For more than a few New York City-based biotechnologists, Genspace looms large. The world’s first do-it-yourself community lab, it was a gathering place for like minds. It served to increase scientific literacy among non-scientists and offered a lab space for tinkerers and entrepreneurs. I was lucky enough to be a part of the original Genspace community on Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, and I count myself a member and supporter of the organization’s latest iteration.

One of the co-founders of Genspace is Ellen Jorgensen, Ph.D., a molecular biologist dedicated to increasing scientific literacy in the general population, particularly in the fields of molecular and synthetic biology. Ellen would go on to co-found Biotech Without Borders and now serves as the Chief Scientific Officer at Aanika Biosciences.

I sat down with Ellen to learn more about Aanika Biosciences, Genspace, COVID testing, and the lessons biotech companies could take to increase their storytelling success. What follows are excerpts from our conversation.

KARL SCHMIEDER: What is Aanika Biosciences?

ELLEN JORGENSEN: Aanika’s mission is to make supply chains more transparent and secure through biotechnology. We have developed customized, microbial-based tags that allow the tracking of food from the point of origin, where the tag is applied, to the end of its journey. Think of our solution as a watermark, barcode, or fingerprint. We take a natural, ubiquitous microbe that is harmless and food safe, put a small identifying tag into its genome, then apply it to food.

Our technology helps companies gain insights about their supply chains, while decreasing food waste [1], and increasing sustainability. Additionally, we can use our product as a platform where we are adding secondary functionality such as peptides that target food contaminants or boost plant nutrition.

SCHMIEDER: What are the benefits of the technology? Why would a food company want such detailed tracking of its supply chain?

JORGENSEN: There is a tremendous amount of food waste caused by food recalls. Think of all the recent recalls of leafy greens like romaine lettuce. Thousands of people have been affected. Some end up in hospitals. A few even die. It’s a terrible thing.

But food recalls tend to be much broader than they need to be. Meaning all the romaine lettuce from one producer will be recalled even if only some of it is contaminated. This results in companies losing money. It also results in a lot of food waste, as the lettuce recalled ends up in landfills, which is bad for the environment.

The Food and Drug Administration has recognized this problem. They recently passed the Food Safety Modernization Act to beef up food safety and increase transparency in food supply chains from farm to fork. But it’s hard for producers to put a barcode on a head of lettuce as soon as it is harvested. Most produce tracking happens when the fruit or vegetable is packaged, and, truthfully, a lot can happen between harvest and packaging. Adding to the complexity, food supply chains are international and often aggregate many small farms. So it’s challenging to track farm of origin information.

SCHMIEDER: When is the Aanika tag applied to the crop?

JORGENSEN: It depends on the crop. We work closely with our clients to figure out the best point of application.

To give you an example, we could put our microbial tracers in the field. They could be incorporated into the application of fungicides or herbicides. Or they could be applied post-harvest. We’re looking at applications in water or on the edible waxes that are applied to the outside of certain fruits and vegetables. Because the microbial tracer is the dormant form of the microbe - the spore form - it is virtually indestructible and can be applied early in the supply chain.

SCHMIEDER: Could you give us a specific example?

JORGENSEN: Sure. Say I’m a consumer, and I’ve just purchased a packaged salad mix that made me sick. The Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration want to know where the contamination originated. With the Aanika molecular tracer, we could take a single leaf of lettuce, analyze it, and tell you the specific location or farm it came from.

We’ve shown that the tags don’t wash off the lettuce during washing. They don’t rub off on other lettuce leaves. So, we can tell exactly where each leaf of lettuce came from and where it’s been. With that information, you could presumably go back and investigate the practices at each farm or in the supply chain to correct the problems.

SCHMIEDER: Aanika recently received an approval from the Bermuda Monetary Authority’s (BMA) Innovation Hub. Could you tell us more about that?

JORGENSEN: Yes, we’re the first synthetic biology company to engage with the insurance industry, and the BMA granted Aanika a license to pilot new insurance products. The insurance industry relies heavily on data to assess risk. Aanika's microbial tag could give insurance companies insight into whether produce from a particular farm ended up contaminated or if it was truly from a foreign producer using sustainable farming practices. That, in turn, allows the industry to better assess risk.

In the future, insurance companies might offer growers a discount if they tag their products. The end-product is still being designed, but it’s very exciting because it could lower policy premiums while at the same time increasing protection for the food and agriculture industry.

SCHMIEDER: It seems that Aanika’s product would have wide applicability. What are some advantages?

JORGENSEN: Think of the DNA barcode being inside a microscopic capsule - a capsule that is very resistant to extreme conditions like heat or ultraviolet radiation. It preserves the information in its barcode better than if you were using naked DNA and spraying that on products.

