A-Life
Unlocking the manufacturing power of biology.
A-Life is X’s moonshot to unlock the manufacturing power of biology. The team is creating a new set of AI tools designed specifically for biology. By combining advanced machine learning with deep biological expertise, A-Life is working on ways to harness the power of cells to make the things we need, like vitamins, cosmetics and medicines, in a way that is faster, better and cheaper than traditional methods. The team is interested in working with biomanufacturing partners who want to scale with more speed, reliability and intelligence. If you’re interested in collaborating, please reach out.
Thomas Scherbart in the A-Life lab
What if we could help nature help us make the things we need every day?
Cells are living factories. They can make the things we need for our everyday lives: food, ingredients for health and beauty products, industrial enzymes for household products, building materials, fuels, medicines and much more. These biological systems can manufacture molecules with atomic precision from renewable resources, and create new materials with totally new functions and properties. Yet understanding exactly how to engineer cells for biomanufacturing is still a slow and costly process with high failure rates, based on trial-and-error development in the wet lab.
A-Life is X’s moonshot to unlock the manufacturing power of biology. The team is creating a new set of AI tools designed specifically for biology. By combining advanced machine learning with deep biological expertise, A-Life is working on ways to harness the power of cells to make the things we need in a way that is faster, better and cheaper than traditional methods.
The Challenge of Biology at Scale
The promise of the bioeconomy has never been greater. Scientists can now read and write DNA with unprecedented precision, engineering cells to produce virtually any molecule imaginable. Yet a fundamental barrier prevents this potential from being realized: the vast gap between what works in laboratory Petri dishes and what can be manufactured at commercial scale.
Today's biomanufacturing relies on costly trial-and-error approaches. Cells are unpredictable—change one component, and you affect everything else. Traditional methods optimize individual biological components in isolation: design a better enzyme, tweak a metabolic pathway, adjust growth conditions. But cells are integrated systems of staggering complexity, with billions of interconnected variables affecting performance. What works at lab scale often breaks at manufacturing scale. It can take years to develop a cell that performs well enough for commercial manufacturing.
Long development cycles, high failure rates, and significant costs prevent breakthrough biological products from reaching the market. The world’s most advanced production systems—cells—have untapped potential for industrial purposes.
A-Life’s biology systems intelligence is powered by new algorithms and data
Artificial Intelligence Built for Biology
A-Life is developing a new artificial intelligence platform built specifically for biology. By combining advanced machine learning with deep biological expertise, A-Life is working on ways to harness the power of cells to make the things we need in a way that is faster, better and cheaper than traditional methods.
A-Life began with the hypothesis that biological manufacturing requires a new kind of artificial intelligence—one that doesn't just model individual components, but understands the relationships inside entire biological ecosystems. A-Life’s biological systems intelligence platform models all the components together to make predictions about what works best at commercial scale. These reveal unexpected cellular engineering recommendations that slower trial-and-error lab experiments might never find.
These insights have enabled A-Life’s partners—ingredient makers who sell their materials across a range of industries—to achieve faster development timelines, higher success rates and higher production yields. At A-Life we envision a world where AI can unlock the power of biology to manufacture the materials to build our cities, the advanced materials to enable technologies we can barely imagine today, and the medicines to extend human health.
Project Lead
Relly leads the team at A-Life, X’s moonshot to unlock the manufacturing power of biology. Relly joined X from Google, where she worked on search and discovery platforms. She earned her PhD in Computational Biology from Stanford, and did post-doctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco.
The Possibilities of Biomanufacturing at Scale
A-Life believes the world is entering a new era for biomanufacturing, powered by AI that bridges the gap between biology’s potential and industry’s scale. The team is working with partners in a range of sectors who want to scale with more speed, reliability and intelligence. If you’re interested in exploring how A-Life’s biological systems intelligence can accelerate your work, please get in touch at hello-alife@google.com.
