beauty and wellness now design products around her data.

Elsa is the founder and CEO of HelloBiome, a San Francisco microbiome intelligence company. It combines sequencing, its own clinical studies, and machine learning to find the biological patterns behind skin, scalp, and hair, then predicts how people will respond to an ingredient or formula before it ships.

Her argument is that microbiome science shouldn't be a box you check on a finished product. It should be where formulation starts.

In 2027 she joins us on the SynBioBeta stage.

What HelloBiome has built:

- A partnership with Cosmax, one of the world's largest cosmetics manufacturers, built on microbiome data from 900 consumers. The work identified microbial markers tied to sensitivity and barrier disruption, then guided which postbiotic actives went into the formula
- A scalp microbiome research program with K18, studying how hair treatments interact with the bacteria on the scalp
- Work with more than 30 clients internationally, including Nutrafol, True Botanicals, OneSkin, and ingredient makers like Takasago
- Research studies, claim studies, formulation development, and white-label microbiome testing kits for skin, scalp, and v***a
- PredictaBiome, its next step from measuring the microbiome to predicting outcomes
- Revenue that nearly tripled in 2024, with the company profitable

"We rely on clinical data that we have collected ourselves," she says. That dataset is the asset.

Her path to HelloBiome:

- PhD in skin barrier science
- L'Oréal, in product development
- AOBiome, early in the live-bacteria skincare field
- Founder of Dr. Elsa Jungman, a skincare line built for sensitive skin
- HelloBiome, Founder and CEO

She's been named to Inc.'s Female Founders 500 and the Longevity 100 in Beauty & Wellness.

Her focus now sits where microbiome science, AI, personalized health, and longevity meet, moving biological data past measurement and into prediction and precision interventions.

If you're building in beauty, personal care, microbiome diagnostics, or anywhere biological data should shape a product before it launches, Elsa is the person to find.

Come find her in San Jose, May 3-6th.

11/09/2026

Sequential diligence assumes the ground holds still while you check it. One investor's view is that in this field, at this pace, it no longer does.

SynBioBeta 2027. May 3 to 6, San Jose. Link in bio.

www.syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=Conference+Insights&utm_medium=LinkedIn

11/07/2026

Nick Ouzounov had the idea for Geltor in the shower: could engineered microbes make collagen cheaper than animals do?

A decade later, Geltor's designed collagens and elastins are in consumer products sold around the world. And they've been part of the SynBioBeta community almost the whole way.

Nick is the co-founder and CTO of Geltor, a precision fermentation company that designs and manufactures recombinant proteins and peptides for beauty, personal care, home care, and ingestibles. He has led protein design and process development since day one, taking designed proteins from sequence through scale-up and tech transfer to commercial ingredients.

He's been in our audience since 2016. In 2027, he joins us on the SynBioBeta stage for the first time.

Geltor at SynBioBeta:

• 2015: Geltor is founded, and Alex Lorestani is at SynBioBeta
• 2017 to 2020: Alex takes the stage four years running
• 2019: Geltor sponsors, with a featured talk on designing beauty products with biology
• 2022: Geltor returns with a main stage fireside chat and a booth
• 2026: Nick and the Geltor team are back on the floor
• 2027: Nick on stage

What Geltor has built:

• HumaColl21, a biomimetic human collagen for skincare, made by fermentation with no human or animal inputs
• Elastapure, a recombinant elastin for beauty and personal care
• PrimaColl, an ingestible collagen that received an FDA "no questions" letter on its GRAS notification
• Biodesigner AI, its computational platform for selecting and optimizing protein sequences before they ever reach a fermenter
• Fermentation routes to bioactive small peptides like GHK, at costs competitive with chemical synthesis
• $137M raised to date, with its most recent round co-led by Starlight Ventures and iSelect Fund, and revenue up around 75% during the raise

Geltor also works with brands to find where a designed protein or peptide can solve a formulation or performance problem, then develops and manufactures that ingredient for them.

How it started: Nick and co-founder Alex Lorestani began Geltor while interviewing for postdocs, with no guarantee the company would get funded. IndieBio gave them their first break. "Having lab space was huge for us since all we had was an idea on paper when we applied," he says.

