Lift Biolabs is replacing costly purification tools with buoyant protein reagents that separate targets using flotation instead of chromatography, magnetic beads, or filters. This makes therapeutic manufacturing more affordable while also enabling biotech to scale into lower-margin markets like agriculture and industrial enzymes—where purification costs have historically been a major barrier.
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Eugene Chung
Eugene Chung is the co-founder and CEO of Lift Biolabs, a biomanufacturing company developing low-cost, nanobubble-based purification reagents. He brings over a decade of experience in nanotechnology design across academic, military, and hospital-based research settings, with a focus on scalable process development. He earned his B.S. in microbiology from Arizona State University and is completing his Ph.D. in bioengineering at Rice University under the mentorship of Professor George Lu.
TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
Purification is one of the most expensive and infrastructure-intensive steps in biomanufacturing. It accounts for a large portion of production costs and requires complex equipment, high-cost consumable resins, and skilled labor. While this burden can be justified in high-value therapeutics, it prevents biotechnology from expanding into lower-margin markets such as agriculture, industrial enzymes, and materials. Traditional purification reagents are inefficient to manufacture—often involving multi-step processes across separate systems—and do not scale economically. Without a more accessible solution, purification remains a bottleneck that restricts where and how biotechnology can be applied.
Technology Vision
Lift Biolabs is developing a new class of buoyant purification reagents based on engineered gas vesicles—air-filled protein nanobubbles that “self-purify” through natural flotation. These reagents are produced entirely in low-cost microbial hosts and genetically encoded to bind specific biomolecular or cellular targets. By enabling separation through buoyancy, they eliminate the need for traditional chromatography, magnetic beads, or filtration. This allows for fast, low-cost purification using both batch and continuous workflows. The platform is modular, scalable, and adaptable across a wide range of targets—offering a more sustainable and integrated alternative to conventional affinity purification technologies.
Potential for Impact
By simplifying and reducing the cost of purification, Lift Biolabs enables more affordable and scalable biomanufacturing. In therapeutic markets, this could lower cost of goods and improve access to advanced biologics. Beyond healthcare, the same platform can be used to support the production of enzymes, agricultural inputs, and other bio-based materials that are currently too expensive to produce at scale. With one flexible platform, Lift Biolabs can bridge the gap between high-value therapeutics and cost-sensitive industrial applications—broadening where and how biotechnology can be applied in the real world.