Aaron Blotnick

🧬🔬 Week 29 of 2026, 15 Bay Area Bio-economy events 🧫🌱 (7 of which are virtual) 🧵

Huge congrats to @WKightlinger, CEO of Ridge Biotechnologies, on winning the Rising Star Award at @SynBioBeta 2026. Our editor @AaronBlotnick sat down with Weston for an exclusive interview. Here's what Ridge is building 🧵

A company, NextHen, made a technology that enables chickens to lay eggs of a different breed. In other words, a 'layer' hen (optimized for egg laying) can lay eggs that hatch into broiler chicks, which are specially bred to grow fast and make more meat. In the 1950s, a typical chicken laid about 150 eggs per year. Since then, companies have bred and selected chickens so intensely that modern 'layer' chickens lay ~400 eggs per year. Companies have also bred chickens to grow over four times the weight of a natural chicken in just 6 weeks (this breed is called 'broilers'). But chickens cannot be both things at once! These are separate genetic lines. Broilers don't lay a lot of eggs, and layers don't make a lot of meat. Both 'lines' have been super highly bred, over many generations, to have distinct genetics. This raises an obvious problem. Namely: Nobody ever 'optimized' broilers to lay eggs, and yet they must lay those eggs to make more broilers (the chicken you buy from the grocery store and eat at home). But the broilers that farmers use to lay eggs suffer a lot during their life. Their bodies grow too large for their legs, and they live in constant pain. "Something you see in broiler breeders a lot is that they're not allowed to eat as much as they'd like to. They're kind of bred to have this voracious appetite so they grow very quickly, but if they were allowed to eat everything they wanted, they would die very quickly — their body wouldn't be able to sustain the weight," says Robert Yaman, CEO of Innovate Animal Ag. "And so they're kept on these restrictive diets, which leads to more aggression. Oftentimes broiler breeders will attack each other, with very high rates of mortality, and they'll just kind of be hungry all the time." Biotech can fix this! The way that this technology works is that you take a layer line and you genetically edit it to be inducibly sterile. In other words, some trigger causes the layer hen to lose its natural germ cells, so it's a sterile bird. Then, as those sterile layers (are developing inside the egg, you inject the germ cells of a fast-growth broiler breed into that egg. So the chicken itself is a layer, but its germ cells are now broiler germ cells. And when this chicken grows up, the offspring it makes will be fast-growth broiler chickens. This technology works in chickens because the bird itself and its germ cells are separable during development Why might this be good? First, because it makes farmed chickens more productive, so farmers could (plausibly) keep fewer layer hens on the farm while producing the same amount of meat. And second, because these layers won't live their life in pain, unlike the broiler breeder chickens that farmers currently use. My full podcast with Robert Yaman — on all things biotechnology + chickens — coming in a few weeks!

@michelleefang @itsajchan @hackersquadio @thechangj @braintrust @DianzhuoWang Should be a good one @bitsinbio

Thursday 7/16 ‣ ElevenLabs x Sauna Hack Night luma.com/elevenlabs-sau… @itsajchan @hackersquadio @thechangj ‣ Workshop: Mastering AI Observability luma.com/ai_workshop_sf @braintrust ‣ AI x Biosecurity — LatchBio Benchmark Launch luma.com/4s00vb76 @DianzhuoWang @_harm0n ‣ Fireside Chat on AI with Marty Cagan & Dan Olsen events.ticketleap.com/tickets/dan-ol… ‣ B2B AI Founders Dinner by Arceus luma.com/9rvpjsa7 ‣ Culture Slop w/ Andrew McClintock, Jason Yuan, Maritza Lerman Yoes luma.com/cultureslop @tiatplace @imempowa @thecultureslop @Yoesbeforebros ‣ Bits in Bio Discussion: Genomics, Dx, and Data luma.com/8bkuhv4x @shantenuagarwal @aaronblotnick @nlarusstone

If you're new or looking to get more connected to SF tech: bookmark these 45+ irl events 🗓️ A list of what's happening this week (July 13 - July 20) ⬇️

Read the full story on the @SynBioBeta website: 🔗synbiobeta.com/read/hedging-o…

January 2026: the first exit. CombinAbleAI, founded inside AION in 2023, acquired by @insitro , @DaphneKoller's AI-therapeutics company. Built from scratch, no background IP, acquired in a little over two years. Across the portfolio: 22+ proofs of concept, $30M+ in total funding.

