Bio 15

Mar 25, 2015 PT

Techonomy Bio is a big-picture exploration of the transformative global social and economic benefits driven by the rapid advances being made in the biological and life sciences. Powered by IT developments and spurred on by new collaborative and open-source thinking, these advances affect everything from manufacturing to medicine, food to fuel and business to buildings.

Conferences

Bio 15

March 25, 2015

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We’ll explore the continued growth of digital health; how big data and the life sciences are combining to feed a growing global population; bio-fabrication and manufacturing; construction and architecture; longevity; ethics; business; industrial biosciences; privacy; policy; security; and more. We’ll also address what this all means for industries, for government and regulators, for investors and ultimately, for us.

Join us at Techonomy Bio, where we will bring together cross-sector leaders from biotech, IT, science, healthcare, pharma, agriculture, academia, finance and the synthetic bio community for an open and dynamic dialogue on the fast moving ideas, solutions and opportunities generated by the growing confluence of tech, bio and business.

Speakers

Linda Avey

Co-founder and CEO, We Are Curious

Steve Axelrod

Chief Executive Officer, G-Tech Medical

Marc Benioff

Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Ryan Bethencourt

Program Director and Venture Partner, Indie.Bio

Kristen Bole

Assistant Director, Public Affairs, University of California San Francisco

Erika Check Hayden

Correspondent, Nature

All Sessions

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Government + Policy

Policy: Makers, Shakers, and Breakers

April 3, 2015

Cumbers: Welcome to everybody. Antony, let’s start with you. Is what you’re doing regulated? And has the policy around biotechnology helped or hindered you in your startup? Evans: There’s a relatively broad range of things that we’re doing. Everything in biotechnology is regulated to some degree. I think you need to be very careful separating the product regulation and the process regulation. And by that I mean the regulation of which the end product which you sell to people is covered, versus the process by which you make that product, which is a very separate process. And actually that’s sort of where more of the FBI issues pop up. So we have a broad set of regulations that fit over what we’re doing. There’s all kinds of regulations around ordering DNA, making sure that those sequences are appropriate, who can do it. You know if you want to order reagents, you have to go through certain processes. There’s a set of regulations around that, the lab, all of that. But the most important for us is the product regulations. We have a couple of areas that we touch into. The first is our genetically-modified plant and the plant’s seeds that we are sending out. We have recently received determination from APHIS (Animal Plant Health Inspection Service) that that product will not be regulated by them. You: So what is APHIS? Evans: APHIS is the USDA’s biotechnology regulatory arm. So they’re responsible for regulating all genetically modified things that fall under USDA’s regulatory permits, which predominantly...