His Companies Secured Hundreds of Millions And Now He’s Converting Waste Into Valuable Products To Decarbonize The Chemicals Industry

Christopher Pirie is one of the few founders in the biotech sphere who has explored multiple frontiers. His path traces an idyllic childhood in Sonoma to building and scaling companies at the cutting edge of science.

Christopher’s career is a masterclass in navigating academic rigor, entrepreneurial drive, and mission-driven innovation. In this conversation, he shared powerful lessons from his ventures, spanning synthetic biology, RNA vaccines, and sustainable manufacturing.

Christopher also talks about alternative financing, customer-centric business models, the history of biotechnology, and the impatience of going through the journey of building his latest startup, Decycle Bio.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Roots in the Pacific Northwest—and Problem Solving

Raised in the rolling hills of Sonoma and later in Seattle, Christopher grew up surrounded by nature, a love for problem-solving, and a deep-seated curiosity about science. His passion for math and science led him to the University of Washington.

Here, Christopher chose biological engineering over chemical engineering not just for the subject, but for the city. In an undergraduate class dominated by 50% pre-med students and another 50% pre-PhD, he began gravitating toward research.

However, Christopher quickly realized that clinical practice wasn’t for him. Instead, he found his calling in labs and publications, and eventually, at MIT, where his entrepreneurial journey began to take shape.

As Christopher sees it, along the course of their PhD journey, most graduate students should have the business school experience. It is crucial to understand that continuing with the academic regime throughout one’s career is not practical. They should think about things beyond scientific research.

MIT: Where Science Meets Venture

While pursuing his PhD at MIT, Christopher crossed paths with MBA students at the Sloan School of Business and began exploring commercialization opportunities. Spending time on both sides of the campus in classrooms and research labs, he received extensive cross-sectional exposure.

Christopher was drawn to the interface between cutting-edge science and the entrepreneurial journey—something he’d been exposed to through his father’s telecom ventures. At that time, he had experienced the energy of an early-stage venture.

Toward the end of Christopher’s thesis work, during one of the MIT classes where students collaborate with researchers to explore commercialization potential, he created a list of classes he wanted to work on that semester..

Christopher didn’t get his first project choice, but his second choice turned out to be life-changing. That technology became the foundation for Manus Biosynthesis.

Founding Manus Biosynthesis: Turning Sugar into Scent

Christopher recalls spending the semester working with Prof. Gregory Stephanopoulos, a postdoctoral researcher and inventor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. At the end of the semester, Gregory invited Christopher and another student from Sloan for coffee.

Christopher recalls how, during the meeting, Gregory suggested that the three of them start a company. Manus Biosynthesis was founded on the principles of metabolic engineering technology.

Its concept emerged from research that enabled microbes to metabolize sugar and produce natural flavors and fragrances. Many of these products are otherwise sourced from plants and farming.

The promise? Replace resource-intensive agriculture (like rose fields for perfume oil) with precision fermentation, a technique that has been used for millennia to produce beer, wine, and other products.

Manus Bio’s innovative enzyme and metabolic process engineering approach enabled, for example, the fermentation of a single acre of corn into a highly efficient manufacturing process for some of the ingredients that would otherwise require millions of acres of plant-based ingredients.

Under Christopher’s leadership, the company developed a scalable and much more efficient enzyme engineering platform. Manus Bio secured over $100M in capital and subsequently announced a high-profile merger.

However, after a five-year successful run, Christopher decided to return to Seattle, driven by personal needs, including a desire to be closer to family and friends and a sense of completion. Christopher had built the enzyme engineering team. The mission was rolling. It was time to turn the page.

Lessons Learned About Entrepreneurship

Looking back, Christopher recalls that, until the time Gregory approached him, as an early-career scientist in academia, much of his work involved demonstrating his knowledge.

Christopher had spent his time passing tests, publishing scientific papers, presenting them at conferences, and proving his thesis to peers and the broader scientific community. Upon leaving academia and starting a company, he quickly realized how irrelevant all that had been.

Christopher was now part of a broader, cross-functional team that was tackling grand challenges. His ability to communicate with people outside the scientific regime who had no scientific training whatsoever, and manage others, was more critical.

Christopher quickly realized that entrepreneurship is less about what you know and more about how you interact with other people. These skills were much stronger driving forces for success as a company builder.

Christopher considers himself fortunate to have connected with co-founders who were familiar with these aspects and supported him through his growth.

Virvio: The Startup That Taught More Than It Sold

Back on the West Coast, Christopher jumped into another scientific frontier: computational protein design, partnering with renowned biochemist and Nobel Laureate, David Baker, in 2016. Christopher had seen his nature publication and was inspired to commercialize the technology.

Though Virvio failed commercially, Christopher called it one of his most important learning experiences. “Success only teaches you one thing,” he said. “Failure teaches you dozens.”

