Meeting created at: 7th Jul, 2026 - 12:49 PM1
John Cumbers: A lot of us here are geeks and we just love playing with new hardware and new tools and the expo is a great place to do that.
Flo Lumsden: Welcome to Talk Biotomy, the show where we sit down with the people building the future of biology.
Flo Lumsden: I'm your host, Flo Lumsden, founder of qoris Studios, a podcast production company where we transform complex technologies and breakthrough ideas into human stories that educate, entertain and inspire.
Flo Lumsden: This year we headed to Synbio Beta, the world's largest conference for synthetic biology.
Flo Lumsden: This mini pod features some of the most fascinating founders.
John Cumbers: We make spores that actually eat the insects.
Flo Lumsden: Scientists.
John Cumbers: We have carbon fixing microbes that can essentially eat emissions.
Flo Lumsden: Researchers.
John Cumbers: This is going to make DNA into a programmable material that we can use to turn biology into infrastructure investors.
John Cumbers: Because it's garbage in, garbage out on AI.
John Cumbers: And Mother Nature still works in mysterious ways.
John Cumbers: Right?
Flo Lumsden: And AI innovators.
John Cumbers: I'm increasingly excited about AI actually making.
Flo Lumsden: An impact in the lab, shaping the future of biotech.
Flo Lumsden: From breakthrough therapies to AI that's beginning to design biology.
Flo Lumsden: I discovered one of the most exciting technological revolutions of our time.
Flo Lumsden: Okay, Talk Bio to me.
Flo Lumsden: Welcome, John, to Talk Bio To Me.
Flo Lumsden: I'm Flo from Qorus Studios and I'm so excited to be here at Synbio Beta for the first time ever.
John Cumbers: Welcome.
John Cumbers: Thank you for coming.
Flo Lumsden: Thank you.
Flo Lumsden: Would you share with the audience your name and your role at Synbio Beta?
John Cumbers: Sure.
John Cumbers: My name is John Cumbers and I'm the CEO and the founder of Synbio Beta.
Flo Lumsden: So I wanted to start at the beginning.
Flo Lumsden: What problem did you set up to solve when you first created Synbio Beta?
John Cumbers: There were a lot of early stage synthetic biology companies and biotech startups that didn't have a peer community supporting that.
John Cumbers: And that was the problem that I set out to solve as a way that we could connect together all of the early stage founders.
Flo Lumsden: Amazing.
Flo Lumsden: How many years has it been going now?
John Cumbers: We've been going for 14 years.
Flo Lumsden: Wow.
Flo Lumsden: Over a decade.
John Cumbers: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: How has it evolved over those years?
John Cumbers: Well, we're in the San Jose Convention center, which is a big trade show.
John Cumbers: We've got over 100 exhibitors, over 100 sponsors.
John Cumbers: We have over 2,000 people here.
John Cumbers: Compare that to the first Synbio Beta, which was in a law firm in a free office in Sandhill Road and we had 150 people show up.
John Cumbers: So it's come a long way.
Flo Lumsden: It's a lot of persistence to build the community.
John Cumbers: Yeah, it is.
John Cumbers: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: So we've discussed the problem you're working to solve.
Flo Lumsden: Can you share a little bit more about your personal journey to synbio Beta?
John Cumbers: I have a passion for events.
John Cumbers: I was in a youth theater growing up, so.
John Cumbers: So I just love the smell of the grease paint, the lights, the soundboard.
John Cumbers: I love the production of events.
John Cumbers: And I think you can create magical experiences outside of the real boring world when you can create a special event.
John Cumbers: So I've loved doing events, I've done events all my life.
John Cumbers: I love bringing people together, I love introducing people and I love creating experiences that you can't find anywhere else.
John Cumbers: So that's the core of it.
Flo Lumsden: I'm sure it's very fulfilling to see these connections being made that could lead to new products and new innovations.
Flo Lumsden: And you're this, you're kind of the spark of that because you created this amazing place for community to come and interact.
John Cumbers: Yeah, we have so many people at the event each year that come up and say, I met my co founder here, my investor here, and people who now come back and those same people then choose to sponsor the conference, they choose to launch a product at the conference.
John Cumbers: They support the next generation with travel, grants or our next gen program.
John Cumbers: So yeah, there's just a lot of excitement.
John Cumbers: And the culture of Silicon Valley is to pay it forward with whatever you've been able to achieve success at.
John Cumbers: You pay it forward to the next generation.
Flo Lumsden: Right.
