BiomEdit is a biotechnology company founded in 2022 as a spin-out from Elanco Animal Health, headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, focused on microbiome-based animal health innovation. It develops microbiome-derived products using synthetic biology to address unmet needs in livestock and pets.
You spent much of your career in large pharmaceutical and animal health organisations, including Eli Lilly and Elanco. What prompted the move into a spin-out, and how did your experience at Elanco shape the decision to form BiomEdit?
The first 25 years of my career were spent primarily in R&D roles — from staff scientist to leading business development and strategy at Eli Lilly — before joining Elanco. By training, I’m a student of the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, and I like to work at the interface between science and business. Moving to animal health was a big decision, but it was “safe” in the sense that Elanco was part of Lilly, essentially an intercompany move to lead R&D. I wanted the opportunity to get behind an R&D engine and bring it to its full potential.
When I joined Elanco, there were already discussions about a separation from Lilly. I was learning animal health while leading R&D and business development at a critical moment for the company, focused on building the pipeline. I led the R&D integration of Novartis Animal Health and Boehringer Ingelheim’s US companion animal vaccine business, as well as several significant acquisitions —Aratana Therapeutics, Kindred Bioscience, and Bayer Animal Health, effectively a combination between Elanco and Bayer. The Bayer deal was the largest animal health transaction ever done, a $7 billion acquisition following the IPO and separation from Lilly. By 2021, as we approached the final post-Bayer restructuring, it became clear that some R&D platforms wouldn’t get the investment they deserved because of budget constraints. One of those platforms became BiomEdit. We explored strategic deals, private equity, and venture options, and the only viable path was a venture-funded spin-out. I retired from Elanco at the end of 2021 and worked with Elanco to establish BiomEdit in the spring of 2022.
You’ve pointed to a long-standing imbalance between investment in animal health and human health. Is that dynamic changing, and why did it exist in the first place?
Historically, animal health companies were expected to benefit from being inside large human pharma through technology spillovers and translational potential. In practice, that leverage rarely materialized. Pfizer carved out Zoetis. When I joined Elanco, one of my premises was that I could unlock that leverage — using Lilly’s scientific foundations to fuel Elanco’s pipeline with human analogs — but it proved hard to do.
There are two reasons. First, scale:
If animal health brings a great product that delivers one-tenth the revenue of a human drug, it immediately sits at the bottom of the investment stack. A blockbuster is $1 billion in human health and $100 million in animal health; R&D budgets follow the same ratio.
Second, technology transfer is difficult. For example, if there’s a phase-two molecule critical to the human pipeline and you want to run animal studies, the human side or the organization imagines worst-case safety signals that could jeopardize the progress of a key pipeline asset. When you do the calculus — no shared customers and limited synergies beyond manufacturing and back office — the industrial logic just isn’t there as consistently as people might assume.
You’ve warned about the consequences of not maturing the animal health industry. What are the biggest threats you see today, and what’s driving disease in 2026?
On the pet side, most owners are willing to spend almost anything to treat problems, and the trend of pet parents has been growing for the past 30 years. Pet ownership is up, family size is down. Preventive care is a major focus, and as such chronic disease now becomes more relevant.
In livestock, the dynamics are driven by animal protein consumption, which will continue to grow for decades. Alternative proteins haven’t succeeded and scaled as hoped, and the market, it appears, has paused on rewarding those companies. Meanwhile, the number of cows, pigs, fish, shrimp, and chickens the world needs continues to increase. The challenge is producing that protein sustainably and keeping animals healthy, which comes back to R&D investment. The industry rewards pet-side innovation, but livestock has seen underinvestment because it doesn’t benefit from human biotech spillover. You’re treating animals to stay healthy until they become a food source, not managing chronic disease. Then there’s the issue of investment scale, the best animal health companies invest about 10% of sales in R&D, compared with 16% to 25% in human biotech — which results in fewer shots on goal — and basically only four large players are willing to take big risks or do acquisitions, resulting in a highly concentrated buyer universe for start-ups.
After four years focused on discovery and development, BiomEdit is now moving toward commercialization. What will look materially different this time next year as you move through regulatory paths and into markets?
Our flagship product is the proof point for the platform. BiomEdit was built on combining deep expertise in animal microbiology and the microbiome with synthetic biology — engineering microorganisms, particularly bacteria, to do more than they naturally do. Today, livestock disease control relies on antibiotics and vaccines: antibiotics are largely restricted to last-resort outbreak use, and while vaccines are effective, they have limits, including strain evolution and the energy cost of mounting an immune response, which diverts resources from the animals’ growth. We start with the idea that a healthy microbiome is the foundation of performance, helping animals realize their full genetic potential, and then go further by engineering microbes to express targeted biomolecules that deliver specific effects.
Our lead product, BE-101, which will be commercialized under the brand name Optavant™ upon full licensure, targets necrotic enteritis in broiler chickens, caused by Clostridium perfringens, which damages the intestinal wall through toxin expression, leading to lesions, productivity loss, and often mortality — an annual $6 billion global problem across the U.S., Brazil, Europe, and Asia. We took bacterial strains that naturally colonizes that part of the gut and engineered them to express molecules that neutralize those toxins. The neutralizing molecules were developed using these toxoids to immunize a llama and identify two single-protein antibodies, one for each toxin, which we then genetically engineered into two separate probiotic strains. The product is applied as a water spray and administered on day one in the hatchery, colonizing the gut immediately. Following the day-one dose, a booster is given in the drinking water on day 14, and this protects the growing broiler chickens across the full growth cycle, reducing mortality by up to 50% and significantly improving feed conversion. At the outset, there was no regulatory path for an engineered bacterial therapeutic, so we worked with the USDA to create one. All laboratory safety work, the efficacy study, and master production seeds are approved, and we’ve received authorization to use this engineered bacterial therapeutic product in food-producing animals. In February, we’ll initiate field safety trials in 3 separate commercial broiler complexes, and we expect to complete the field safety trials submission to the USDA in May. We expect conditional licensure in the third quarter, and we are planning to commercialize around October 1 — making us the first company, in any species or geography, to have a live engineered bacterial therapeutic approved and commercialized.
There’s growing interest in applying AI and digital models to biological research, but results have been uneven. Where do these tools genuinely add value in animal health R&D?
Biology is biology — anything that helps interpret complex, variable data sets matters. What’s unique in animal health is the opportunity to move faster than in humans, particularly in the microbiome. Human microbiome development has been difficult, with many failures. Variability in genetics and diet makes signal detection hard.
Livestock offers a cleaner system. Broiler chickens share genetics and diet, which allows us to unlock microbiome insights faster, cheaper, and more reliably — and those insights can eventually inform human applications. AI is central. Our methane-reduction program, supported by a Bezos Earth Fund grant, is building a “rumen digital twin” that correlates genetics, microbiome, feed, and outcomes like milk yield and methane emissions in cattle. Humans can’t integrate that complexity alone, and AI is key to unlocking those insights and turning them into predictions.
As agriculture rises on the political agenda, what do policymakers most misunderstand about animal health and innovation?
Livestock and crops remain the foundation of the global food system and will for the next hundred years. The vilifying of animal health around antimicrobial resistance and climate change has been a little extreme, in my opinion. These are contributors, but they’re not the dominant drivers, and balance is missing.
Broadly speaking, we (the industry and scientists) have done a poor job at scientific communication. Unwarranted GMO fear is a clear example — poor communication allowed it to take hold. Progress is iterative: every technology has trade-offs, and society improves by solving them in sequence. I believe policymakers should introduce regulatory actions to protect against real risks, incentivise the right outcomes, and depoliticise science.
