This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic from Bloomberg Radio. But last year McKinsey came out with a report and they noted that the bio economy could have a directing economic impact of up to four trillion dollars a year over the next ten to twenty years. One company working in that world is in Scripta, Shri Kazaraja Cook. Let me try it again, Shrekazaraju.
He is president and CEO of the digital genome engineering company that we just mentioned in Scripta and he joins us on the phone in San Francisco Street. Forgive me from the mispronunciation. It's what I can't even read my own notes or fonetics. Um, but it is good to have you here. And I have to say that my producer, you bet, my producer and I were talking earlier that this was just something that we love to talk about. Tell us, first of all, um, how are you doing
what the past year has been like? Yeah? Well, first of all, Carol, thanks for having me on. I'm a big fan of Bloomberg Radio. I listened to it every morning, so I did want to say that before he started, UM in the morning, you didn't say the afternoon. Now I'm a little worried. Now I'm just kidding a yeah, I wish I could listen all day. UM. Well, the
last year has been phenomenal on many fronts. UM. Obviously, the the opportunity we're going up against has gotten a lot more visibility, and we'll talk about what that means in the bioeconomy, but it is going to be something that I think people start hearing much more about in the additional dimension that it adds to the potential of our economy and to society at large. UM. The pandemic has obviously made it tough for for us, as it
has for many other companies who are innovating UM. But we have very dedicated employees who have been in the lab diligently working. We've had our commercial teams diligently preparing to to launch our our first commercial product, the Onyx platform, which we announced just a few weeks ago that we we shipped our our first commercial unit. So UM, we are trying to make progress despite the pandemic. We'll tell
us exactly what the bioeconomy is. Yeah, So, so it is UH, as I said, it's to me, it's a it's an additional dimension to the economy and new referenced at the outset McKenzie statistic. Another statistic from McKenzie last year was that in principle, approximately of the physical inputs to the economy could be biologically produced. And when you sort of take a step back and think about that, that explains the magnitude of what we talked about with
the bioeconomy. Biology has played an important role in the last decade on discovery and life sciences and even in the production of therapeutics. However, bioeconomy is larger than that. It affects many more industries beyond just healthcare, and it has much more far reaching impact into products that all of us touch every day. And and there's a couple of themes that are sort of catalyzing this movement UM
and some of them are very familiar to us. That the movement to sustainability UM, the movement to to climate change, to adapt to climate change, and the basic movement around just greater performance and efficiency of our of our products and businesses. So there are so many confluent catalysts that are really accelerating this movement in the bio autonomy. So I feel like we're speaking tree and kind of broad
strokes here. So tell me, like drill it down, like does this include things such as growing food and labs, growing organs and labs? Like is tell us kind of when we get down to a granular, granular level, like what exactly this means? So, so the most common things that you might read about if you were to Google Google it would be UM in agriculture, crops or plants that are disease resistant UM that are they're characterized traits that allow them UM to to to grow and prosper
more efficiently. So agriculture is a place where you might hear and see this a lot. And as our global population grows, as we're trying to get more efficiency out of the land and water um in in plants UM. This is one area that a lot of companies are looking for to see UM innovation and benefit cosmetics. You find that that also are starting to talk about using UH gene engineering to to manufacture more sustainable UM cosmetic products.
We also see it if you kind of move back, you know, and I said it is beyond healthcare, but if you kind of move back to healthcare, even in biologics. You know, just today I was talking to a researcher in Europe who was very keen in his study of antibiotics antibiodetics. Antibiotics haven't really been advanced in the last two decades, and many of the organisms in the body
have have shown resistance to antibiotics. So researchers are studying what causes that and can we identify and isolate those parts of the genes that contribute to that so that we can design more effective antibiotics in the future. So, really, as you can tell just such a wide range of potential application, I want to get right back to our guest.
Shree Kasaraju is with us. He's president and CEO of the digital genome engineering company is called it SCRIPTA and Tree still with us on the phone in San Francisco.
So Shri, tell us about kind of where your company fits into this world of the bioeconomy, what you are specifically doing, who you're working with, sure, Carol, So the mission for in script is to enable researchers to realize the full potential of the bioeconomy, and specifically what that means is in our in our first product that we're launching. It represents the first digital genome engineering platform in the world that can sit on a bench in a lab.
