Anton Jackson Smith
Founder at b.next
Anton Jackson-Smith is the New Zealand-born founder of b.next, a synthetic biology company building living cells from scratch rather than modifying organisms such as E. coli. He took an unconventional path from self-taught software engineer in Queenstown to law student at the University of Otago to a PhD in bioengineering at Stanford. Through b.next's open-source Nucleus platform, he is working to make biology programmable, with applications spanning cancer diagnostics and treatment, lab-grown food and smart crops. He discussed the work on Diaspora NZ with David Booth, covering synthetic cells, programmable biology and the future of biotech.
In their own words
From S3 | E6 Anton Jackson Smith (Founder of b.next) on building synthetic cells, programmable biology, and the future of biotech · Diaspora NZImagine if you built a car and every time you took it out of the garage, something had changed just overnight. That's biology right now.
Career
- Now Founder · b.next
- Earlier Co-founder · Build-a-Cell
Sources: bnext.bio
Key moments
Jump straight to the part of S3 | E6 Anton Jackson Smith (Founder of b.next) on building synthetic cells, programmable biology, and the future of biotech you want.
- 1:21 What is a synthetic cell—and why should you care?
- 6:44 How Anton fell into biology (thanks to an E. coli article in Vietnam)
- 11:12 Why modifying real cells isn’t enough—and what BNext is doing differently
- 16:30 The near-term use cases: cancer, diagnostics, and food
- 22:47 How Nucleus is creating the open-source toolkit for biology
- 30:14 Three phases of BNext’s business model: Boot → Build → Bazaar
- 37:10 The big vision: programmable biology that saves lives
- 44:18 What New Zealand’s biotech future could look like
- 47:30 Returning talent, building bridges, and bringing brains back home
Connections
Spot something wrong? Suggest a correction Updated 25 September 2026
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