Christina Smolke

“What if we brewed meds like beer?” turned out to be a $56M idea.

Christina Smolke is a synthetic biologist and professor at Stanford.

She’s also the CEO and cofounder of Antheia, a biotech company rebuilding how essential medicines are made.

At Stanford, her lab engineered baker’s yeast to produce plant-based opioids.

Including thebaine, one of the most chemically complex alkaloids in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

To make it work, they inserted 5 genes from two organisms: three from the poppy plant, and two from a bacterium that lives on poppy stalks.

Most researchers could only get cells to perform 2 or 3 steps in a chemical pathway. Smolke’s team figured out how to make them run 50 to 100.

What once took farms, factories, and months of logistics, her team basically condensed into a fermentation tank.

But she knew the tech wouldn’t matter unless it left the lab.

So in 2015, she launched Antheia to manufacture
pharmaceutical ingredients using synthetic biology.

The platform converts sugars into active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) using engineered yeast. Eliminating the need for fragile, agriculture-based supply chains.

Instead of growing crops, Antheia grows molecules.

Their first major product? Thebaine, the core input for Narcan, the opioid overdose reversal drug.

They delivered their first commercial shipment in 2023.

And in 2025, raised $56M in Series C.

Antheia’s also working with the U.S. government on $23M in contracts to onshore critical drug manufacturing as part of a broader health security strategy.

Smolke didn’t take the usual route of licensing IP.

She built the infrastructure to take products from microbes to market internally.

And she built all of this while starting a family.

During Antheia’s first fundraising round, she was 3 days from her due date.

Her water broke in the middle of a pitch meeting.

She walked the investors out, and went straight to the hospital.