Recombinant DNA Technologies

06/04/2026

Assay conditions are not neutral.

They determine what biology youre able to see.

One lesson l've seen repeatedly across high-throughput screening, synthetic biology, and industrial biotech:

You always get what. you screen for.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bwolner_high-throughput-screening-is-often-treated-share-7467293821404557312-KDbm/

High throughput screening is often treated as a straightforward exercise. You build an assay around the hits you want to find - binding partners, enzyme activity, phenotypes. Most of the focus goes toward throughput. How do you screen more candidates, faster? But assay conditions are not neutral. Th...

06/01/2026

Scaling in biotech is hard. The cost of putting steel in the ground is high. Some companies have considered repurposing existing infrastructure. It makes sense but has its own challenges.

CAPEX can be a killer in industrial biotech. For years, companies have explored repurposing breweries, ethanol plants, and other fermentation infrastructure rather than rebuilding capacity from scratch. On paper, it sounds logical. But retrofitting biological processes is often far more complicated....

05/28/2026

Having helped companies working on the gut microbiome/cancer therapeutic relationship, I am excited to see the field moving from correlations to mechanisms.

Gut microbiome and cancer therapeutics. It’s a fascinating relationship. I’ve advised companies working in this area, read papers, and followed the topic for years. One observation keeps coming up: responders and non-responders often have different microbiome compositions. That led to the obviou...

05/26/2026

Business are Complex Adaptive Systems. But sometimes adaptation can become drift.

I’ve seen biotech teams mistake changing conditions for a reason to continually redefine direction. Sometimes adaptation is necessary - markets shift, funding environments change, and technical assumptions fail. Good captains adjust to weather, but resilient organizations still maintain a coherent...

05/18/2026

It's important to stop and check your bearings.
Especially when things are moving quickly.

Before GPS, captains regularly checked their bearings. Not because they expected catastrophe. But because even small deviations compound over time. I think about this often in biotech R&D. Markets shift. Requirements change. Early assumptions prove false. New data can look promising yet still lead t...

05/15/2026

I love sailing. And books about sailing. Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series about Jack Aubrey provide many life lessons.

Good captains don’t fight every battle available to them. That’s a recurring lesson in Patrick O’Brian’s novels - and in leadership more broadly. Sometimes the conditions are wrong. Sometimes the ship isn’t ready. Sometimes the crew is exhausted. Sometimes the risk outweighs the prize. And...

05/15/2026

Where you're going isn't as important as where you've been.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bwolner_a-boats-wake-tells-you-where-its-been-ugcPost-7458947133405151232-LPGg

A boat’s wake tells you where it’s been. Not where it’s going. I see this in biotech fundraising all the time. Founders spend most of the pitch talking about: • what they’ve accomplished • the data they generated • the technical hurdles they overcame And those things matter. But increa...

05/14/2026

Latest article on leadership

“It’s easier to set a course than to correct one.” It’s a cliché. But it’s also an aphorism - the kind of phrase that survives because it expresses something true. In Project Management, we learn that “the cost of change increases with time.” There are two reasons why: First, the long...

04/27/2026

"Plant-based" is out of control. And consumers are getting tired of it.

04/24/2026

My latest take on what investors are backing in biotech

“Investors want proof, not promises.” That’s true. But in biotech, the real question is: Proof of what? Most teams show: • a working strain • a promising pathway • bench-scale data And assume that’s enough. But investors aren’t underwriting the science. They’re underwriting whether...