Our Story

Akshay Maheshwari is CEO of b.next. Growing up in the Silicon Valley as the internet was first coming of age, he thought anything was possible, and was convinced that biology could be as programmable as computers. He helped build the Synthetic Biology Open Language while in high school and dreamt about growing wings to fly. While at UC San Diego for his undergraduate in Bioengineering, he worked on building cartilage tissue and founded an engineering organization focused on developing globally accessible medical technologies. Realizing that the vision of programmable biology would need significantly more foundational work, he moved to Stanford University to pursue an MD/PhD. At Stanford he first worked on CRISPR tools for engineering mammalian cells, but found the process too slow; and machine-learning generation of genomes, but found the bottleneck was physical understanding and implementation. He ultimately spent six years developing a colloidal physics framework for designing defined biological systems at molecular resolution. He hopes that b.next can help the world finally realize programmable biotechnology.

Anton Jackson-Smith is CTO of b.next. Growing up in Queenstown, New Zealand, he was deeply immersed in technology from an early age, teaching himself Linux and programming while writing code for a local network engineering firm throughout high school. After finishing school, he lived in Vietnam during a gap year where a chance encounter with an article about the iGEM competition—featuring a student team programming E. coli to perform "dialysis in a pill"—flipped a switch, revealing to him that biology could be written like software. He returned to New Zealand to pursue Molecular Biotechnology alongside Law at the University of Otago, viewing legal structures as just another complex engineering system for human society. Driven to make living systems truly engineerable, he moved to Stanford University to earn his PhD in Synthetic Biology. At Stanford, Anton focused on "bottom-up" synthetic cells—assembling defined DNA, custom proteins, and lipid membranes from scratch—to eliminate unpredictable cellular behavior and build controllable biological systems. Alongside Akshay Maheshwari and Jon Calles, he co-founded the Build-a-Cell community. He hopes b.next can build the foundational platform for programmable biology, enabling synthetic cells to rapidly detect disease, deliver targeted cancer therapeutics, and address critical global challenges across health, climate, and agriculture.

His story starts on the foggy outskirts of San Francisco, fascinated by how complicated systems organize themselves. He would go on to study Physics and Chemistry at Occidental College by way of the California Community College system, where he used surface tension to assemble colloidal nanoparticles and received a Goldwater Scholarship. As a Fulbright Fellow in Germany, he patterned surfaces with spider silks using DNA. Anton received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. His doctoral work combined soft matter physics with digital fabrication and distributed manufacturing. During this time, he worked on a range of open-source hardware projects, including Open Microscopy with Cephla and Fairscope, digital infrastructure for FabCity Hamburg, and launched an initiative to make menstrual pads from locally sourced biomass, including a first demonstration of an absorbent material derived from the drought-tolerant succulent Agave sisalana, developed with partners in Nepal, Kenya, and France. He believes synthetic cells will help create a new kind of collaboration in biotechnology.

Jon Calles is Chief Engineer of b.next. Following his eccentric interests brought him through Penn Biochemistry and Biophysics and various seemingly unrelated projects — programmed supramolecular organic chemistry assembly, scintillators for a large multi-group neutrino detection consortium, solid-state silicon nanopores for DNA sequencing and bioanalyte detection — to the Endy Lab at Stanford University, where he received his PhD in Bioengineering. Here, these disparate ideas came together into one, simple, powerful approach: build biological systems, one piece at a time, and study their behavior as you build more complexity. His graduate work used this approach to design and prototype “fail-safe” biocontainment strategies that restrict the evolution of engineered organisms. Along with Akshay and Anton Jackson-Smith, he co-founded the Build-a-Cell community to collaboratively design and build fully defined, bottom-up composed synthetic cells. Integrated in a global community of likeminded colleagues, Jon hopes to co-create a new practice in biotechnology that will, one day, make biology truly programmable.