What happens when an evolutionary biologist and an aerospace engineer both arrive at the same conclusion — that the future of drug manufacturing isn’t steel, it’s biology? In this episode, Karl Schmieder and Erum Azeez Khan sit down with Sam Levin (Co-Founder & CTO) and Dimi Kellari (Co-Founder & CEO) of Neion Bio to unpack one of the most counterintuitive ideas in modern biomanufacturing: producing therapeutic medicines inside genetically engineered chicken eggs.
Rather than optimizing the same mammalian cell culture systems that have defined biopharma for 50 years, Neion Bio’s Raptor platform replaces complex steel bioreactor infrastructure with a self-replicating, two-input biological system — chicken feed and water in, life-saving medicines out. The conversation covers their stealth-to-commercial journey, a multi-product monoclonal antibody partnership announced alongside $11M in seed funding, the scalability and supply chain resilience advantages of egg-based manufacturing, how they navigate FDA regulation with a living bioreactor, and their North Star: dropping end-to-end production costs of monoclonal antibodies below $10 per gram — an order of magnitude that could fundamentally reshape who has access to biologics and where they’re made.
Watch the video
Grow Everything brings the bioeconomy to life. Hosts Karl Schmieder and Erum Azeez Khan share stories and interview the leaders and influencers changing the world by growing everything. Biology is the oldest technology. And it can be engineered. What are we growing?
Learn more at www.messaginglab.com/groweverything
Chapters
(00:00:00) – Intro & 4th of July: America’s 250th anniversary celebrations
(00:03:00) – America’s Living Library Act & NDAA biotech provisions
(00:06:00) – Midjourney’s ultrasonic body scanner & patient data ownership
(00:10:00) – NVIDIA’s AI co-scientist, the AI value pyramid & AbbVie’s $11B Apogee acquisition
(00:20:00) – Introducing Sam Levin & Dimi Kellari of Neion Bio
(00:26:00) – Neion Bio’s Raptor platform: making medicines inside chicken eggs
(00:33:00) – Scalability, onshoring & true supply chain resilience
(00:39:00) – Downstream purification: cracking eggs vs. CHO cell lysate
(00:47:00) – FDA pathways & batch-to-batch consistency in a living bioreactor
(00:50:00) – Drug supply chain fragility & national health security
(00:56:00) – $10/gram North Star: end-to-end cost breakdown
(01:00:00) – Quickfire Q&A: engineering challenges, union demands & investor misconceptions
(01:04:00) – Outro: calls to action & what’s next for Neion Bio
The post 188. Which Came First: Chicken, Egg, or Medicine? Neion Bio Turns Evolution into a Precision Factory appeared first on World Bio Market Insights.