Flo Lumsden: People know what it's like to start at the bottom and they want to help others.
John Cumbers: Exactly.
John Cumbers: And science does that too.
John Cumbers: The ability for people to get a PhD and study something at a university means that you are creating new knowledge and it gives you a advantage in the playing field when you're starting a company.
John Cumbers: And how did you get that advantage?
John Cumbers: Well, by thinking, by doing experiments, by doing something that nobody else had done.
John Cumbers: So it's a real beautiful way for society to work and for the economy to work, because it really does enable.
John Cumbers: Science is a great enabler.
Flo Lumsden: It's amazing.
Flo Lumsden: I've learned so much these three days.
Flo Lumsden: I'm pretty new to biotech.
Flo Lumsden: I've heard a lot from the folks I've interviewed that it's one of the only places where the business and the science really come together, and that's why they're here, is to like build something that can be used in the real world, like bring science to out of the lab, out of the university and into the real world.
Flo Lumsden: So I think you've accomplished what you set out to do.
Flo Lumsden: I've seen a lot of AI startups this year.
Flo Lumsden: AI is rapidly transforming synthetic biology.
Flo Lumsden: Where do you see the biggest opportunities at the intersection of AI and biotech, where do you think that the industry still faces limitations or challenges?
John Cumbers: The biggest opportunity, the area where we're seeing so many startups, is large language models for genes and genomes.
John Cumbers: You're seeing companies like Latent Labs, which spoke yesterday, or Cellular Intelligence, which is creating a different kind of AI model for cell signaling.
John Cumbers: And so what you're seeing is proprietary data sets which are being generated through experimentation, and then that data then being fed into an AI model, and then that AI model then being used for designing an enzyme or making a new kind of organism that's going to perform some particular function.
John Cumbers: So I think that's the most interesting thing is that genes and genomes are pretty diverse things in terms of the nature that they've evolved and how they've come about.
John Cumbers: And we've been trying to engineer them through one base pair at a time, or one promoter or gene at a time.
John Cumbers: And it's been a pretty manual process to take hundreds of millions of letters of DNA and try to design them.
John Cumbers: And now you're seeing these LLMs produce these genes and genomes and they're producing things that we've never seen before.
John Cumbers: And people are starting to build them and see whether they're functional or not.
John Cumbers: And some of these are doing better than the human design.
John Cumbers: Well, a lot of these are doing better than the human design genes.
John Cumbers: So, yeah, I'm very excited.
John Cumbers: And most of these are antibodies that people are making for making drugs to cure diseases.
Flo Lumsden: Yeah, Very important work.
John Cumbers: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: What about some challenges or limitations to implementing AI into the scientific biotech processes?
John Cumbers: Yeah, it's a good question.
John Cumbers: I don't know what challenges or limitations exist.
John Cumbers: Probably more on the human centric piece of this, which is the, you know, where do humans fit in an AGI world that we're heading towards, and what does the future of a company look like?
John Cumbers: So I think the challenges are more societal challenges and business model challenges to AI, I think, rather than the implementation of it, because, yeah, I do think we're approaching this singularity where we're going to achieve AGI and then it's going to be this giant leap forward in our capabilities.
Flo Lumsden: But where do we fit in?
John Cumbers: Yeah, where do we fit in?
John Cumbers: Do we need money anymore?
Flo Lumsden: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: Crazy.
John Cumbers: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: Across synthetic biology, what innovations or areas of research are you the most excited about right now?
John Cumbers: I'm most excited about the companies that are looking at new models of healthcare, new models of fighting disease.
John Cumbers: Companies like United Therapeutics, we Had Martine Rothblatt come speak last year at the conference and she spoke about the xenotransplantation of humanized pig organs, taking those pig organs and then transplanting them into humans.
John Cumbers: And she's had great success with that, with people walking around with their organs from United Therapeutics for months.
Flo Lumsden: Wow.
John Cumbers: Yeah.
John Cumbers: So I'm really interested in things at the edge of the envelope that nobody else is doing.
John Cumbers: And so that's one example.
John Cumbers: I'm also interested in some of the consumer applications of biotechnology.
John Cumbers: Zbiotics is one of our sponsors here.
John Cumbers: They sponsored the VIP dinner last night giving everybody their probiotic hangover cure, which.
Flo Lumsden: I got to interview Zach.
John Cumbers: Oh, you did?
John Cumbers: Wonderful.
John Cumbers: Yeah.
