Obviously this is true. There’s much that goes into industrial synthesis that someone with a setup like his at home just can’t currently reproduce, and safely.

What I find most dubious about the article is the lack of attention to synthetic biology. Because QA in that sense can become say, “this modified organism can produce the drug in question under most conditions and all future populations will carry the new genes with X% assurance” - ONCE -and you’re done.

This is quite possibly the real Pharma killer, IMO.

But only kind of. Even if you could get a strain of yeast to produce a specific antibody 100% of the time, how reliably could you get the yeast to grow? If you can get it to grow, how reliably can you extract a enough of the antibody to form just one dose? If you can extract, can you get it into a formulation that is pharmaceutically viable? Its not just about synthesis.

There's so much tooling and expertise that goes into front end, back end, deployment, db, QA, etc ,etc, etc just to get one app going. Why would would drug deployment be any different?

Well, yes you’re correct, there are associated complexities I’ve glossed over. My point however is simply that all of these complexities only really need to be solved once by an expert or team of experts such that non-experts can then utilize such a biotechnology (“yeast strain”) to produce some medicinal compound or other useful engineered metabolite. A yeast strain that can’t be reliably cultivated by a non-expert with relative ease and safety (in a non-laboratory) wouldn’t make the cut, in theory.

Also the same semi-synthetic organism could be applied in traditional pharmaceutical process settings as well, if for no reason other than cost reduction (and probably workforce reduction as well). So even “big pharma” has some incentive to contribute to this sort of technology.