Quick Chat: Kevin Chen
EMMA LINDSAY - AUGUST 23rd, 2022
Kevin Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Hyasynth Bio. He completed his Honors Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry at Queen's University and went on to start up Hyasynth Bio. Hyasynth Bio is a synthetic biology company that specializes in creating strains of yeast that produce cannabinoids. Cannabinoids are naturally occurring compounds found in the cannabis plant, two of the most popular being THC and CBD. Cannabinoids have applications in nutritional, pharmaceutical, and recreational-use products. Since Hyasynth specializes in engineered yeast, their platform is adaptable, efficient, and scalable. The yeast is grown in fermenters and fed sugar and water over the course of a few days, after which the end product is extracted and purified. The cannabinoids can be included in a variety of products including pills, oils, and topical formats. The goal of Hyasynth is to customize combinations of cannabinoids and find rare cannabinoids that can be beneficial for a variety of diseases.
What is Hyasynth?
We are focused on genetic engineering of yeast for the production of natural compounds, but specifically cannabinoids. So instead of growing cannabis to get THC and CBD, we grow yeast. We are able to isolate those interesting ingredients, and do that in a much more efficient and sustainable way than growing cannabis. Right now the cannabis or cannabinoid industry is developing in a very bizarre way where on one hand, the science behind it, the endocannabinoid system, is super relevant to all kinds of human health, for example in cardiovascular and neurological aspects. There's so many things that cannabinoids tie into that is going to be a huge topic to research because of what it can do for human health. But at the same time, this system is tied to the cannabis plant and everything that it’s known for, all this narcotics stuff and there's a lot of noise, so the whole space gets looked at in a bit of a funny way. It's tied to this current supply chain and to this whole idea that you have to grow cannabis. For Hyasynth, we're saying we don't have to make cannabinoids using plants, we can do it using synthetic biology, and biosynthesis, and have a regulated, clean, and scalable supply for these things. We started out from scratch where there wasn't a whole lot of research done on these enzymes or the chemistry or anything about them. So it was a lot of basic research that we had to do in those early days to figure out how we actually biosynthesize cannabinoids inside a yeast cell. And on that journey, we came across some super interesting stuff, we developed some really interesting technology platforms. But in the end what we have are strains of yeast that produce CBD at levels that are competitive to the cannabis plant and that's what we’re on our way to commercializing now.
What does a day to day look like at Hyasynth?
You show up to work, you know who and what you’re working for. We all understand the purpose of the company and we’re all similarly minded where we all care about the future, the technology, each other, and how we progress ourselves in our career paths. There's a lot of mutual respect and a great team environment to work in where people are supportive of each other. There’s plenty of ways to build your expertise, skill set, try new experiments, and learn about the leading ways you can engineer yeast. My job day to day is to send emails and take phone calls. It's not very exciting. But I do love to meet new investors that are looking at synthetic biology that don't really understand it and want to learn more about it because it's part of an ongoing revolution, and that's exciting for me. I also love to hear about all the technology we develop at Hyasynth when we come up with new ideas or when we find some fun way to engineer yeast. That’s all pretty amazing to hear when we get breakthroughs like that. So I hear about those things and tell investors about how cool we are. That's what I do.
Is there a benefit to using yeast over other techniques?
In the end, every host organism has its own properties so yeast is one of the generally accepted ones where people know how to grow it and work with it. The genomic tools are pretty widely available and well understood so it's not like you're troubleshooting and falling more into discovery land. It grows quickly and easily, and it's not super sensitive to certain reactive conditions or contamination. So it makes a pretty good overall picture for a manufacturing system. Every organism will perform differently. There's research being done into new host organisms for other things as well, which is all very cool stuff. But, for at least the cannabinoid pathway, yeast is clearly the most efficient organism to host this pathway, and like I said, more so than cannabis itself.
How did you get involved with synbio?
I got into synbio through the iGEM competition back in 2011/2012 and at the time I was studying biochemistry at Queen's University. I had a super great experience. It opened my eyes a bit to the world of synbio and genetic engineering, which I was always passionate about ever since [I learned about] the idea of DNA and genomics as a blueprint for living things. The concept was always interesting to me. After doing IGEM, I got to know a couple people who were starting a synthetic biology company in Canada, which at the time was called Synbiota. It was through that experience with that start up company, and with these couple Canadian entrepreneurs that were bold enough to start a synthetic biology company here, that got me interested in the idea of starting a company as opposed to joining the industry or joining academia. I thought that was super awesome because I was coming from this IGEM experience of we’re a team, we’re coming up with our own ideas, we're solving these problems, we're thinking about how this actually exists in reality, and I loved all of those things. It wasn't like I had one thing where I loved technology or science, or I loved the effect on society, or the economics of it. In the end, all of it coming together was what I loved the most, and working as a team was also a big part of what I liked about that. After being connected to the start up I also started my masters degree at McGill University and during that degree was where I felt like I was taking a step back cause the environment was such a contrast to what I was already getting excited about. Once the opportunity came around to start Hyasynth, I knew this was what I really wanted to do, and starting a synthetic biology company is the best thing for me. At the time we were among the first companies in Canada to really focus on synthetic biology. That was in the year 2014, where we kicked things off and that's when we got founded. That was also when I dropped out of my masters degree at McGill and did this full time.