His path:

• PhD in molecular biology from Princeton University, studying MreB, the cytoskeleton of E. coli, with Zemer Gitai and Josh Shaevitz
• IndieBio, where Geltor got its lab space and first funding
• Geltor (2015-present), Co-founder and CTO

If you're making ingredients with biology, or you're a brand looking for a protein that does something no existing ingredient can, Nick is the person to find.

Come find him in San Jose, May 3-6th.

11/07/2026

About a third of global fertilizer trade moves through the Strait of Hormuz. Access to fertilizer decides who eats, and it is currently coupled to energy markets and to a short list of geographic chokepoints.

The environmental arithmetic is worse than most people assume. Tim Schnabel of Switch Bioworks pointed out at SynBioBeta that nitrous oxide from nitrogen fertilizer is 267 times more potent than CO2, and that running Haber-Bosch takes roughly the energy of 200 nuclear power plants. Add them together and you are over a gigaton of CO2 equivalent.

Some microbes already fix nitrogen from air at room temperature without fossil fuels. Schnabel left Stanford after more than a decade to ask what it would take to recode them into fertilizer factories sitting on plant roots.

Three things, he said. Engineer them to release ammonia into the plant, because wild type will not. Make the release switchable, because constant ammonia production costs so much energy the microbes cannot compete in field soil. And build a team of strains, because no single one colonises well enough to matter.

His framing: we used to ship nitrogen around the world, and we will grow it where it is needed.

SynBioBeta 2027. May 3 to 6, San Jose.

11/06/2026

In the grocery store, the GMO corn offers the shopper nothing the other one does not. So why take any risk at all? Give people a benefit they actually want and the maths changes. Thirteen million bottles later.

SynBioBeta 2027. May 3 to 6, San Jose. Link in bio.

11/05/2026

Most vaccines are about getting the right ingredients in. Claire Zeng showed that where you put them matters, down to 3.5 nanometers.

Now she's turning that discovery into a company.

Claire is the co-founder, CEO, and CTO of DoriNano, a Harvard spinout building programmable DNA origami nanoparticles for therapeutic cancer vaccines and nucleic acid delivery. DNA origami folds strands of DNA into precise 3D shapes. Claire uses those shapes as scaffolds, placing immune signals exactly where the body's immune cells will read them.

She is an MD and PhD, trained in clinical medicine and cell biology, and she pioneered the use of DNA origami to control the nanoscale presentation of immune signals.

In 2027 she joins us on the SynBioBeta stage.

What the research has shown:

- In Nature Nanotechnology, her team found that spacing adjuvant molecules 3.5 nanometers apart on a DNA origami particle gave the strongest activation of immune cells, slowed tumor growth in mice, and worked alongside checkpoint inhibitors
- In Nature Biomedical Engineering this year, a DNA origami vaccine carrying the full SARS-CoV-2 spike protein drove T cell and antibody responses similar to mRNA vaccines in mice and in a human lymph node-on-a-chip model
- DNA origami vaccines avoid some of the cold-chain and formulation complexity of lipid nanoparticles, which could make them easier to store and ship

What she's built at DoriNano since founding it in 2023:

- Closed a pre-seed round
- Secured an exclusive patent license from Harvard
- Established collaborations with Daiichi Sankyo and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
- Generated encouraging non-GLP toxicology data
- Completed an FDA INTERACT meeting on the path to the clinic

She built the company with co-founders Jessica Baker Flechtner and William Shih, whose lab at Harvard helped pioneer DNA origami design tools.

Her career runs from the clinic to the lab to the company:

- Clinical medicine and a PhD in cell biology
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Wyss Institute at Harvard, as a Senior Scientist developing the DoriVac platform
- Harvard Medical School, as an Instructor
- DoriNano (2023-present), Co-founder, CEO, and CTO

If you're working on vaccines, drug delivery, nanomedicine, or programmable biomaterials, Claire is the person to find.

Come find her in San Jose, May 3-6th.

