Engineering serendipity
Biology is technology. Over billions of years, evolution has rendered an awe-inspiring library of innovation that we can use to solve important problems. Think: antibiotics, aspirin, fluorescent proteins, gene-editing tools.
But the tree of life is more than a collection of parts. It’s a holistic system with emergent design principles. We want to decode these to uncover groundbreaking insights with intention, not luck. This is what we mean by engineering serendipity.
The evolutionary history of organisms is an archaeological record of countless experiments, conducted on an unimaginable scale. We are developing more efficient and scalable ways to analyze these patterns to source new solutions to problems in human health. This work seeds our own portfolio of start-up companies, which we experimentally de-risk within Arcadia.
Because our goals sit right at the interface between basic and entrepreneurial science, our work is organized into two interdependent efforts, Discovery and Translation.
Evolutionary trends are powerful clues for when and where there’s been natural innovation.
Arcadia’s discovery platform team develops ways to rationally find and engineer novel traits across biology. Although biology is a vast and noisy dataset, research technologies are more affordable, scalable, and computable than ever before. We are seizing this moment to conduct strategic comparisons across a far wider array of organisms than the community has traditionally pursued.
Biological innovation can inspire new strategies for tackling unmet challenges.
Arcadia’s translational research leverages our platform to address major problems bottlenecked by science. We are mining the unrivaled biological search space to unearth the most strategic organisms for each question. We aim to take the most efficient possible path from discovery to invention, focusing on opportunities in therapeutics.