John Cumbers: So he's an amazing entrepreneur.
Flo Lumsden: He is.
John Cumbers: And then these GLP1s, these peptides are also great consumer applications.
John Cumbers: We just had David Sinclair talk about cellular reprogramming and the ability to reverse aging in skin cells and eye cells.
John Cumbers: So there's just a whole ton of opportunities there in consumer facing biotechnology, which I think are really important.
Flo Lumsden: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: It feels like as a consumer coming into this space, sort of new, it feels like we're getting products for the first time that are representing real innovations in science.
Flo Lumsden: Like even Zbiotics, like that sort of product never existed before.
Flo Lumsden: And it's exciting that it's coming to shelves near you.
John Cumbers: Yeah, exactly.
John Cumbers: Yeah.
John Cumbers: And I think there's going to be a lot more.
John Cumbers: Zebiotics has another product out for fiber, enriching fiber in your diet.
John Cumbers: And I think I keep hearing some other interesting probiotic companies that are going direct to consumer as well.
John Cumbers: So it's a great new opportunity.
Flo Lumsden: Very cool.
Flo Lumsden: Have you learned about anything new, this Synbio Beta that you've been really excited to hear?
John Cumbers: Yeah, there's a team here from Korea that is making a new kind of genetically engineered plant that glows in the dark.
John Cumbers: Yeah.
John Cumbers: So they have a poster in the poster session and I think that's a pretty interesting and innovative model.
John Cumbers: And then there's also a lot of small hardware providers.
John Cumbers: Expo is a really good place for small companies that are doing automation or software or hardware to come and meet with their customers, which are the small and mid sized biotech companies that are going to buy their products.
John Cumbers: And so there's some new bioreactors out there's some new software tools.
John Cumbers: A lot of us here are geeks and we just love playing with new hardware and new tools and the Expo is a great place to do that.
Flo Lumsden: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: I wondered if some of the hardware and software, especially the AI and Robotics products might team up.
Flo Lumsden: Because I spoke with Chris from AIX Ventures.
John Cumbers: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: And he was saying he really only wants to invest in AI for scientific innovation.
Flo Lumsden: That is really A to Z.
Flo Lumsden: You know, it's totally integrated.
Flo Lumsden: It's not, you know, use this product here.
Flo Lumsden: Use this product here.
Flo Lumsden: He wants to invest in not just the research for AI, but also the implementation and the robotics and all of that.
Flo Lumsden: So I wonder if we'll see some.
Flo Lumsden: It seems like there's some disparate products kind of along the research and development pipeline that could team up to create more full.
John Cumbers: Maybe full stack.
Flo Lumsden: Full stack, yeah.
John Cumbers: Because it's not clear where the value is going to emerge.
John Cumbers: Therefore, people definitely want to create the full stack of applications, from data gathering through to feeding the data into the model.
John Cumbers: So I think that makes sense that investors would want to look there.
John Cumbers: They don't want to miss out on where the value is going to be added.
Flo Lumsden: Right.
Flo Lumsden: Well, final two questions.
Flo Lumsden: We kind of covered this, but like, in terms of like thematically this year, how did you approach this year Synbio Beta and what was really exciting about that?
John Cumbers: Yeah, a number of themes that we had this year around human health, AI and bio, planetary health, tools and technologies and all of those different things come together and have a core base community of people who care about making it easier to engineer biology.
John Cumbers: That's the core of the event.
John Cumbers: That's the core of our community.
John Cumbers: And then next year, we're already starting to think through what might the topics be and who might come and speak.
John Cumbers: We're going to be announcing some community sessions so people can propose sessions that they want to have at the conference.
John Cumbers: Rather than us programming it all, we're going to be kind of throwing open the doors and saying, hey, community, you know, what do you want to see?
John Cumbers: What do you think's hot?
John Cumbers: So we'll be starting that process in August.
Flo Lumsden: So exciting.
Flo Lumsden: Well, I've been honored to be here to interview some of the most amazing thought leaders in this space.
Flo Lumsden: And I've learned so much.
Flo Lumsden: Like, my brain has increased three times in size.
John Cumbers: I think that's wonderful.
Flo Lumsden: So thank you for having me and I hope we'll be here next year.
John Cumbers: Sounds good.
John Cumbers: Looking forward to it.
John Cumbers: Thanks for having me too.
Flo Lumsden: Yeah, cheers.
Flo Lumsden: Don't forget to subscribe or follow talk bio to me on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube today for episodes dropping very soon.