The Future of Biotechnology is the Future of Humanity: Scientific Animator Cameron Slayden Sees Trends that will Impact Us All.

Hidden away in home studios throughout the US and UK is a largely unknown, yet thriving ecosystem of artists who have a unique specialty: producing short films for biotech and pharmaceutical companies. I met with Cameron Slayden, M.S., Co-founder and CEO of Microverse Studios, an animation production house completely dedicated to cellular and molecular biology. 

Their productions ease the communications process as startups and midsize companies leverage their scientific research to land deals with larger pharmaceutical companies and investors. To accomplish this, the artists have to have strong scientific backgrounds in order to understand what they are animating. Do you know which way DNA twists? Or what an alpha helix or beta pleated sheet is? I guarantee you every one of the Microverse Studios animators does. They have to in order to do their work.

The clientele served by Microverse Studios gives them an unparalleled insider perspective on the cutting edge of biotechnology, allowing them to experience first-hand a cross-section of what advancements are taking place in life sciences. Slayden had a few very interesting things to say on the topic:   

On Biotech in General

“We’re in this strange and magical time for the human species where it’s hard to predict where things are going to go. The merging of AI and biotechnology make it so that we can understand and manipulate living systems previously too complicated to even know where to begin. I like to compare it to the first time humans managed to smelt iron. They created this big hunk of metal and they had a few ideas of what to make with it, but they had no idea that it would lead to the steam engine, to electronics, to space flight. The technologies we’re developing today are like that first hunk of molten iron. We can see in the short term a few tools that can be made, but the future it’s going to unlock is beyond our ability to conceive right now.”

On Artificial Intelligence

“We do a lot of work with AI-based biotech companies, and the common theme is that they are all using the same kind of technology as DALL-E or ChatGPT to design therapies. These platforms are able to look at extremely complicated systems and then skip the painfully slow early phases of conventional drug discovery. We’re seeing technologies that can identify new therapeutic targets, find very precise small molecule drugs, and even design entire proteins from scratch. Some companies are using protein building blocks that aren’t used by terrestrial life in order to help them evade breakdown by our bodies. The question isn’t whether these companies can create a therapy on demand, it’s whether funding, drug approval and manufacturing systems can handle the onslaught of new potential therapeutics. These platforms are in their infancy. Advancements are leapfrogging past problems before they even arise, and I contend that our generation will see a revolution in human health unlike anything we’ve witnessed before in human history as a result.”

On Genetic Engineering

“At Microverse Studios, a huge amount of our animations are centered around technologies that involve DNA. Genes control the function of every cell in our bodies. As we learn to control how our genes work, everything from inherited disease to aging itself is becoming a target for treatment and likely one day a cure. Traditionally, genetic engineering has always been a sticky subject because of the potential for it to go sideways. Sending a gene therapy throughout the body can have a lot of unexpected effects, but there have been some amazing breakthroughs with targeting genes to very specific diseased tissues. For example, Intergalactic Therapeutics has developed both a modular gene assembly system and an electromagnetic field-based delivery method that allows them to drive custom-crafted genes only into a very specific region of cells. Right now they’re focusing on replacing damaged genes in the retina that cause blindness, but regardless of where they take this technology, it shows that a combination of technologies that exist today can deliver genes into a target region of the body in a way that gets around the dangers of just injecting DNA into someone’s veins.” 

Not Just DNA

“As everyone might recall from its first deployment in Covid vaccines, we can inject RNA into the body to get cells to produce whatever proteins we want. Most people hear protein and think of steak or chicken or a smoothie, but proteins are the machines that make our bodies work. If we think of DNA as a library of instructions for all of the proteins an organism can make, then RNA represents the actual instructions to make those proteins. When a cell is making a lot of a specific protein, like a white blood cell making antibodies, for example, there’s a ton of that antibody-coding RNA floating around inside of it.” 

Reading RNA

“There are companies like BioSkryb Genomics popping up now that can quantify all the RNA in every individual cell in a sample and see not just what genes are present in the cell, but how they’re being expressed. Some of the first phases of cancer involve aberrant gene expression, and as a tool for science, this will allow us to analyze pre-cancerous cells and grow our understanding of how cancer arises in the first place. If this can become a diagnostic tool, I predict that it will be a tremendously important component of preventing disease before it even becomes noticeable. Imagine being able to detect and correct cancer before it even becomes a disease!” 

Delivering RNA

“If you monkey with a cell’s DNA, you can potentially introduce mutations or other unexpected results, and they’ll be a permanent part of that cell and all its descendents. But RNA is fleeting, only lasting for a few days before it’s gone completely. If you want to get a cell to produce a protein without actually changing its genome, an RNA delivery system is the perfect solution. With the RNA Covid vaccines, a simple droplet of oil with RNA packed inside was all it took. It was injected into muscle cells, which then produced a few parts of the SARS-COV-2 virus for the immune system to react to, but with no functional virus or viral genes. But what if we wanted to easily target genes to individual organs? Sail Biosciences is the result of a merger between Senda Biosciences and Laronde, and will combine their technologies to create something that has never existed before. Senda developed a method of creating nanoparticles that could precisely home in on and deliver payload to individual tissue types, and Laronde developed a long-lived artificial RNA platform that could code for all kinds of therapeutic proteins. By merging these companies, we’re looking at the possibility of literally programming desired behaviors in individual organ systems without tampering with genes.”

Beyond Genes

“Biotech is also more than just genetics. Nearly every disease space is seeing a potential revolution. HDL Therapeutics has developed a method to take a blood sample and extract and isolate lipoproteins including LDL or ‘bad cholesterol,’ and turn them into HDL, or ‘good cholesterol.’ HDL acts as a kind of disposal unit to soak up excess cholesterol throughout the body and return it to the liver for disposal. When they re-inject this fresh HDL into your body, it cleans cholesterol out of arterial plaques! It’s currently FDA-approved for people with an inherited extreme oversupply of blood-borne cholesterol, but imagine if we could get this therapy done every few months as we age. Cardiovascular disease, one of the biggest drains on the economy and the number one killer in the United States, could be as easy to cure and as uncommon as scurvy. And this is just one example of the crazy ways that companies are using an advanced understanding of the complex functionality of all the millions of systems that make the human body work.”

Add it All Up

“This may be the sci-fi fan in me speaking, but taken together, I can’t help but imagine an injection that suddenly lengthened all of your telomeres, or made a protein that broke down Alzheimer’s plaques, or otherwise cured or offset a disease with a single easy dose. When these swords and plowshares start being beaten into proverbial steam engines, the very nature of the human experience is going to experience a fundamental change on par with when our ancestors first tamed fire.”