Beneficial Bio

The Elevate Prize would be transformational to my work at this time for three reasons. One is that the funding would allow me to consolidate the lessons of my organisation Beneficial Bio's pilot biomanufacturing partnership in Cameroon and extend the model to support social enterprises with local leadership in Ghana, Ethiopia, Chile and South Africa to ensure researchers and innovators in diagnostics, biodiversity monitoring, biomedical science and other technologies with social impact potential have the tools they need to address local and global challenges. The second is amplification, which is urgent and timely. Due to COVID-19 the world acknowledges the broken supply chain for biotechnology and its inequitable innovation model so now is the time to promote a sustainable and equitable way to fix it. I need support to hone and deliver a message that we need to build capacity that does not entrench and perpetuate scientific dependency but promotes autonomy and solidarity. I am also reaching a time in my professional life where I need honest, objective feedback and mentorship from social impact leaders as offered by the Elevate Prize to lift my game and overcome some of my own personal challenges as an Executive Director and leader.

As a biotechnologist I thrive when I can be creative, take risks, try things and if they fail, try again. I also want agency to shape the future of biotechnology to benefit people and the planet. During my PhD working on dengue mosquito control I saw inefficiency, unhealthy competition and huge barriers to participation in the bioeconomy, particularly for innovators in the global South, which denied them these opportunities. There was little attention being paid to solving the innovation-stifling scarcity that left my talented collaborators waiting months for supplies to arrive that cost 2-5x more than I pay in Cambridge and lowering their scientific aspirations as a result. I founded Beneficial Bio to replace scarcity with abundance and put the means of production into the hands of local biotech leaders by supporting them to establish manufacturing nodes for the biological tools like enzymes that underpin not only research but also diagnostics. My goals for the future are that every biologist in a developing or emerging economy has access to a local Beneficial Bio node that provides affordable, high quality, rapidly delivered reagents and the training and support they need to apply them for social impact, be that in research or diagnostics.

We are solving the problem that the supply chain for biological and diagnostic reagents in the global South is broken. COVID-19 has brought this issue, a day to day reality for all researchers and healthcare professionals in those nations, to international attention. I interviewed >50 biologists in Africa and Latin America and unanimously they had severe issues, waiting 3 to 16 weeks for supplies to arrive that may be damaged en route. This means thousands of researchers whose work could impact millions of people and thousands more clinicians, biomedical laboratory technicians and patients who cannot access molecular diagnostics due to low availability or high cost of imported materials.

Beneficial Bio is building an open source manufacturing model for local production of reagents (and eventually diagnostics) to international standards that are lower-cost, faster and adapted for use in the resource-limited contexts. We will support biotech leaders in Latin America and Africa to implement the system as a biomanufacturing node within the Beneficial Bio network - gaining support from Beneficial Bio but also from each other. This involved offering tailored support to establish the manufacturing facilities, providing DNA, protocols, pooled procurement, back-end operational systems, marketing, training materials and overcoming other barriers.

Beneficial Bio's innovation is a combination of technology and a disruptive business model based on distributed manufacturing. My academic research group developed an open source toolkit of DNA to produce diagnostic enzymes and Beneficial Bio is developing a manufacturing blueprint for that toolkit including detailed Standard Operating Procedures and template Quality Assurance documents to assist local producers to use it and eventually to meet international standards for in vitro diagnostics manufacture. Our R&D is focused on drastically reducing costs of manufacturing and introducing circular design and use of locally available materials e.g. through inducing expression of the enzymes using light and purifying them with cheap materials like cellulose.

By fostering a network of locally owned and led nodes that produce the reagents and also have social impact in their organisational DNA and a deep connection to the local scientific community, we are unique in focusing on local autonomy, sustainability and capacity building for production rather than use of scientific tools. Our approach enables rapid redistribution of material from any node and accelerates development through collaboratively sharing know-how between nodes.

Our impact is one step removed from the end users of biotechnology because we supply innovators who develop impactful technology like diagnostics or undertake work such as biodiversity monitoring which informs conservation.

We therefore start with the assumption that biotechnology can have an impact on humanity and by enabling a thriving biotechnology innovation ecosystem.

Step 1: develop biomanufacturing nodes and support the use of the products by local researchers.

Step 2: train bio-entrepreneurs and innovators to move biotechnology from research labs to small companies.

Step 3: further develop the nodes to diagnostics production which will enable further work on the quality assurance but has a much more direct impact through increasing access to affordable diagnostics through global South health systems.