How We Think About Ethics in Bioindustrial Investing
Why a fund investing in non-pharma biotech approaches bioethics differently, and the framework we use to practice it.
At Juniper, we back bioindustrial companies: startups using biology to make physical products, from materials and chemicals to ingredients, and the tools and infrastructure that accelerate the bioeconomy. Here’s how we approach the ethics of that work, where our thinking comes from, and what we’ve committed to.
Written by Michael Luciani and Jennifer Kan, PhD
The use of biological components, processes, and living organisms to create useful products has applications beyond medicine, but most bioethics frameworks are centered on patients and clinics. The companies we invest in often have neither. The ethical weight of our companies sits elsewhere: in environmental release and irreversibility, dual-use and biosecurity, ecosystem and food-system effects, as well as impact and consent at the population rather than patient level. This is still a bioethics conversation; it’s just different from one centered on human health.
Why this matters now
The capabilities underlying modern biology are becoming cheaper, faster, and more powerful each year. Work that once took an established lab years to complete now sits within reach of a seed-stage company. That shift is precisely what makes the field investable. It is also what makes ethical scrutiny urgent rather than optional.
Much of this comes down to timing. The standards that will govern bioindustrial work are still taking shape, and the companies being built today are setting precedents before any settled consensus exists. The decisions a founding team makes early, about containment, data, and how a technology is deployed, tend to become embedded in the company before their solutions reach the market. The most influential moment to ask these questions is therefore also the earliest one.
For early-stage investors, that represents both an opportunity and a responsibility. We are frequently the first institutional capital in the room, engaging with founders while a company’s direction is still wide open. Taking ethics seriously at that stage is not a constraint on building ambitious companies; it is part of building them well.
A foundation decades in the making
Over the past few decades, as biotechnology’s reach has widened, reputable institutions have built bioethics into a discipline, and its foundations are now well established. In 1979, the U.S. National Commission’s Belmont Report set out the enduring triad of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. That same year, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress expanded it into the four-principle approach (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) that still serves as the common vocabulary of the field.
The conversation grew as the science did. In 2010, after the J. Craig Venter Institute built the first self-replicating bacterial cell with a synthetic genome, President Obama called for a review of the ethics of synthetic biology, which produced the Presidential Commission’s “New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies“ and its recommendations for capturing the field’s benefits within sensible ethical limits. Two years later, the UK’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics published “Emerging Biotechnologies: Technology, Choice and the Public Good,” which mapped the challenges common to emerging biotechnologies and offered a practical way to weigh them.
More recently, the scientific community has written frameworks for itself: the Engineering Biology Research Consortium’s Guiding Ethical Principles in Engineering Biology Research (2021) established principles, values, and ethical standards to which engineering biology should adhere.
As we build our own framework for investing, we also draw principles from the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, the international agreement governing the safe handling and use of living modified organisms, and the WHO’s global guidance framework for the responsible use of the life sciences.
Juniper’s ethical investing framework
Part 1: Categorical exclusions
We do not invest in companies whose primary business is, or materially depends on:
Biological weapons or offensive agents: any work whose foreseeable primary use is to cause mass harm.
Any work whose aim or foreseeable effect is to enhance the transmissibility or virulence of a potential pandemic pathogen.
Covert or non-consensual collection, use, or sale of human genomic or biometric data.
Biometric or genetic identification systems whose primary market is population-scale monitoring by states or employers.
Animal-derived inputs from species or systems with serious welfare concerns.
Nucleic acid synthesis or benchtop synthesis services that do not adhere to recognized sequence-of-concern and customer-verification standards.
Engineered organisms or gene drives for open environmental release without a containment strategy, reversibility plan, and ecological review.
Part 2: Six axes of ethical diligence
For every company that clears Part 1, we use these axes to structure conversations with founders. None are pass/fail; they’re forcing functions for honest discussion. Not every axis applies to every company; we use the ones that fit the technology and solution.
1. Benefit and public good. What concrete problem does this solve, for whom, and how large is the benefit relative to the status quo? Could the same benefit be achieved with materially less risk or irreversibility?
2. Containment and reversibility. Does the technology stay where it’s supposed to? If an engineered organism, material, or molecule escapes its intended context, what happens? Can deployment be unwound?
3. Distributional effects. Who wins and who loses if this company succeeds at scale? Bio-based technologies could displace petrochemicals, traditional agriculture, animal agriculture, and traditional mining practices. We don’t view incumbent disruption as inherently bad, but we want to understand how founders think their solutions might affect workers, farmers, communities, and other stakeholders.
4. Ecological footprint. How does the technology affect biodiversity, water, soil, and land-use as it scales? Does it trade a win for a loss elsewhere?
5. Dual-use and biosecurity. How could this be misused, and how hard would misuse be? For platform technologies, such as DNA synthesis, protein design, and organism engineering tools, we want to understand what screening protocols, customer vetting, and biosecurity policies are in place.
6. Animal welfare and sentience. Where relevant, such as cell-cultured foods, ingredients and materials replacing animal-derived inputs, does this product reduce net animal suffering relative to its conventional counterpart? And does that gain hold across the entire production chain, including upstream inputs (growth factors, scaffolding materials, cell-line derivation) and validation/testing that may still rely on animal use?
What we’re committing to
We apply the Part 1 exclusions in our diligence, and use the six axes to structure our conversations with founders at every company that touches them substantively. We keep updating this framework as our thinking matures, and we are candid about the cases where reasonable people might disagree with where we land.
And when a potential investment raises questions we cannot answer with the framework we have, we seek outside expertise. The version of ethics we believe in is the one that thinks carefully before investing, brings in people smarter than us when it needs to, writes down what it learns, and adapts as the technology moves.
If you’re thinking about the ethics of bioindustrials and other non-medical applications of biology, we’d love to learn with you.