Accelerating Bio-Innovation Conference 2026
West Road Concert Hall, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
22–22 April 2026
Constructive Bio CEO Ola Wlodek presented at the Accelerating Bio-Innovation Conference 2026 in Cambridge on 22 April. The invitation-only meeting, organised by Royalty Pharma, convenes academia, industry, and investors around new therapeutics. Ola’s talk covered genetic code expansion as a route to manufacturing peptides and proteins with non-canonical amino acids.
Presenter
Ola Wlodek PhD
CEO
We presented
Constructing Life: Programming Cells to Manufacture New Medicines
Ola covered how Constructive Bio rewrites bacterial genomes so cells can incorporate non-canonical amino acids directly into peptides and proteins. The talk set out the case for programming cells to manufacture medicines that are difficult to make with conventional chemistry, and for scaling that approach through fermentation.
Ola’s talk made the case for programming cells to manufacture medicines that are difficult to build with conventional chemistry. By rewriting the genome of E. coli and reassigning codons, Constructive Bio can incorporate non-canonical amino acids directly into peptides and proteins during biosynthesis. The result is access to molecules that sit outside what canonical amino acids can deliver, produced through fermentation rather than chemical synthesis.
Industry themes
ABI 2026 centred on the interface between academic discovery and industrial translation, with sessions on bio-innovation funding, platform companies, and translational medicine. Royalty Pharma used the meeting to launch its Translational Prize, reinforcing the conference’s academia-to-industry remit. Sustainable manufacturing of complex biomolecules came up across the agenda.
Key takeaways
- Programming cells to manufacture medicines opens access to chemistry that conventional synthesis cannot cleanly deliver.
- Non-canonical amino acids are already present in approved peptide drugs, so the chemistry is proven at the patient end and the bottleneck is manufacturing.
- Recombinant fermentation in recoded E. coli is a candidate route to scale that manufacturing without the solvent-waste profile of solid-phase synthesis.
About the event
Ola Wlodek presented at ABI 2026 in Cambridge, an invitation-only meeting organised by Royalty Pharma that alternates between Cambridge and Boston. The conference convenes academia, industry, and investors around new therapeutics.