Owen Stone

Hi, X! I’m Deniz, Co-Founder and CEO of Prolific Machines. This is my first post. My team and I are pioneering digital control over living cells using synthetic biology, optics, and machine learning. We have built a new manufacturing method that allows for any process inside a cell to be controlled with orthogonally tunable wavelengths of light, happening inside of a bioreactor. We engineer the cells to respond to specific light triggers, we retrofit existing reactors with custom illuminators, and we train AI to optimize the light patterns. We call it Optogenetic Biomanufacturing. It's essentially driverless bioreactors. Most of what humans need can be made from cells. Food, medicine, materials, fuels, etc. And we aren't very good at making them. Prolific Machines exists to solve that problem, and medicine manufacturing is the easiest place to begin. It's shocking to me that most biological medicines are made by cells controlled with virus sequences that are always on. This is like having a car with the gas pedal stuck always on. It would be madness to drive such a car. But people sell each other cells with the gas pedal always on every day. One of the first things we did was build an adjustable gas pedal for cells, where the amount of light we shine on the cells controls the intensity of the production. This tool alone outperforms all incumbent technologies on cellular productivity. And that was just the beginning. We built tools to use light to control all manner of processes inside cells. From accelerating cell growth, to controlling sugars on proteins, to tuning secretory capacity, and more. We've built a toolkit for biomanufacturing that actually makes sense. Anything that you want to control inside a cell can now be controlled. And people want it. The demand we are seeing for upgrading manufacturing in our initial niches of protein therapeutics and gene therapy production far outstrips our current ability to deploy this technology. To solve that, we need to rapidly expand our team and deliver multiple deployments simultaneously. The first of those deployments will be announced next week. Today we’re announcing the initial closing of our $50M Series B2, co-led by @NantCapital @DrPatrick and @atomsandbitsxyz. Patrick is joining our board, and we’re starting a collaboration with NantWorks across its biologics programs. Learn more here: prolific-machines.com