Neion Bio CEO: genetically engineered chickens producing medicines inside eggs could slash drug costs

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Sounds like a lightning round.

Yes, this is the Lambda Lightning round.

Tummy,

what's happening?

Good to meet you.

You're here with us,

TBPN. Please uh introduce yourself and the company

because not only have we not heard of you, but I think you're coming out of stealth. No one's heard of you, or at least this company.

No one has heard of us. I'm Demi Clari. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Neon Bio. Uh, in a nutshell, what we do is we genetically engineer chickens. Okay.

To produce medicines inside their eggs.

Wow. How did you get into this? What's your backstory?

So, I'm an aerospace engineer. So, naturally, I went into uh biotech.

Yeah. Chickens.

My my co-founder is an evolutionary biologist as well. Okay.

You know, I've always been involved in manufacturing of uh uh complex things.

Planes are are sort of one complex thing. Um these proteins, these medicines are also similarly complex in different ways. Um you know as um as some of the uh uh the problems facing um uh drug uh drug pricing and um sort of the onoring of of of manufacturing had come to bear over the last few years. Seemed like a good place to hone my uh my skill set.

So what do you

Yeah. Where where did the original kind of concept come from? Did it did your was your co-founder, you know,

making an omelette,

hanging out,

being like, "This will cure cancer."

You know, um we

they're like these lay these chickens, they lay eggs every day. We got to put something in them outside of

You're not far off. I mean, we all know chickens to be sort of incredible sources of edible proteins, you know, the ones that make your omelette. Most new medicines today are uh are complex molecules. they are proteins themselves and so um the way they're manufactured today uh prior to neon bio is you know it's expensive it's sort of reliant on these complex fragile global supply chains and and it sort of makes these drugs inaccessible to most people but chickens happen to be the universe's best uh protein factory um you know they've been honed by 250 million years of evolution to efficiently turn very simple inputs grain and water into complex outputs these proteins inside their eggs. And so we harness that same system to produce, you know, some of the drugs you might see advertised on on TV like Humira or Kituda.

How uh so so I mean how far away are you from actually doing a partnership with a a biotech company that owns intellectual property around a particular protein? It feels like there's this dance between like you need to genetically engineer the chicken, make the chicken, get the eggs, extract the protein, like actually get into the drug. That sounds like years, but then there's only there's a ticking clock on every drug that's out there in the IP landscape. So, how do you marry those two?

Yeah. So, one of the things we announced today really is um is this large commercial deal that we signed um with a partner to bring up to three drugs to market. Up to three drugs. Okay. Um and and and the drugs that we're focusing on to start with are are known as bioimilars. So they are drugs that you know have existed. We know they work. They're on the market. They can cost in the thousands or tens of thousands per dose. That's super expensive. Um we are starting with those because they're they're known molecules. We're not taking on molecular risk there. Over time, we're developing technologies that will make this process way faster, much more efficient, increase the yields. But for now, we have a very good market in in in the biosimilar space where

there's huge demand for these drugs. Um,

coupled to sort of the cost aspect, which is a sort of a big part big part of our value proposition is the fact that our

what how many doses from an egg? Are we talking one is it a single shot or can you get potentially multiple doses and then because I'm I'm just thinking at some point you're just scaling a facility that has chickens in it.

Yeah, we we scale by breeding chickens. That's one of the advantages here, right? It's it's pretty linear and we know how to do that. Um to just give you a sense for scale, you know, with a few thousand birds. Um and and to give you a sense of what that means, you know, a small farm

um is anything below 25,000 chickens. So with a few thousand, we can produce the global supply of a drug like humira.

So a chicken can treat,

you know, depending on what the what what what the medicine is, anywhere between 10 to 100 people in a year.

Wow, that is remarkable.

That is insane.

Do you not have a chicken sound effect?

I was just about to text the team. We need a chicken sound effect. play the rest of the barnyard because we'll ask, is there a plan to make horses work for us? Goats for us, sheep. Are you staying in chickens forever or will there be other animal? Okay, eventually. Okay. Well, call us.

We need We need horses to save to save us from other from other ailments.

There are actually drugs that come from uh from horses as well.

My my you know where my mind's gone?

Partnership with Varta. Let's chicken.

Space chicken. I mean, I was thinking about that when when you said a aerospace to bio. There is an there is an interesting overlap there. Well, thank you so much for taking on the line.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're we're having a lot of fun, but this is this is very this is uh one of the craziest pitches.

I think I think Caffeinated Capitals, I think, an investor in both companies as well, right?

That's right.

Raymond Raymond loves making making drugs in difficult ways, but potentially extremely valuable ways. No, that's very cool, Demi.

Very cool. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you guys.

This is great. We'll talk to you later.

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