synbio1

Really cool area for emerging biotech. Insulin production circuits like the ones described in this article have inspired (and frustrated) synthetic biologists for a long time.

For anyone who approaches biotech with an engineering mindset, insulin makes for a very clean and well-posed problem.

1) Medical insulin is already produced by engineered microbes, and has been for 40 years. So we know microbes can do this safely and effectively.

2) Insulin is a single gene, so it's easy to engineer. We can move it around to different organisms and add different control systems to explore where and how it is expressed.

3) Diabetes is a well studied disease. We know a lot about how much insulin patients need, at what times, in response to what signals. So it is a well defined engineering problem.

4) There is a clear medical need for better diabetes treatments and a large profitable market for anyone who can deliver them.

Personally, I'm not sure that engineered microbes are going to be the best answer for delivering insulin to patients in real time. There are just so many alternative ways to deliver insulin. You'd have to really deep dive on a lot of options to decide which tech was most promising.

But insulin as a challenge problem has driven a lot of innovation in engineered live microbial medicines, including for applications where a microbe is really the only logical answer.

Check out the latest data from synlogic, for example, on live microbial therapies for other metabolic diseases: synlogictx.com/clinical-trials