In addition, our microbial tags withstand most supply chain conditions. Leafy greens are grown, harvested, and on the shelves in three weeks. Once they’re harvested, they’re refrigerated. But products like palm oil, for example, might sit in 55-gallon drums on container ships for weeks where the temperature can change dramatically. Our tags can withstand it. As I mentioned, they’re completely food safe, the barcode information is rugged, and they are very difficult to destroy.

SCHMIEDER: What’s your origin story? How did you end up at Aanika?

JORGENSEN: I’ve been in the biotechnology industry my entire career - mostly focused on biomedical applications. I spent about ten years working on citizen science and opened the world’s first community lab, Genspace, in 2010.

At Genspace, our mission was to democratize biotechnology. We described Genspace as a place where we would teach genetic engineering to anyone who came in off the street. I thought that was important because there had been a backlash against genetically modified organisms, particularly in food. That seemed very self-destructive to me given the tremendous positive potential for biotechnology to solve a lot of important problems - everything from cancer therapies to climate change. I didn’t like that negative perception of the industry and felt very strongly that we needed to help change the dialogue.

It’s scary to live around and be forced to use a powerful technology that you don’t understand. It’s the way I feel about artificial intelligence because I don’t code. So I figured if we could provide more people with hands-on experience of how genetic engineering works, they’d be a lot less frightened of it -- especially if you learn to do genetic engineering side-by-side with your teenage daughter in a small community lab. Once you've done that and understand how the technology works, you’re less likely to be afraid.

Vishaal Bhuyan, Aanika’s founder, took a class at Genspace. His background is finance and investing, but he’s intellectually curious and creative. He noticed a lot of investors were talking about using DNA for information storage. They’d ask how much information can be stored in DNA? Can we pixelate a photograph and store it in DNA? Can we store all of Wikipedia in DNA?

He realized there would be a good use case for putting a very small but valuable piece of information into DNA. He approached me to be on the advisory board of a company that became Aanika and eventually recruited me to serve as Chief Scientific Officer. Vishaal’s first idea was Bitcoin keys, but we quickly realized we could move way beyond that and do good in the world with the technology.

There are tons of use cases because an invisible tagging system could help prevent counterfeiting, diversion, and adulteration in multiple products, from hamburgers to e-cigarettes to cannabis. We settled on food because we were uniquely suited to solve a big and growing issue. We’ve also partnered with GS1, the largest barcoding organization in North America. They’ve very interested in traceability back to the field of origin for produce.

SCHMIEDER: Genspace was the first community biolab in the world. There are several now all over the world. Besides dispelling fears, why is citizen science important?

JORGENSEN: There needs to be a place where you can follow your intellectual curiosity. In community labs, the work you do is not constrained by whether or not it will save the world, make money, or even be successful - all we cared about was whether it was safe and would not hurt you or anyone else. Companies and funding agencies both have specific agendas.

When you talk to professional scientists, you realize they got into science because they were curious about the world around them. They want to explore. Their eyes would light up when we would say, “For a very low-cost monthly fee - we charged $100 - you have access to a molecular biology lab.”

Innovators could perform proof-of-concept experiments at low cost. We outfitted the lab by acquiring equipment through donations or auctions and were equipped to do experiments with bacteria and plants, and yeast. We provided the infrastructure and subsidized a lot of the expense by providing consumable supplies like gloves and test tubes.

During my tenure, we incubated several companies. One of them, CurieCo, is developing proteins to replace toxic ingredients in consumer products. The founder, Erika Milczek, did the stability studies at Genspace. Opentrons, the open-source, liquid-handling robot company, built their robot prototypes at Genspace. They are one of New York City’s biotech success stories. Other companies that started at Genspace ended up moving on to other New York City incubator spaces like Launchlabs and Jlabs.

We were the first in the world to teach a synthetic biology class open to the public. Genspace also taught a hands-on CRISPR class where participants were able to do gene editing in yeast - a eukaryotic organism that is a level more complex than bacteria - and give it different characteristics.

Getting people to understand that a powerful technology exists and that there should be a conversation about it is very important. Most biologists live in a bubble though we do talk to each other. But when you go on the street and ask a random person if they know there has been genetic editing of humans at the embryo level, they will have no idea that actually happened unless they happened to see it on the news that week.

So there were three things that Genspace provided, education, open community, and innovation. We helped spread the word about biotech.

SCHMIEDER: The pandemic accelerated biotech in a lot of different ways. It demonstrated how the life sciences industry can quickly step up to challenges. And it showed that scientists can and will collaborate openly. How do you think the pandemic has changed the need for citizen science?

JORGENSEN: It definitely highlighted the need for more science, more biotechnology education.

I was involved in a project that Aanika helped support where I collaborated with an international team of scientists developing new Covid tests at a time where very few were available. We used a novel online collaboration platform called JOGL, Just One Giant Lab.

