With close ties to Stanford, Antheia combines founding IP with important expertise in synthetic biology, informatics, and fermentation technology to provide a stable and cost-competitive supply of plant-based medicines and an approach towards transforming the discovery, manufacture, and distribution of medicines. Describing themselves as "unlocking the medicinal power of nature" the firm's synthetic biology platform surpasses the limits of conventional drug discovery and manufacturing through a novel approach to whole cell engineering reconstructing complex molecules in yeast to bring to market next generation plant inspired medicines. A published article about the firm described Antheiaâs technology platform as "essentially a collection of computational tools and reusable strings of genetic code". The article goes on to describe computational tools as " ecipes for searching out (in a database) specific genes from the genomes of various organisms The strings of genetic code, when stitched into the DNA of yeast, cause the organism to perform some specific function. One of these âoff-the-shelfâ pieces of genetic code might direct the yeast to produce a specific enzyme that embeds itself at a specific place in the cell wall at a specific time - a first step in a complex process that may produce a high-value compound at the
