Workforce for Scale: The Diverse Talent Your SynBio Company Needs
Takeaway: Scaling a synbio company requires looking beyond the PhD biologist; you must build a truly interdisciplinary team that blends scientific expertise with the hard-won operational skills of chemical engineers, manufacturing technicians, and supply chain experts.
In the early days of your startup, your team is likely a small, close-knit group of brilliant scientists. Your primary challenge is a scientific one—to engineer an organism and prove that your core technology works. As you succeed and begin the journey toward commercial scale, however, the nature of your challenges changes, and so too must the composition of your team.
The skills that get you from a lab bench to a successful 1-liter fermentation are not the same skills that will get you from a 1,000-liter pilot run to a profitable 100,000-liter commercial operation. Scaling is an interdisciplinary sport, and building a workforce for scale requires you to look beyond the world of academic biology and embrace a much more diverse set of operational and engineering talent.
The Three Key Pillars of a Scaling Team
As you grow, you will need to build out expertise in three distinct areas:
The "Upstream" Team (The Biologists and Genetic Engineers): This is your core R&D engine, the team that got you here. They are the experts in molecular biology, metabolic engineering, and strain improvement. Their job is to continue to innovate, creating next-generation versions of your microbe that are more robust, have higher yields, and are better adapted to the stresses of an industrial process.
The "Midstream" Team (The Process Engineers): This is the bridge from the lab to the factory. This team is composed of biochemical and chemical engineers who are experts in process development and scale-up. They are the ones who understand fluid dynamics, mass transfer, and bioreactor design. Their job is to develop the robust, reproducible, and economically viable fermentation process that can be successfully transferred to a large-scale manufacturing environment. This team is absolutely critical and is often one of the hardest to recruit.
The "Downstream" Team (The Manufacturing and Operations Experts): This is the team that runs the factory. They are responsible for the day-to-day execution of the commercial process. This includes:
Manufacturing Technicians: The skilled operators who run the bioreactors, monitor the fermentations, and perform the downstream purification steps.
Quality Control (QC) and Quality Assurance (QA) Specialists: The experts who ensure that every batch of product meets the required specifications and that the entire process is compliant with all regulatory standards.
Supply Chain and Logistics Managers: The professionals who manage the complex flow of raw materials into the plant and finished product out to your customers.
Building Your Interdisciplinary Culture
Successfully integrating these diverse skill sets is a major cultural challenge. The academic biologist, the process engineer, and the factory operator all come from different professional worlds and speak different technical languages.
Great leaders create a unified culture where these teams can work together seamlessly. They foster an environment of mutual respect, where the PhD scientist values the hard-won, hands-on knowledge of the manufacturing technician, and the engineer acts as a translator between the world of the cell and the world of the factory. Building this cohesive, multi-talented team is the key to conquering the immense challenge of scaling your innovation.
Disclaimer: This post is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. Reading or relying on this content does not create an attorney–client relationship. Every startup’s situation is unique, and you should consult qualified legal or tax professionals before making decisions that may affect your business.