Samuel Levin, cofounder and chief technical officer of Neion Bio, opened his talk at Synbiobeta 2026 with the inefficiencies of current biomanufacturing processes. Most biological medicines are predominantly manufactured in massive bioreactors, primarily utilizing Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells. However, Levin pointed out that this cell type became an industry standard not because of its efficiency or merits, but because it was one of the few cell types scientists could engineer a few decades ago.
Yet, the industry pours a staggering amount of money into keeping the system functional. Facilities required to house these cellular bioreactors often cost hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, and the resulting biological products can cost up to thousands of dollars per gram to produce.
Neion Bio, which emerged from stealth in 2026, proposes a radical departure from this hardware-heavy history. Founded by evolutionary biologist Levin and aerospace engineer Dimi Kellari, the company seeks to replace nearly every component of the modern bioprocessing facility with nature’s most prolific protein factory: the chicken egg. Neion Bio’s team genetically engineers chickens so they lay eggs with the desired proteins, and the team extracts these downstream. According to Levin, a single chicken farm, small enough to fit within a standard laboratory could theoretically produce the global supply of a blockbuster biologic like Humira.
Samuel Levin (left), chief technology officer, and Dimi Killari (right), chief executive officer, co-founded Neion Bio to simplify biomanufacturing.
Marco Figueroa
“We essentially farm medicines,” Levin said of the company’s autonomous, self-replicating, and scalable bioreactor system.
In an interview after their talk, the leadership team at Neion Bio—Levin and Kellari, the company’s cofounder and chief executive officer—discussed the technological breakthroughs and economic imperatives driving their mission to democratize access to life-changing medicines.
The Genesis of the Avian Bioreactor
How did you get the idea of using chicken eggs as bioreactors?
Levin: Like most things in science, we're building on decades of research by other people. My cofounder Dimi and I were fixated on this problem, which is that while AI dramatically reduces the time and cost to discover and design new proteins, the way we actually make these proteins in the real world hasn't changed in 15 years and remains very inefficient. So, we spent a ton of time questioning why we make proteins in giant steel tanks and CHO cells. How else could we do this? What would the ideal bioprocess look like?
In the middle of this deep problem searching, we came across a paper from 20 years ago, where a team worked on genetically engineering chickens to produce medicinal proteins in their eggs.1 This immediately stood out to us as a potential, incredible solution. Although there have been 20 years of labs, companies, and startups trying to do this, what we saw is that it's been very inefficient, very hard to engineer chickens, but now there are these new technologies that would increase the editing efficiency by 100 or 1,000 times. So, that kind of all fell into place.
Precision Engineering of Chickens and Hijacking Their Native Machinery
Even with improved genetic engineering tools, how hard is it to edit chickens?
Levin: It's a startup, so everything's hard. Plus, it's biology, so everything goes wrong and takes longer than it should. But the incredible thing is that we moved into our lab a little over a year ago, and we now have five genetically engineered lines of chickens. And that's not to say it was easy. We had to recruit the world's best genome engineers to do this work, but we are moving very quickly and having a very high success rate. That is in part because we are building on the shoulders of giants and 30 years of research that has solved what not to do. We have strong advisors, partners, and collaborators, and all of the academic teams and scientists, who have been working on this technology of genetically engineering chickens for 25 years.
What genes are you engineering in chickens?
Levin: The basic technique is to harness the native genetic architecture that drives protein production in the egg. Half the protein in the egg white is ovalbumin, so we simply take a gene that codes for our medicine, and we insert it into the ovalbumin locus. We're harnessing the native machinery for producing proteins in the eggs. We basically take a code that represents, let's say, a monoclonal antibody, and we insert it into that location of the genome.
A $10 Monoclonal Antibody Dream
What are your efficacy and cost goals?
Levin: We have our targets that we want to get to, and we're still scaling up our first products. Our sort of North Star, which was set by the Gates Foundation, is to get below $10 per gram for end-to-end production of monoclonal antibodies.
What's the timeline for getting these monoclonal antibodies into the market?
Kellari: We will have our first product at intermediate scale (stage before full scale commercialization) at the end of this year. We'll have our first regulatory submissions sometime next year, or the beginning of the following year. So, we expect our first therapeutic products to hit the market in a few short years—not long at all.
Where do you see your company in five years?
Kellari: We want to make the production of all therapeutics more affordable, more accessible, and more resilient. We also want to, through unlocking new biology, make new things that weren't previously possible. In five years, we'll be doing all of that. We want to enable the ability to locally manufacture anything without compromising on cost, in fact, reducing cost, and that underpins the platform that will enable us.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
- Lillico SG, et al. Transgenic chickens as bioreactors for protein-based drugs. Drug Discov Today. 2005;10(3):191-196.
