{"id":74621,"date":"2017-12-19T21:22:28","date_gmt":"2017-12-20T05:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/bio-programming-toolkit-maker-asimov-launches-with-4-7m-from-andreessen-horowitz"},"modified":"2017-12-19T21:22:28","modified_gmt":"2017-12-20T05:22:28","slug":"bio-programming-toolkit-maker-asimov-launches-with-4-7m-from-andreessen-horowitz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/bio-programming-toolkit-maker-asimov-launches-with-4-7m-from-andreessen-horowitz","title":{"rendered":"Bio-programming toolkit maker Asimov launches with $4.7M from Andreessen Horowitz"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Biotech is one of today\u2019s many hot frontiers of technology, but one thing holding it back is that it\u2019s significantly less amenable to traditional computing techniques than other areas. A new startup called Asimov<\/a>, spun off from research at MIT<\/a>, is working on bridging the gap between the digital and the biological by creating, essentially, a set of computer-aided biology design tools. It\u2019s a prescient enough idea that it has attracted $4.7 million in seed funding.<\/p>\n

The problem that Asimov addresses is this. Say you\u2019re a pharmaceutical company trying to make a tiny biocompatible machine that holds a certain amount of medication and releases it when it senses some other molecule.<\/p>\n

In order to do so, you\u2019d have to \u2014 well, among about a million other things \u2014 design what amounts to a logic gate and signal processor that works at the molecular scale. This is a daunting prospect, as creating molecular machinery is a labor-intensive process often involving creating thousands of variations of a given structure and testing them repeatedly to see which works.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biotech is one of today\u2019s many hot frontiers of technology, but one thing holding it back is that it\u2019s significantly less amenable to traditional computing techniques than other areas. A new startup called Asimov, spun off from research at MIT, is working on bridging the gap between the digital and the biological by creating, essentially, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}