This initial platform is for microbial so yes Nikoli organisms And just to kind of put this in the context, can it do a typical experiment, a gene editing experiment that a lab may have done with a couple of PhDs over the course of many months up to a year now can be done in a matter of weeks
or months and it's an incredible savings of time. But more importantly, the scale um of of edits that this can produce in a single run can get up to ten thousand single edits and parallel, So there's incredible power in the scale of this platform UM, and it's really opening the minds of many researchers that we speak to about what kind of work and research they could do with it UM. So that's that's the Onyx platform, and behind it UM we're in development on several other very
exciting platforms as well. Can you talk to us at all about some of the partners or the some of the areas that you're working in specifically, I know you talked about kind of applications of this UM so I'm assuming a lot of it is either agg or healthcare. I mean, where is it. Well, we're just getting started commercially, so we announced our first commercial shipment to gene mill UH in the UK in Liverpool. UM. There are two main categories of folks that that we're talking to right
now about about the platform. One is your your core academic research centers and to our our bio industrial companies and the range of industries that that represents your your right. You know, it's a it's a very wide range, UM. And but many of these folks are already utilizing Crisper in some way, meaning they're doing some form of gene
editing UM in house already UM. And they're looking to to really make those experiments more efficient, but also explore what more can they do with a more powerful system and platform. So, Okay, forgive me because I'm thinking we've got a lot of listeners and we have a really smart audience. UM. And I'm gonna unt this is not my world, but it definitely interests interests me in terms
of gene editing and kind of where this is all going. So, if you were sitting down with someone to explain kind of the potential because it sounds like we're on the cusp Uh, there's a lot out there already, but there's so much more that could be done when it comes to the bioeconomy or uh, the genomic engineering that you guys are involved in. UM, how would you explain it kind of to a lay person in terms of how
it might impact us in the years to come? Also as an investor kind of who will be the players involved in it? Because I am curious about kind of your own future. Yeah, sure, yeah, that's a great question. So to put this into context, if we think about genomics, and even with COVID, we've heard about some of these
terms of the technologies that are being used. PCR and next gen sequencing are amongst some of the biggest step function changes in our history as it relates to genomics, and those are all around reading genes and that's provided us incredible information. We've utilized it in a variety of ways for research, even trying to develop UM diagnostics or or even things to fight things like the US the
COVID nineteen virus. What what what Cristper has done is provided a step function change against those prior historical advancements Now with Crisper, we can edit genes. We can write genes instead of reading them, and that the opportunity around that is massive. When you when we speak to researchers, they're trying to create as much they call it variation. That means as much things to study around, something to learn as possible. But it's not just about research and information.
Now with with gene editing, we can also create new products. And that's the biggest change with this advancement of what we in script as well as others are going to be doing, as we're not only going to be understanding information, but we're going to be creating products um with this technology as well. And that is where the breath of the opportunity is just so incredibly massive that that we're all quite excited about it. Well, So tell us about
this billion dollar Series E finance round. I think it was led by Fidelity. There's also funds and accounts from t ro Price that are involved in it. Tell us about that and and that kind of that money. What will you guys plan to do with it? This this is a just an incredible market I know, you know all the listeners know that from watching the market environment we're in and seeing the premium for for innovation and growth companies UM, and specifically in in the life sciences.
You know, this whole area of gene editing also has been extremely robust and a lot of capital going against it because there's a lot to do. UM. We we looked at this round as as an opportunistic financing UM. We were well capitalized. UM. There are a lot of alternatives for companies to raise money to go public. UM.
We think we got the best of both worlds. We got really world class long term investors, and we also retain the ability to to grow our business privately, you know, which affords tremendous flexibility UM and the opportunity to to explore new areas. And so the hundred and fifty million dollars you know, I use the word opportunistic, it's really around going after additional areas that where we can bring
our technology UM to more and more researchers. So those are these are things down the road beyond what we're already developing with either Onyx or our Mammalian platform. What is the growth of the company do you I mean, I know you're early in what are your expectations going forward, this is such as we've established such a large market. The the focus for for us is exactly that, having focus, picking certain areas and customers and really showing success of
our platform. So it might be contra to what someone might think about, you know, really growing going fast and growing fast for us that the long term future gets solidified and much stronger if we can be successful showing customers applications where they can use this technology, gene where
they can do things they haven't done before. So when we look at this, and when I think our investors who got involved in the series, he looked at this, it wasn't about driving um platform revenues or sales, you know, this was about how do we secure our place as a long term impact you know that can drive a new paradigm change, not just for the technology but for us as an organization. You know, they they've encouraged us to be aggressive and invest um and to take our
time making good decisions. You know that that aren't necessarily short term oriented, but can drive greater long term stability and success. We think this is going to be a new large market and so being early, being smart about how we build a company for the future are our paramount. Well, we look forward to hearing more and I hope you'll come back and by then, hopefully I will have your
name down Pat Tree uh Kosaraju. He is the President CEO of the Digital Genome Engineering cow Bunny in Scripta and we appreciate his time. Shares it Dell by the way up about eight point four percent, and the after hours saying it's going to spin on em Ware software unit by the fourth quarter. Have a good and safe evening, everybody. This is Bloomberg