With over 25 years of experience in process engineering and technology transfer for biotechnology scale-up, Steve Decker (a.k.a. The Mayor) is currently VP of cell-culture operations for Eat Just. He previously held positions at Merck, Amgen, and Solazyme. Decker has a strong technical background in process development and extensive technical scale-up experience with CMOs, and is a go-to expert on Hawkwood’s advisory council. We caught up with him to learn more about his contributions to the field, and what excites him about the future. 

We know the basics of your background from your bio on Hawkwood’s website. Please tell us more about what you’ve done and highlight some of your key contributions to the field.

Steve Decker: My education is in biology and I’ve been doing bioprocess development for 30 years now. My focus has been in fermentation and cell culture. Specifically, process development strain, fermentation and cell culture scale-up, and also technology transfer and technical operations for demonstration and commercial-scale plants. I’ve spent a lot of time working on pilot plant scale, both managing pilot plants and also designing and building them. I’ve worked in both the biopharmaceutical and in the industrial bio space.

I started my career doing bioprocess development for Merck Research Laboratories. Then I worked at Amgen on animal cell culture and monoclonal antibody development, process development, and fermentation process development. When I moved to the Bay Area in 2005, I ran a small manufacturing facility where I managed manufacturing sciences technical operations for VaxGen. We were making a Bacillus anthracis vaccine as part of the BioShield project that came out after 9/11. From there, I transitioned into industrial biotech at Solazyme where I established and built out a development laboratory for fermentation and downstream processing. (Downstream processing typically refers to things after fermentation or cell culture. After you synthesize a raw product using biological organisms, you have to recover and purify it. Then, you have to formulate the product to be consumer-ready.)

At Solazyme, I was the main person doing the technology transfer and scale-up to third party sites: facilities in Europe, the Midwest, and South America. So basically we used the pilot facility to fine-tune a process, and then we would do the work to scale it up and transfer it. 

After Solazyme, I moved back to pharmaceuticals where I worked on biosimilars doing monoclonal antibody process development and scale-up. I was involved in two successful biological license amendments and applications approvals. Currently I’m in charge of cultivated meat operations at Eat Just, where I run a group that does cell line development and process development. We have equipment to do scale-up. We’ve designed and built two cell culture facilities and are now also working on downstream processing for meat products.

How did you get involved with Hawkwood Biotech Partners’ Advisory Council, and what’s your role there?

Steve Decker: I met Hawkwood’s leadership during my time at Solazyme. I’ve known Tony Day since 2008, when I joined as employee #20 and Tony was in the top five. That’s also where I met Richard Kenny. Hawkwood’s Advisory Council is a great group and I’m happy to help because working in the industrial biotech space can be very hard. It’s quite different from pharmaceutical biotech in terms of the price points and margins. So, in my role at Hawkwood I do due diligence for potential investors, assessing technology. I’ve also done program reviews, to see what the weak points are from a process design or facility design point of view, and also proposed scale-up approaches.

Talking to people who have been through the trenches and have made mistakes is extremely valuable. People come to us with their plans and intentions, saying “we’re going to do it this way,” and we have seasoned veterans who have done it multiple times, who can say that it’s failed every time it’s been done that way. That’s really good advice to be able to provide. I really want to help the industry as a whole. If you think of your company as competing with other companies, some of that competitive instinct is healthy. But really, we’re all in this together.

I think big failures in the industrial bio space affect the entire space. So I’m here to guard against that.

What have you learned from your work in biotech that supports your role as an advisor to Hawkwood’s client base and larger network?

Steve Decker: In my work with Eat Just, we’ve launched in Singapore as our first market. Our goal is to reduce the costs of manufacturing, both by process enhancement and identifying ways to reduce overall capital and operational costs for future larger scale production. 

There’s a lot to learn from Singaporean regulators and the culture in general. It’s an extremely diverse culture with multiple official languages. The road signs are in four different languages. 