Christopher learned to be more dispassionate about their technology and venture thesis, and more critical. He concedes that he should have been less blinded by passion and more attuned to timing the technology correctly, team composition, and finding the product-market fit.

HDT Bio: RNA Vaccines and a Pandemic Pivot

Ironically, it was an investor who passed on Virvio who opened the door to HDT Bio. In 2019, Christopher joined forces with researchers exploring RNA cancer vaccines. At that time, RNA was not yet an accepted modality in the therapeutic portfolio. Then the pandemic hit.

Almost overnight, the world shifted its focus toward RNA-based solutions for infectious diseases, and HDT Bio was ready. Backed by angel investors, multiple government grants, and international licensing transactions, the company rapidly advanced clinical development and trials.

Ultimately, HDT Bio demonstrated that the underlying technology at hand was tremendously successful in differentiating itself in terms of patient safety, memory, and cellular immune response through clinical development in several countries.

The RNA vaccine received emergency use authorization in India. More importantly, HDT Bio was relatively insulated from the venture market downturn that affected many of its peers in the early-stage biopharmaceutical sphere.

Thanks to a diversified funding base, which included non-dilutive capital and licensing revenues, HDT Bio remained unaffected. Christopher recalls how they raised $20M. Their funding wasn’t tied to market-driven liquidity opportunities, and the company grew to 50+ people.

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Christopher reveals how they have continued to innovate on the RNA vaccine platform through partnerships with the government and other commercial entities, exploring additional applications for infectious diseases and cancer vaccine regimes. Some of their successes have been recently published.

Decycle Bio: Closing the Loop with Sustainable Chemistry

Post-pandemic, as Christopher’s life evolved —getting married, having children —so did his sense of urgency. “Having kids made me realize how important every day is. And how important the future is.”

Inspired by a new MIT paper on AI and biochemical reaction modeling using AI, Christopher connected with its authors.

He began forming what is now Decycle Bio, a new venture utilizing AI, enzyme engineering, and cell-free systems at the molecular level to convert industrial waste streams through an enzymatic cascade into valuable chemical products.

The goal? Replace legacy chemical processes, often powered by fossil fuels and operating under harsh conditions such as high temperatures, high pressures, and toxic environments, with sustainable biomanufacturing solutions.

As Christopher sees it, it’s a return to his Manus Bio roots—only now, with AI and next-gen bioengineering at the helm.

What Makes a Good Investor And a Great Partner

Having raised funding multiple times, Christopher now filters investors more carefully. “It’s not just about the capital—it’s about alignment, trust, and whether they truly put founders first,” he shared. He points out that Decycle Bio is very different from HDT Bio.

Decycle Bio has a distinct team, technology, and marketplaces. It is an entirely new story, which is why Christopher needed investors who were in it for the right reasons. He needed mission or impact-driven investors.

Christopher encourages early-stage founders to talk to portfolio CEOs, examine investor track records, and ask: Have they helped build companies like mine through their growth journey? Have they operated in the technological and market spaces? Are they committed to the long game?

The answers will reveal a lot about their ability to help founders curate human resources, capital resources, and business resources throughout the company’s development.

His Vision for Decycle and Final Advice to His Younger Self

Envisioning the future, Christopher would want to see a world where we have either replaced or surpassed one or more chemical manufacturing processes for various products, more sustainably than the processes used over the last 50 to 100 years.

Christopher doesn’t expect Decycle Bio to be the only company that will play a part in the grand transition. This shift is already underway in the chemicals industry, with efforts to improve its sustainability and scalability for the future.

However, Christopher hopes Decycle Bio will be successful enough to bring multiple sustainable chemical products to the market and displace unsustainable chemical manufacturing incumbents in the process.

“Biotech isn’t just about healing people anymore—it’s about healing the planet,” he said.

If he could go back in time, Christopher would urge himself to trust the journey, embrace managerial and entrepreneurial growth early, and listen to his own evolving voice. “Sometimes you have to hear it from yourself to really hear it.”

In Conclusion

Today, Christopher mentors early-stage founders in the Seattle and MIT entrepreneurship ecosystem broadly, emphasizing both the courage and humility that entrepreneurship requires. The world needs more entrepreneurial leaders to help lead us into the future, he says.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Venture formation is often about timing, team, and the courage to make strategic pivots.
• Alternative funding sources, such as grants, licensing, and angel investors, can offer resilience in tough markets.
• Sustainability in biotech is both a necessity and a massive market opportunity.
• Your investor’s track record says as much about them as their term sheet does.
• The best technologies don’t sell themselves; founders must learn to translate deep science into compelling business narratives.
• Failure forces introspection, tests assumptions, and sharpens your execution instincts.
• Founding a company is also a personal journey that involves significant life changes.

 

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