A good microbe can make plastic, rubber or protein in a flask. Proving it can do the same inside a 25,000-liter tank is where companies run out of equipment, money and time - so BioMADE is building the missing middle.
Jennifer Kan spent years at a Nobel laureate's bench teaching enzymes new tricks. Now her fund backs the founders trying to grow the physical economy - chocolate, copper, chemicals, even data - one engineered cell at a time.
The New York investor does more than write checks. It links scientists, factories, corporations and rural universities in a bid to move food technology from the lab to the loading dock.
Douglas Friedman is CEO of BioMADE, the U.S. Department of Defense-funded Manufacturing Innovation Institute dedicated to growing the domestic industrial biomanufacturing ecosystem. With a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Northwestern and a career spanning the National Academies, the White House OSTP, and the founding of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, Friedman is one of the foremost architects of America's bioeconomy strategy — arguing that biology, not silicon, may define the next great manufacturing revolution.