How do you get four fierce pharma competitors to co-found a company together? In 2020, @pfizer, @AstraZeneca, @Merck, and @tevapharm did exactly that, with the goal of exploring AI 3 years before @OpenAI's @ChatGPTapp existed. Here's the story behind @AionLabs, and why its own leadership says it couldn't happen today 🧵

@lukas_m_ziegler Great Map of the Bay! Would love to see a Biotech version? I do some similar maps for events every week:

This is the capital of robotics! 🌁 Silicon Valley is home to so many physical AI companies that you could spend a month visiting them and still not see even 10% of them (trust me, I tried). It took me 3x to create this map as it did to create any other. And the truth is, it's still incomplete. Let’s see why this is the case. So, the Bay Area is the world's leading ecosystem for robotics startups, bringing together top AI talent, top universities, experienced founders, and unmatched access to capital. The region is anchored by Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, two of the world's top universities for AI and robotics. They produce a constant stream of researchers, founders, and breakthrough technologies. The Bay Area is also home to many of the companies shaping the future of robotics and AI, including @Figure_robot, @physical_int , and major AI labs such as @OpenAI. This concentration of talent makes it easy for startups to recruit experienced engineers and collaborate with leaders in embodied AI. Not mentioning that it  is also home to leaders such as @NVIDIARobotics , whose headquarters and leadership in AI chips power much of today's robotics revolution, and @Tesla, whose work on autonomous driving and humanoid robots has created a deep pool of robotics, AI, and manufacturing talent. Perhaps its biggest advantage is access to capital and ambition. The Bay Area has the world's deepest network of venture capital firms, serial entrepreneurs, and technical leaders who are willing to fund bold, long-term robotics companies. In the comments I'll post the companies from the ecosystem. ‼️ Note that Bay Area has >300 robotics companies, research labs, and innovation hubs, so this is a curated selection of the notable product companies, not an exhaustive census! P.S. I'm constantly working on improving these maps, so if your company is missing, please DM me with basic info about the co, and I will include it in the next release. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com

@draparente @dr_alphalyrae Interesting!

@dr_alphalyrae Aaand related to genomic stability - FDA requires very long GLP safety studies for iPSC-derived cell therapies (standard is 9-12 months) to see if any residual iPSCs form tumors. It's expensive and can really hold back IND filing.

Spent some time this weekend talking with a friend building in cell therapy. One thing that stuck with me - I think we picked most of the low hanging fruit. Single edits in primary cells are becoming increasingly routine. The interesting problems now are multiplex editing, recombinases, integrases, large insertions, and eventually chromosome scale engineering. The challenge is that primary cells don't really like being edited over and over. Cell health suffers which makes potency drop, and manufacturing gets harder. My guess is the field gradually shifts toward engineering pluripotent cells first, then differentiating them into the cell types we actually need. A lot of teams are solving one piece of this puzzle. Very few are solving the entire workflow. The last piece is the one investors should probably care about most -- platforms are having a hard time creating value on their own, a lot will hinge on clinical validation

@jboysen0 @SynBioBeta Will do!

@AaronBlotnick @SynBioBeta I’d be interested in some comparative lab supply economics data — how much to say run a western, do a Gibson assembly etc — how big is the physical supplies cost edge vs West? And do they have one of those electronics supplier malls but for bio, why (or why not)

Will be flying out to China 🇨🇳 in one weeks time to do reporting for @SynBioBeta. I'll be visiting 13 companies, 5 cities, and I've been invited to speak at 1 conference during my trip. If you have anything you'd like to learn from someone on the ground studying the Bio-economy in China, please share questions to me via chat or comments.

