Andrew Hessel

Why organisations work with Andrew Hessel

• He is one of a small group of people actually running a human-genome-scale project. Co-founding Genome Project-write with George Church and Jef Boeke gives him a direct line of sight into what will be technically and commercially real in the next ten years, not a commentator’s view.
• He has built companies in this space, not just written about it. Miikana Therapeutics, Pink Army Cooperative and Humane Genomics each tested a different commercial model for synthetic biology, which is what boards want when they are sizing their own exposure.
• His Autodesk work made the abstract concrete. The phiX174 genome his team synthesised sits in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, which is a useful anchor for a room that has not yet understood that genomes can be printed.
• The Genesis Machine, co-authored with Amy Webb, gives leadership teams a shared reference point. It was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 and is already on the reading lists of strategy and R and D functions thinking through biotech platform bets.
• He speaks to risk as fluently as opportunity. Biosecurity, governance and dual-use are part of his core argument, which matters for regulated industries and for any board that has to sign off on a biology-forward strategy.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder, Genome Project-write (GP-write), the international effort to engineer large genomes including the human genome, launched in 2016 with George Church, Jef Boeke and Nancy J. Kelley.
• Co-founder and President, Humane Genomics, a synthetic-virus cancer therapeutics company based in New York.
• Distinguished Researcher, Autodesk Bio/Nano Programmable Matter group, 2012 to 2018; led the synthesis of bacteriophage phiX174, a print of which entered the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.
• Founding faculty and former co-chair of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology, Singularity University.
• Co-author with Amy Webb of The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology (PublicAffairs, 2022), a New Yorker Best Book of 2022.
• AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador, 2015; contributor to Scientific American.

Biography

Genome Project-write launched in 2016 with a plan to engineer genomes at the scale of the human genome. Hessel co-founded it with Harvard geneticist George Church, NYU’s Jef Boeke, and Nancy J. Kelley, after a period advocating that biology needed an equivalent to the software industry’s write phase, not just the read phase delivered by the original Human Genome Project.

That framing runs through his career. As Distinguished Researcher at Autodesk from 2012 to 2018, he led the team that designed and printed the bacteriophage phiX174 genome in three weeks for roughly a thousand dollars, a demonstration that biology had become a design discipline. A copy of that print entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Before Autodesk he was founding faculty at Singularity University, where he built and co-chaired the Bioinformatics and Biotechnology track.

He is also an operator. He co-founded Miikana Therapeutics in 2002, launched Pink Army Cooperative in 2009 as an open-source biotech experiment in personalised cancer therapy, and co-founded Humane Genomics in 2017 to develop synthetic oncolytic viruses, starting with a veterinary indication before moving to human oncology. Each company is a different bet on how synthetic biology gets to market.

His 2022 book with futurist Amy Webb, The Genesis Machine, is the clearest articulation of his argument: synthetic biology is on the same kind of curve that digital computing was in the 1970s, with the same mix of platform opportunities and governance risks. The book was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 and is widely used by strategy teams trying to build a common vocabulary for biotech decisions. He was named an AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador in 2015 and contributes to Scientific American.

Key speaking topics

• Synthetic biology and the future of medicine
• Programmable genomes and the write phase of biotechnology
• Biosecurity and governance of engineering biology
• Personalised and precision cancer therapies
• Platform economics of bioengineering
• Convergence of AI, software and biology

Ideal for

• Pharma, biotech and medtech boards sizing long-horizon platform bets
• CTOs, Chief Scientific Officers and heads of R and D in regulated industries
• Insurance, agriculture, food and materials leaders exposed to biological innovation
• Strategy and foresight teams building scenarios for the next decade of life sciences

Audience outcomes

• A working model of synthetic biology as an industrial platform, not a research topic
• A clearer read on which biology-driven shifts are near-term commercial and which are still speculative
• Named examples of where programmable biology is already changing medicine, agriculture and materials
• A sharper view of the biosecurity and governance questions that sit alongside the commercial upside
• Language and reference points leadership teams can use to brief their own boards