11/03/2026

Most synthetic biologists work on making engineered microbes do something new. Tae Seok Moon spends as much time on what happens to them after the experiment ends.

In 2027 he joins us on the SynBioBeta stage.

Tae Seok Moon is a professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute, founder of Moonshot Bio, and director of CIRCLE, the NSF Global Center for Innovative Recycling and Circular Economy. Before JCVI he spent a decade on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. He did his PhD with Kristala Prather at MIT and his postdoc with Christopher Voigt.

What he's built:

- Leads CIRCLE, a five-year, $5M NSF Global Center with more than 40 principal investigators across 18 institutions and 16 companies in at least six countries, aimed at plastic waste, food and ag waste, and air pollution
- Engineered a two-microbe consortium that upcycles mixed plastic waste, the category nobody can sort economically, into lycopene and lipids, published in Nature Communications in 2025
- Built CRISPR-based kill switches that stay genetically stable, one of the harder unsolved problems in deploying engineered microbes outside a fermenter
- Showed this year that plasmids carrying antibiotic resistance genes can survive bleach and autoclaving and still transform bacteria, a finding about biosafety practice that nobody wanted but everybody needed
- Developed a medium for in-space biomanufacturing, making microbes produce useful molecules from what's available off Earth
- 32 funded projects, $45.8M, 112 publications, 12 patents

He also founded SynBYSS, the weekly seminar series that pairs a rising young scientist with a senior one, and chairs the SynBYSS conference. He's Editor-in-Chief of New Biotechnology and sits on the editorial boards of about ten more journals, plus the EBRC Council.

On the resistance gene work, he put it plainly: "even when that goal is met, engineered DNA can remain intact enough to function."

That's the thread running through all of it. Build the thing, then ask honestly what it does when it leaves the lab.

If you work on biocontainment, waste valorization, microbiome engineering, or you just want to argue about what the field is willing to look at, Tae Seok is the person to find.

San Jose, May 3-6.

https://www.syntheticbiologysummit.com/

11/02/2026

Hugh Goold led the build of the final chromosome in the global effort to make the first synthetic eukaryotic genome.

Now he's taking those tools out of the lab and into the ocean, to help kelp forests survive warming seas.

Hugh is a Scientia Fellow at UNSW Sydney, working in partnership with the NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development. He has spent 20 years in microbial biotechnology across three countries, including a decade in government research, and his current program asks a simple question: what happens when you bring genome-scale synthesis and analysis to organisms beyond the standard lab models?

In 2027 he joins us on the SynBioBeta stage.

What he's built:

- Led the construction and debugging of SynXVI, the 903 kb synthetic yeast chromosome that completed the international Sc2.0 project's set of 16, published in Nature Communications in 2025
- Found that the placement of genetic markers can disrupt essential genes, and fixed it with CRISPR-based tools, a lesson for anyone designing genomes at scale
- Secured more than AUD$2 million in the last 18 months for his genome-scale research program
- With support from Revive & Restore, is developing gene-editing tools for golden kelp (Ecklonia radiata), a foundation species of the Great Southern Reef that stretches more than 8,000 km along Australia's southern coast
- Applying genome-scale deletion collections to non-standard model organisms, starting with heat-tolerant microalgae, to learn what lets them survive warmer water

"If we figure out the genetics underpinning how these organisms survive in warmer climates and apply that in restoration," he says, "we will be able to prepare our important marine habitats for climate change."

His work has run through some of biotech's hardest problems:

- Microalgal production of sustainable aviation fuel
- Filamentous fungi engineered as enzyme factories
- Yeast strain engineering and synthetic genomes at Macquarie University and the Australian Genome Foundry
- A decade in government research, now with NSW DPIRD

He's a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and the Australian Society for Microbiology, a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and a board member of AFRAN, the Franco-Australian research network.

If you're working on synthetic genomes, conservation biology, or taking engineering biology beyond E. coli and yeast, Hugh is the person to find.

Come find him in San Jose, May 3-6th.

10/30/2026

Most synthetic biology starts with sugar. Michael Köpke built a platform that starts with steel mill exhaust.

He's named on more than 500 patents, and the microbes he engineered are running in commercial plants around the world.

