28.10.2022 | Published by bit.bio

Watch our CEO explain LifeOS and its potential in just 15 mins

Mark at Codex Talk

CAMBRIDGE, Wednesday 19 October 2022 - bit.bio founder and CEO Dr Mark Kotter was invited to the Codex Talk World's Top 50 Innovators 2022 event in London. He had just 15 minutes to answer the question "How can we program biology as software to develop affordable next generation cell therapies?"


Dr Kotter said that a reliable source of human cells can change the way we discover drugs. If we take Alzheimer's disease for example - currently drugs are developed in mice that don’t get Alzheimer’s.

Imagine, we can actually use cells that are affected by the conditions we want to treat? The chances of success will be much higher. This is extremely important, because our biomedical knowledge is growing exponentially, and we need to get better at developing new medicines. 

Our approach is unique in the cell therapy industry because we are starting with the fundamental building block of these medicines - the cell. Not the disease or drug target. This approach will democratise access to human cells for the cell therapy industry so we can finally bring this third generation of medicines to every patient everywhere. 

Learn more in the video below. 

“The area I am most excited about are cell therapies. Emily is the first child who was treated with such a therapy, and as you see she has been cured from her cancer.

This involved taking a particular type of her own immune cells, called T-cells and engineer them so that they recognise the cancer cells. The problem is that this is extremely expensive –in the UK this treatment costs 350k. I feel very strongly that a medicine needs to be available for every patient. Imagine we can use cell programming to generate these cells at scale and at an affordable cost.”

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Mark KotterCo-founder and CEO, bit.bio

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