| Synthetic Biology Today and Tomorrow: The Way Entrepreneurs and Visionaries Want the World to Be. Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum. Our February program will focus on the entrepreneurial opportunities and challenges of building a business based on synthetic biology. “Synthetic biology” is the term that has come to mean the development of fundamental building blocks that can be used to create biological elements with predictable characteristics, but which do not exist in nature. Early commercial applications include microbes created with synthetic biology techniques and already used as sources of alternative fuel sources. However, the frontier will be the engineering of biological elements that can be used in medicine. That will take large, risky investments, and long periods of time, and it will raise a variety of issues of ethics and how to regulate the new technology appropriately. Our panelists will include a mix of entrepreneurially-oriented academics who are pushing the envelope, business executives who are already immersed in developing and selling the building blocks and experts in the finance and future regulation of those emerging businesses. The program will highlight how the leading edge of research will turn into entrepreneurial opportunities that will transform medicine. See http://www.entforum.caltech.edu |
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