Meet Microverse Studios, the Animation Studio at the Center of the Biotech Boom

Amid the churn and burn of biotech startups, one thing is constant: everyone needs to explain their science to investors. They have to do it quickly and in a way that doesn’t just blend into the background noise of pitch decks and diagrams.

Microverse Studios, helmed by Cameron Slayden, has positioned itself as a leader in providing life science companies with the communications tools that they need to do just that. At the ultra-exclusive JPM Healthcare conference in 2023, Microverse Studios’ clientele made up almost 10% of presenters.

Perhaps their popularity is because the animators at Microverse Studios have a strange and rare combination of skills and interests: they are award-winning filmmakers, but they also happen to be scientists. They’re a collection of men and women with a passion for creating beauty and crafting human experiences, and who have dedicated their careers to learning and communicating deep science. They work from home offices around the country, much more likely to see one another through a Zoom window than in person. In their off hours, if they aren’t snowboarding, practicing jiu jitsu, or running half-marathons, they spend their time tending to exotic gardens and growing giant pumpkins, or pursuing other obscure and creative hobbies.

Thanks to their scientific backgrounds, every one of them also knows which direction DNA turns, how big a red blood cell is compared to a white blood cell, and where the glomerulus can be found (spoiler: it’s in the kidneys).

When asked how they got into this line of work, their answers vary. Some planned on a career in the arts and discovered that they loved science, and others had it the other way around. What’s consistent in their stories is that they each found the perfect balance of interests and skills in scientific animation, and they were in the right place at the right time to join Microverse Studios.

And it is the right time indeed– even with the biotech sector shrinking over the last two years, the life sciences business landscape has tripled in size since 2012 and remains on track to continue to grow far into the future. A pandora’s box has been opened in gene editing and RNA technologies. This, coupled with AI-assisted drug design and an ever-advancing understanding of the systems underlying disease and aging, is unlocking great leaps in medicine and biology-based technologies that have already begun to change our lives.

Take, for example, the Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines. Rather than inject dead or weakened viruses as all other vaccines have in the past, these therapies consisted of temporary molecular instructions to create parts of virus particles for the immune system to respond to. This kind of precision medicine has never happened in the history of humankind, and within a year of development it was brought to market, and it worked! More breakthroughs like this are coming, mark my words.

But for every blockbuster solution, there are dozens of other technologies that won’t develop fast enough to keep investor interest. Often, multiple startups chase the same technologies, and the questions then become not just which is the safer bet, but which is going to make a bigger splash. Investors don’t just want a sure thing. They want the next big thing.

Standing out is key for these companies to survive to the next phase until they are ultimately acquired or reach commercialization with their technologies. Luckily, they have a team of filmmakers and artists at their disposal to help them stand out among the crowd: the scientific creatives at Microverse Studios.