Michael joined LanzaTech in 2009 and built its biology platform from the ground up: synthetic biology, automation and biofoundry, strain and protein engineering, and computational modeling. Today, as Chief Innovation Officer, he directs the company's innovation strategy and technology partnerships.

His view is simple. "The world has enough carbon above the ground to make the things we need."

In 2027 he joins us on the SynBioBeta stage.

What the platform has delivered:

- More than 500 metabolic pathways designed and over 100 molecules produced directly from gas, at bioreactor scales above 500,000 liters
- Led the work showing carbon-negative production of acetone and isopropanol by gas fermentation at industrial pilot scale, published in Nature Biotechnology
- Steelanol in Ghent, run by ArcelorMittal under LanzaTech's license, shipped its first barge of ethanol made from recycled steel mill carbon in 2024
- Shougang LanzaTech, the joint venture that runs gas fermentation at steel mills in China, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in June 2026
- A new multi-year collaboration with DTU's BRIGHT initiative to build a next-generation C1 biofoundry for turning CO2, CO, and methane into fuels, chemicals, and materials

Recognition along the way:

- The Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award
- The ACS National Award for Team Innovation
- A spot on The Bioeconomy 500

His work reaches well beyond one company:

- PhD in biotechnology from Ulm University
- LanzaTech (2009-present), VP of Synthetic Biology, then Chief Innovation Officer since 2023
- Adjunct professor at Northwestern University
- Board member of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC) and the International Metabolic Engineering Society
- Author of more than 50 peer-reviewed studies and community research roadmaps that bring academia, industry, government, and nonprofits to the same table

If you're working on carbon-to-product biology, gas fermentation, or biomanufacturing that has to compete at industrial scale, Michael is the person to find.

Come find him in San Jose, May 3-6th.

10/29/2026

Most investors talk about AI for biology. Edward Kliphuis co-leads a $200M fund that does nothing else.

His team at Sofinnova Partners has backed some of the most closely watched AI-bio companies in Europe, from protein design to foundation models for biology.

Sofinnova has been investing in life sciences for 50 years. In 2023 it launched its Digital Medicine strategy to back early-stage companies "at the intersection of biology, data and computation," and Edward and fellow partner Simon Turner closed Digital Medicine I at $200M, above target. Edward put the pace plainly at the close: "In just a few months since launching this strategy, we've executed five investments into transformative companies which are fusing state-of-the-art computational methods with advanced biological innovations."

In 2027 he joins us on the SynBioBeta stage.

What the Digital Medicine portfolio has been up to:

- Co-led the $40M Series A for Latent Labs, founded by Simon Kohl, former co-lead of protein design at Google DeepMind and a senior scientist on AlphaFold2
- Backed Bioptimus, the Paris team of ex-Google DeepMind and Owkin scientists building a foundation model for biology, now at $76M in total funding
- Led the €13.8M Series A for Kiro, which uses AI to help doctors and patients make sense of lab results, with Edward joining the board
- Co-led the $5M seed for BioCorteX, which simulates how microbes, the body, and drugs interact, with Edward joining the board
- Also backing Cure51, Excelsior Sciences, Betteromics, deepc, and L'école AI

His career has followed the money into medicine:

- M Ventures, the corporate VC arm of Merck KGaA, where he started as a biopharma analyst and later invested in digital medicine, including the developers of the first FDA-authorized video game therapy
- Kempen & Co, the European merchant bank, covering listed small- and mid-cap life sciences stocks
- Sofinnova Partners (2021-present), where he is now a Partner and co-leads the Digital Medicine strategy

He holds an MSc in Biopharmaceutical Sciences from Leiden University, with a focus on pharmacology.

And he likes a challenge. In 2012 he and his team drove an underpowered 1.2L Chevrolet Aveo from London to Mongolia, across the Gobi Desert, to raise money for SOS Children's Villages.

If you're building a company where biology meets data and computation, and you're looking for an early investor who has done this before, Edward is the person to find.

Come find him in San Jose, May 3-6th.

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Website

https://synbiobeta.com/, https://syntheticbiologysummit.com/

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