In-Q-Tel reveals its latest investments into gene therapy, lab-grown meat, and drug discovery, among others in its quarterly recap.
Created by the CIA in 1999, In-Q-Tel is a non-profit, non-government organization that invests in private foreign and domestic companies and transfers their technologies to just about every three-letter agency within the defense and intelligence communities, including the CIA, DIA, FBI, DHS, and CBP, along with foreign government partners.
In-Q-Tel’s Spring recap highlights 14 companies that were added to its portfolio last quarter.
These companies are involved with gene therapies, automated taxation on crypto transactions, cultivated meat, drug discovery, fermentation applications, cybersecurity, communications, and advanced materials.
Perhaps one of the most versatile companies on the list is Prolific Machines, with its platforms that use light to control biology by manipulating cells that can be used in a wide range of applications, including gene therapies and alternative proteins like cultured meat, as well as complex tissue engineering.
“Our platform can create complex tissue products such as steaks or organs by differentiating cells into specific cell types in a desired pattern”
Prolific Machines
The Prolific Machines platforms enable partners to unlock direct and precise control of cells using light that can “instantly turn ‘up’ or ‘down’ important cellular processes” such as gene expression, receptor activation, and enzyme activity.
By precisely controlling every major cellular process with light, the applications can range from lab-grown meat to gene therapies and customizable disease models.
Recently, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced it was putting together a research program to shine near-infrared light into people’s brains that if successful, would be able to activate and deactivate drugs in their bodies on demand.
Another In-Q-Tel Spring portfolio company involved in cellular science is Inventia, which creates 3D cell models for accelerating drug discovery and biomedical research.
“The RASTRUM platform has allowed us to efficiently and reproducibly generate 3D brain organoids from induced pluripotent stem cells for our research on neurogenerative disease”
Inventia Testimonial
The company’s RASTRUM platform allows scientists to “model complex biology, discover new therapeutic targets, and screen drug compounds.”
One researcher said the platform allowed them to “recreate humanized beating cardiac 3D organoids” from stem cells, which they used to “test for the interaction of genetics on drug response.”
In-Q-Tel’s investment into both Inventia and Prolific Machines aligns with DARPA’s own pharmaceutical research, development, and deployment efforts.
For example, earlier this year DARPA put out a special notice for its Establishing Qualification Processes for Agile Pharmaceutical Manufacturing (EQUIP-A-Pharma) program, which “aims to explore innovative approaches to demonstrate a real-time digital regulatory approval framework for multiple finished drug products produced from widely available precursors on a single reprogrammable hardware platform.”
While In-Q-Tel is a non-government entity that invests in private companies for defense and intelligence purposes, DARPA is a government entity that invests in research and development for the Pentagon and awards contracts to private companies like Raytheon.
Last year, the newly-established Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) announced it was looking to take health technologies and innovations coming out of DARPA and other defense agencies and expand and adapt them for civilian use under a new ARPA-H program.
The ARPA-H “Shared Health Applications Research for Everyone” (SHARE) program “seeks to adapt Department of Defense (DoD) and other related government entities’ health innovations more broadly to all Americans.”
Getting back to the Spring portfolio list, In-Q-Tel invested-in a company called TaxBit, with its platform designed to automate tax filings for taxable cryptocurrency transactions.
Concerning cybersecurity, the CIA-founded In-Q-Tel added AI-powered deception tech company Acalvio and threat hunting platform Hunt.io to its Spring portfolio.
Acalvio’s deception-based Active Defense strategy can detect, engage, delay, and divert attacks on enterprise systems while Hunt.io scans, tracks, and hunts down malicious infrastructure.
For fermentation and production, In-Q-Tel invested in Synonym and Cauldron.
Synonym offers a database of global fermentation capacity, a technoeconomic analysis tool, and project development financial services for bioindustrials while Cauldron’s hyper-fermentation technology allows for the rapid scale-up of precision fermented prototypes to commercial quantities in manufacturing.
In what ways could foreign and domestic defense departments and intelligence agencies make use of In-Q-Tel’s most recent investments?
Image: Screen shot from In-Q-Tel podcast on YouTube