During the pandemic lockdown in New York, I had access to a small home lab where I had very basic high school biology lab equipment and could do things like the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Using JOGL, I was able to collaborate with someone from a community lab in Chicago and a young researcher from the Centers for Disease Control.

We began by validating some of the publications that people were publishing on a website where you could publish research before it’s reviewed by other scientists but quickly moved on to developing our own test. At the time, PCR was the only test, and it was hard to access. PCR amplifies - or increases - the amount of DNA in a sample by running through samples of heating and cooling. The instruments that do that are expensive and have to heat and cool within seconds. We wanted to develop a test that would be fast and less resource intensive.

Remember that at the beginning of the pandemic, no alternative tests to PCR were available. And the PCR test rollout had a bunch of problems in the United States. People couldn’t get access to tests and were panicking because they didn’t know if they were infected with COVID19 or not. There wasn’t enough information to determine whether people were infected and had no symptoms.

We settled on an isothermal method that only required you keep your sample at a certain temperature. It could be as simple as a cup of water in a well-insulated Thermos. You had to keep the sample at 65 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. We tried to make it as simple as possible, so someone in a community lab could do it.

We ended up producing a test that you could do in an hour in a very low-resource setting. We thought that if we published the protocol, people would boot it up in community labs and test a lot of people.

Interestingly, we found that people really just wanted someone to hand them a box with the test in it. They wanted us to manufacture and distribute it. At the time, the FDA required an Emergency Use Authorization - an EUA - to sell the test. And this became a moving target because regulations kept changing.

In the end, we realized the biggest impediment to innovation isn't inventing something - it’s taking an invention to scale up. In the case of the pandemic, it meant being able to distribute the test. But again, communities wanted specific validation or paperwork from a government entity before they said yes, and the government wasn’t willing to do that. Eventually, the government ended up focusing on companies that could produce millions of tests and distribute them all over the country. They weren't interested in a small team like ours that was serving people in the Chicago metropolitan area. It was an interesting lesson. [2]

As a result, JOGL is taking the first steps towards creating a completely open source pipeline that will take these wonderful ideas that came from cooperation and citizen science - everything from COVID tests to DIY respirators - and get them out into the world using a structure that is novel, more distributed, but will be acceptable for society to use. For example, if you're in a hospital and you’re in desperate need of respirators, right now, you cannot go the DIY route. Normally, there would be liability issues if a hospital tried to solve problems itself, but think of how effective it could potentially be. So, there is definitely a case for setting up a non-profit entity that could provide testing, manufacturing, and quality control. I enjoy thinking through how something like that would work.

SCHMIEDER: As someone who ran a community lab and is now building a biotech company, do you have any communications tips?

JORGENSEN: We have to be humble and realize that even if we think we’re communicating, we might not be. So, always keep checking.

It's amazing how people in any field who are experts underestimate the amount of background knowledge that they have when they try to talk to someone. You can have somebody who's absolutely brilliant in one field that will have a very hard time understanding another. When I was teaching at Genspace, you’d get someone that has a Ph.D. in English literature or sociology who would sit through a whole lecture and then ask, “Is a cell a protein?” You come to realize they didn't have even the most basic knowledge. That's one of the takeaways from my ten years in community labs. You have to meet people where they are.

This experience has been very useful in communicating the Aanika technology to an industry sector (supply chain security) that has never before engaged with biotechnology. We find ourselves being very creative, looking for the best ways to explain how our product works with stories, pictures, video. Especially since the technology is invisible to the naked eye.

So, my advice is to be humble. You may have the coolest technology in the world, but you have to meet your potential customers where they are, understand what they care about, and tell stories they can relate to.

Learn more about Aanika Biosciences by visiting their website. Follow Ellen on Twitter or LinkedIn.

1. Globally, 30 to 40 percent of food intended for human consumption is not eaten. “Reducing food waste is a means of reducing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere while ushering in a more regenerative society and economy… Basic adjustments in how food is produced and consumed could help feed the entire world a healthy, nutrient-rich diet through 2050 and beyond without clearing, planting, or grazing more land than is used today.” That’s according to Chad Frischmann and Mamta Mehra in their 2021 Scientific American article, Massively Reducing Food Waste Could Feed the World.

2. In October 2020, the one-hour Covid Test developed by Jorgensen Sara Ware and Chris Monaco became a finalist in the XPRIZE rapid Covid testing competition (link). In early 2022, Inverse published “The Rise and Fall of an Open-Source Covid-19 Test," which describes the effort to produce the test and the challenges faced by the team. “[The] story reveals the limits of working outside the conventions of our medical system. But it also allows us to imagine how Covid-19 testing could have been so different. What if a Covid test wasn’t something you buy but something you make?”

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