Why do you think synthetic biology is such an important field?
Some people define synthetic biology as some kind of sub-sector of biotechnology as a whole but really, think of synthetic biology as anything genetic engineering related or something that is geared by synthetic DNA. Even every mRNA vaccine we've seen to date or DNA-based vaccines that are helping us with COVID stuff, that’s all synthetic biology. How can you look at that and argue that there’s no impact of synthetic biology? Because it clearly defines the world. The investment towards it is super clear from the human health standpoint. Where it also gets interesting is when you look at the agricultural impact as well. Which is a bit more where Hyasynth applies. We're going to replace an agricultural process with a fermentation process and have a massive benefit to the carbon impact and human health by doing so. There's quite a few companies that do lean in the direction of what other parts of manufacturing or society can be improved by synthetic biology. But anywhere where there's a microorganism or a living thing that can be worked with at the DNA level, there's an opportunity for those things to be improved or better understood through the study of synthetic biology. And even beyond that, you can consider very cool things like the use of DNA and data storage as another branch of synbio that is on its way. There's other fun things with aptamers or RNA ribozymes that fall into the category of synthetic biology because they’re still based on synthetic nucleotides. Those are fields where they’ll change things about diagnostics or changing the analytical chemistry that are on their way too. Synbio is already the root of a lot of what we do. It might boil down to a way of thinking around it. This is a point I do want to stress when it comes to a lot of synbio. When you think about the tools that we have to do research, to do science, to solve a problem, that's where the tools are starting to change a bit. Where you might’ve originally had the idea of chemically synthesizing cannabinoids, that would be the easy way to do it, that's the way we can do it scalably, there's no such thing as a yeast that can produce cannabinoids, that's impossible. But these days, it's actually quite possible and quite easy to realize. It becomes clear how to engineer yeast to do these things. Or even the mRNA vaccine where it was super relevant for COVID stuff, but the original story with a lot of the mRNA vaccines was more around oncology. So the platform was transferable. That’s the interesting thing that you can change about the way research is thought about and how these tools are looked at. Once you can synthesize DNA and use that for a problem, that can be reapplied in a lot of different ways and you start to see a lot of platform based approaches on things. Start to think of DNA or RNA as a tool kit or platform that can be engineered or tailored to whatever need you have. I think that's the big difference between biotechnology of yesterday and synthetic biology of today.
What do you think is the biggest obstacle for synthetic biology research?
In some ways I feel that the barriers come down all the time. DNA used to be too expensive, sequencing used to be too expensive, the equipment used to be expensive. But everything keeps getting better and cheaper and it's becoming more and more competitive to produce the tools for doing this kind of work. You could talk about society and regulations as some type of barrier. But that's not really a barrier because on some level, you and I define the regulations through democracy. You can vote for people who will put the regulations in place that we think make sense, but it's also our responsibility to drive those things at the same time. In some sense, I could say the major barrier of a lot of synthetic biology stuff is not doing more of it or not trying hard enough to look at the barriers that are preventing you from succeeding. Even the idea of critical thinking around what your barriers are. If your barrier is that NSERC won’t give you enough money for this stuff then get a bunch of professors together and write some big letters to NSERC until you convince them otherwise. If your barrier is really about consumer interest or public interest or public perception on GMOs, then put some readers to that, do the work. I think people tend to throw their hands up in the air a bit and say that they’ve hit a barrier, it’s not a barrier, it’s something that you gotta fix. And you’re the ones that got to do it. There’s a lot of work that has to go into it before it becomes a clear, established process.
Do you have any advice for a student who is looking to get involved with synthetic biology?
Come work for Hyasynth is one. Two would be go join SynBio Canada. Three is to start your own synthetic biology club at school, or join an iGEM team. Just find ways to get involved and dig into it. Start to do it. You could take the traditional approach and find internships or find professors and start working with them but I think in a lot of cases, especially in this field, a lot of these things are going to be things you start from scratch. Even build a lab in your garage. That's the way a lot of people have gotten into synthetic biology. That's what I would recommend for students.
