BioLabs Greater Boston Resident Spotlight: Pando Bioscience

Pando Bioscience ( Pando Bioscience (YC W23) ) is an AI-driven synthetic biology company revolutionizing enzyme engineering for pharmaceutical manufacturing and diagnostics. Enzymes are crucial biological catalysts in various industrial applications, but inefficient enzymes lead to significant financial losses. Developing industrial-grade enzymes with balanced complex properties is a top priority but remains challenging and time-consuming.

The team at Pando harnesses AI to design enzymes with mutations that enhance multiple properties simultaneously. Their unique ultra-high-throughput one-pot screening method enables them to experimentally validate AI-generated enzymes, screening libraries 1,000 times larger than traditional methods. This generates massive, high-quality data for continuous AI learning. By integrating AI design with advanced screening, they've reduced the full engineering cycle to just 24 days—much faster and cheaper than competitors.

Pando’s platform efficiently develops enzymes that boost profitability for collaborators. They have secured eight projects from five collaborators in diagnostics, biotech, and pharma. For one pharma collaborator, Pando’s enzyme reduced manufacturing costs by 50%, replacing an 11-step reaction with a single enzymatic step and increasing the collaborator’s profit margin by up to $24 million. Despite being less than two years old, Pando and this pharma collaborator have completed four projects together and are planning the fifth. In another case, Pando enhanced an enzyme for a diagnostics collaborator who now projects doubling their revenue and expanding into a new market.

Pando Bioscience also supplies high value engineered molecular biology enzymes directly to the public. Their first enzyme asset is phi29, widely used in RCA, MDA, whole-genome amplification, and single-cell sequencing, etc. This proprietary phi29 mutant exceeds the market leader in reaction speed and efficiency and is ready for distribution. Mutated T4 ligase and a ligase for ssDNA and RNA are on the way, built for supreme ligation efficiency. If you need any of these, don't hesitate to reach out to Pando Bioscience via their website.

Finally, Pando would like to express their thanks to Biolabs Watertown for providing a home for the their team. Thriving as a company in this economy is hard, but the Biolabs space—with its well-organized procurement system, fantastically-maintained instruments, and tremendously kind staff—has made everything so much easier.

“At Pando Bioscience, we're eager to collaborate with partners in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries who share our vision of revolutionizing enzyme engineering. If you're interested in enhancing enzyme performance to reduce costs, boost revenue, or access new markets, we'd love to connect. Visit our website or reach out to us directly—let's innovate together!”