Antony Evans is founder and CEO of TAXA Biotechnologies where he leads the non-technical aspects of the business including business development, marketing, fundraising, external communication and regulation. He has an MBA with Distinction from INSEAD, an MA in Maths from the University of Cambridge and is a graduate of Singularity University’s GSP program. He is both a Louis Frank and Oppidan scholar and worked for six years as a management consultant and project manager at Oliver Wyman and Bain & Company. Prior to TAXA he lead the Glowing Plant Kickstarter campaign (crowdfunding $484k), led product development for the world’s first pure mobile microfinance bank in the Philippines and launched a mobile app in partnership with Harvard Medical School that has over 250,000 downloads.
Bio + Life Sciences
A Glowing Plant: the First Fruit of “Digitized” Genetic Engineering
Synthetic biology is entering an exciting new phase. An ecosystem of companies is now developing services to enable faster, cheaper, and better genetic engineering. They are, in effect, "digitizing" genetic engineering through relatively inexpensive cloud-based and robotic laboratories that bring capabilities that were once the exclusive domain of large corporations to academic groups and small startups. To use an old computing analogy, this is biotech’s PC moment: Digitization allows those without technical expertise to operate at higher, more abstract levels. The digital keys to synthetic biology—reproducibility and protocol sharing—could make biological apps as easy to develop as mobile apps are today.