@dr_alphalyrae Well said! The IPSC Derived Cell Therapy space has had its own challenges, but the field is definitely in a more developed phase than the past attempts. Feels like a "when" more than an "if" question for sure.

@EuphrosMD What about bench-to-farm, bench-to-material, or bench-to-bioreactor? The Bioeconomy is alot larger than just "Therapeutics". And hey, some of us just like to hang out with other people that like to talk about biology 🧬

@AaronBlotnick 15 events in one week. Bay Area density is real. What I'd watch: which of these produce actual bench-to-bedside timelines vs. networking with a bio label.

🧬🔬 Week 29 of 2026, 15 Bay Area Bio-economy events 🧫🌱 (7 of which are virtual) 🧵

Flashback Favorite 🔙 Ranked: The 50 Most Food Self-Sufficient Countries in the World 🌽 From the Archive: visualcapitalist.com/ranked-50-coun…

Fri, July 17 🔹 Bio by the Lagoon July Professional Networking Event ⏰ 4:00–7:00 PM PST 📍 Foster City 🔗chamberorganizer.com/Calendar/morei… Bio by the Lagoon Foster City Sat, July 18 🔹 Ebolathon: Compute to Cure ⏰ 1:00–10:00 PM PST 📍 San Francisco 🔗 luma.com/2rbgfn69 @katyenko, @derekalia, @andrei_tyrin, @daniil_boiko, @dasha_shunina, @RowanSci, @onepot_ai, @muni_bio Sun, July 19 🔹 Marco Polo 2026 / A US-China Biotech Conversation, on a Mountain ⏰ 8:30 AM–3:00 PM PST 📍 Mt. Tamalpais / Stinson Beach 🔗 luma.com/owqqp9n4 @alexkesin, @YoniCombinator

Thu, July 16 🔹 The Road to Amsterdam: Alternative Proteins 2026 ⏰ 6:00–7:00 AM PST 📍 Virtual 🔗 fpg-media.webinargeek.com/the-road-to-am… @AlephFarms, @Nizo , @FutureProtein 🔹 Design Motifs for Improved Control in DNA-Based Molecular Machines ⏰ 7:45–9:45 AM PST 📍 Virtual 🔗us02web.zoom.us/j/88380504839 @JCVenterInst, @Moon_Synth_Bio 🔹 Waypoint Live: Open Microbiome Foundation Models ⏰ 8:00–9:00 AM PST 📍 Virtual 🔗 luma.com/lylpnyfh Outpost Bio 🔹 Immune Checkpoint Response Prediction Webinar ⏰ 9:00–10:00 AM PST 📍 Virtual 🔗event.on24.com/wcc/r/5385504/… @mithrl_ai , Elephas, Erika von Euw PhD MBA, Ada Shaw PhD 🔹 MBC BioLabs Planetary Health Block Party ⏰ 3:30–6:30 PM PST 📍 San Carlos 🔗 luma.com/mbc-tep8 @bitsinbio, @SynBioBeta, @HomeworldBio, @activatefellows, @abundantgreen, @NFX 🔹 Bits in Bio Discussion: Genomics, Dx, and Data ⏰ 5:30–8:30 PM PST 📍 San Francisco 🔗 luma.com/8bkuhv4x @shantenuagarwal, @aaronblotnick, @jessime, @nlarusstone, @phil_fradkin, @blankbio_ 🔹 AI x Biosecurity — LatchBio Benchmark Launch ⏰ 6:00–9:00 PM PST 📍 San Francisco 🔗 luma.com/4s00vb76 @LatchBio, @DianzhuoWang, @_harm0n, @evanseeyave