It’s really unique and welcoming. But while Singapore and the United States are both meat-eating countries, here in the U.S. we do things differently. We have a lot of arable lands, so there’s always been this reliance on traditional farming. But doing things the way we’ve been doing them for hundreds of years may not be sustainable as the population continues to grow. 

As the number of people in the world increases, we’re breathing out more carbon dioxide. We also need more food, and the production process itself creates carbon dioxide. It’s pretty easy to understand how this cycle works. And as upsetting as that is, it’s essential to long-term survival to take a hard look at our practices.

The American dream is that every generation has it better than the previous generation, right? But I just don’t think driving gasoline cars and using petroleum-based chemicals is going to be the right way to do it. We’re going to have to change how we do things. Otherwise, life is not going to be enjoyable. 

Countries like Singapore and Qatar are good test markets because they’re much more open to changing processes. They’re wealthy countries that have also had a population boom, and they’ve improved the quality of life for their population. But the major risk they have is not jobs or money. It’s food. So they’re supportive of food innovation. 

What are you excited about for the future?

Steve Decker: I’m excited to see how AI will affect the development cycle. This will go into the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry first, just because of the establishment and capital costs, and margins in that sector, but eventually it will also filter into industrial bio.

One area where this will take place is strain optimization in strain engineering. I also see AI being effective in process development and enhancing experimental design and decision making.

And as a biologist, I’m excited about developments in the field. Biology is very unique because what separates biology from everything else is that it’s catalytic. It involves higher order things like enzymes and proteins. It takes many different components to run these things. They’re little factories in their own right. It’s very difficult to model everything in totality. Sometimes even with advanced modeling you’re only looking at one perspective, which is where AI comes in.

Biology is harder than other sciences. It’s always been referred to as the black box, right? It doesn’t necessarily have an equilibrium like chemistry or physics. I remember a college professor who said, most of the stuff in these physics textbooks is from the fifties, and probably hasn’t updated that much since then. Chemistry is not that different. In biology though, you get a new addition every two years because everything’s so drastically changing. And I think we’re still in that ramp-up period in biology. If you think of DNA technology, unless you were a science major, you probably didn’t even hear of DNA until the OJ Simpson trial in 1993. And now it’s used in so many places, and it’s common in the lexicon for almost anyone to talk about DNA.

I think there’s also some stuff going on in the cultivated meat space that’s changing dogma on how things are done. For example, some technological developments in cell culture reactors and bioreactors. 

I’m also interested in how we integrate green energy, water recycling, and water purification in waste water cleanup into industrial bio projects. A lot of areas of the world do desalination, and then they have large waste streams that they need to get rid of. So, similar to the industrial bio plants, they have very large footprints. And they generate a lot of liquid waste that has high BOD (biological oxygen demand) and COD (chemical oxygen demand). And sometimes it requires various specifications for water, reducing needs for water through coexistence of energy generation.

Any last thoughts on your role in the biotech industry?

Steve Decker: I’ve been in the biotech space since the late eighties, early nineties. It’s a tight knit community, and I have a lot of friends. I was given a nickname around the turn of the century, when a group of colleagues started calling me the Mayor: the guy who really just kind of keeps everything together and organizes and leads. And so that turned into my moniker.

I think connecting people to each other is an important quality of leadership. Leadership is not just telling somebody what to do, it’s suggesting things and helping people understand why they should do those things a certain way and getting them on board with those processes. It’s also about putting ego aside. In my current role at Eat Just, we have very candid discussions, which are very helpful both to me and to their leadership. You don’t want to just be this director, telling everybody what to do. Oftentimes that can have the opposite effect in the end.

I’m very fortunate. I come from humble beginnings in Pike County, Pennsylvania, and I firmly believe I’ve gotten where I am in my career, having gone up the chain of command and been given increasing responsibility, because I’ve been able to lead people, get them on a mission, and organize them to execute. It’s a skill that scientists and engineers don’t always have. You don’t get that training in college, you earn it out in the field.

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Learn more about Hawkwood Biotech Partners’ Advisory Council.