An explainer covering b.next's relationship to Nucleus across six FAQ-style questions: current support, benefits to b.next, revenue model, long-term vision, governance roadmap, and funding sustainability.
b.next launched Nucleus in 2023, and today we're users, contributors, and maintainers. This multifaceted relationship raises a fair question: how does a for-profit company with commercial ambitions relate to an open, permissively licensed platform it also helps run? We think that question is worth answering carefully, but it's in service of something bigger: the belief that labs and institutions building on shared, reusable foundations will get to better outcomes faster than each working in isolation.
Fortunately, similar arrangements have played an important role in advancing engineering progress in other fields — from Willow Garage developing and stewarding ROS in robotics to RISC-V spinning out SiFive in integrated circuits. Figuring out how these precedents translate to synthetic cell engineering is still real work, and a real answer means addressing several questions at once.
We hear versions of these questions constantly — at conferences, on calls with labs building alongside us, in workshops we've organized or participated in: what we actually contribute, whether we profit off something meant to be open, who's really in charge of it. Our hope is that having this written down once means the next conversation — whether at a conference or on a call — can start past these basics and get to the more interesting stuff.
As users, in the course of doing our own synthetic cell engineering we make use of Nucleus tools. As contributors, our work that is broadly useful goes onto Nucleus, permissively licensed, for anyone to pick up and build on. As maintainers, we’d love help: we're actively working out what it looks like to hand more of it to the community building alongside us, so that a community of maintainers grows up around it.
Nucleus needs leadership and a coherent vision, backed by a dedicated team — especially in these early days. We started b.next to fill that gap, because it wasn't being filled and few were incentivized to fill it. We hold leadership and direction today, but not because we intend to keep them. The goal is to put Nucleus on rails both sustainable and sturdy enough that others can join us to shape the direction of a shared resource that will enable the synthetic cell engineering community to work better together.
How does b.next currently support Nucleus?
Since launching Nucleus in 2023, b.next has driven its core development: technical contributions, community support, and the infrastructure that makes both possible.
- Technical content. We make ongoing contributions of plasmids, methods, and reference specifications, including the full set that defines Nucleus Cytosol, as well as the protocols for liposome encapsulation. We regularly document our own work for reuse as Nucleus content and help others who want to build alongside us.
- Community building. We work as the dedicated team to help ensure that the community can build synthetic cells together. This means we respond to questions about protocol details and will hop on a call if the Cytosol protocol is not working. We also organize Developer workshops to bring the community together to share engineering best practices and increasingly help each other out.
- Core infrastructure. We maintain and develop the underlying technical infrastructure that makes Nucleus possible. This includes technical partnerships to sustain the infrastructure that runs Developer Notes and the legal work to ensure that Nucleus and its community have freedom to operate as a permissively licensed project (learn more about Nucleus licensing).
How does b.next benefit from Nucleus?
Our core thesis for investing in and contributing to Nucleus is that the sooner people can build cells, the sooner b.next (and others) can develop cells to solve problems. Short term, we benefit by building products like b.next Cytosol and services like contract R&D on top of Nucleus. Long term, b.next will benefit by using foundational technology developed on Nucleus to build valuable applications. Just as important, we’ll need to develop capabilities to operate at speed and scale, and to make those applications robust enough for real-world deployment, capabilities we expect other organizations building on Nucleus will need to develop too. Growing this alongside Nucleus is core to how we plan to turn the open foundation into deployed, real-world impact. We benefit from working closely with today’s synthetic cell pioneers, and we want that group to grow. The synthetic cell specifications, methods, and protocols on Nucleus will remain permissively licensed so that anyone can use and modify them for any purpose, even commercial.
How does b.next intend to make money?
We see Nucleus as core technology for synthetic cells. By creating this technological foundation, we believe we’ll be able to pursue application development, and so can anyone else. We believe there’s more opportunity here than any one organization, b.next included, could realize alone. The specifications, protocols, and reference designs are open, and b.next builds commercial work on top of that open platform rather than by restricting it. Per our contribution rubric, what’s broadly enabling for others (e.g. specifications, protocols, plasmids) goes back into Nucleus; what’s specific to deploying a particular application is what we build our business on. Short term, that means supporting researchers working to make synthetic cell technology reliable and reproducible, through products like Cytosol and services like contract R&D. Long term, as that groundwork matures, we want to build applications ourselves and enable others to do the same. We also reserve the right to pursue work that isn’t related to Nucleus at all.
What is b.next’s long term vision for Nucleus?
Our long term vision for Nucleus is that it becomes the platform synthetic cell researchers reach for by default: the specifications, protocols, and tools that let people build without reinventing the basics. This means that Nucleus should always strive to meet the needs of its user community and grow in whatever direction best addresses those needs while remaining sustainable. We recognize this might require Nucleus to become its own independent organization, governed by the community it serves, or it might take some other form. What matters is that the structure serves the community building on it, not b.next alone. In all scenarios, we see ourselves as a core user and contributor to Nucleus, since enabling the synthetic cell community is core to our mission.
What is b.next currently doing to realize its long term vision for Nucleus?
Currently, b.next’s core team decides which contributions appear on Nucleus sites and enter its repositories, and sets the specifications and quality bar content has to meet. While Nucleus is still in its infancy, we believe it is important for b.next to retain this role. However, we know that our long term vision requires us to create a shared governance with the community. We collaborate with an increasing number of labs; those interactions inform our thinking about Nucleus. In parallel, we worked with an independent third party, Conscience, to survey how the community sees itself engaging with Nucleus. We are using this feedback to define a set of criteria and a timeline for opening up greater governance to the community.
How does b.next decide what to contribute to Nucleus?
Our rubric is simple: if something is broadly enabling for others building alongside us, it belongs on Nucleus. Capabilities that are more specific to deploying a particular application such as the speed, scale, and hardened engineering needed to bring a product to market, for instance, are more likely to stay with b.next.
How is Nucleus sustainable?
Nucleus doesn’t depend on any single source of support. Today, Nucleus’s early promise has attracted financial support that has gone directly back into developing Nucleus itself, including support from Schmidt Sciences (which funds the DevCells program, supporting multiple labs building together on Nucleus to expand its collection of reusable content and modules), the Astera Institute, and the Sloan Foundation. As more labs build on and contribute to Nucleus, we expect that base of support to broaden further, reducing reliance on any one funder or organization, including b.next. Right now, that support is largely grant-funded, which isn’t a permanent model on its own — but the number of institutions and funders willing to back this work has grown steadily, and we expect that momentum to continue as the field matures.