About Us
Our mission is to use our new technology to make natural health products more affordable, starting with NMN.
Tiny Forge Supplements is the operating trademark of Spero Technologies, Inc, our small biotech company founded by Connor Behr in 2021 after he created and open-sourced the core technology for a countertop insulin production concept with teams from the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. “Spero” is Latin, meaning “I hope.” Connor chose this name at 16 years old, with a vision of using science and technology to help overcome things that make people feel scared.
The name Tiny Forge Supplements draws from elements of both our unique technology and our product.
Inspiration from the tech
Discussed in detail on the “About Our Tech” page, a central pillar of our technology is the use of a slime mold called Physarum polycephalum to produce enzymes for our reactions.
The species name,
polycephalum, translates directly to “many-headed” because Physarum can have several advancing fronts at a time while searching for food. It can also be considered "many-headed” because it is multinucleated (you can think of the nucleus as the brain of a cell), having several hundred thousand or more nuclei in a specimen the size of your hand.
The genus name, Physarum, has more complicated roots, but it’s a playful spin on “physarion,” with the greek “physa” and the diminutive suffix “-arion” meaning “tiny bellows.” This is a reference to the way specimens pump fluid around their cell to share nutrition and oxygen; it appears to be inflating and deflating like tiny bellows stoking a bright yellow flame. All together, Physarum polycephalum is the many-headed tiny bellows. And it lives up to the name adorably.
Because Physarum plays a central role in supplying enzymes for our cell-free reactions, it’s fun to imagine it as the tiny bellows powering the little furnace of a forge built to craft molecules. This is a lovely reflection of the way we strive to work: With precision and attention to detail as we shape and hone every molecule individually, but also with adorable and bright yellow joy.
Inspiration from the product
Nearly everyone has heard the cell biology mantra “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” but you’re not alone if that little sentence bite is all but meaningless at this point. While the idea of the mitochondria producing the cell’s energy does come through, there are other areas of a cell where energy can be produced. However, there are no other compartments of the cell where complete oxidation of dissolved solid matter to water and carbon dioxide is achieved.
This means the more specialized function of mitochondria is to literally burn food for energy, but instead of producing heat as you might expect from burning, they are capable of harvesting what should have been heat as distilled and biologically accessible chemical energy. In this way, mitochondria are less the “powerhouses” of the cell and more the furnaces of the cell. Supplying not only energy, but also many starting units important for life to craft all its pieces and parts, the mitochondria can be seen as the microscopic furnaces of the world’s tiniest forge– the cell itself.
As discussed in our other about page “About NMN,” NMN has many amazing uses in the body; arguably the most important use is as a direct precursor to NAD+, a critical tool used by all life on earth to safely harness the overwhelming power of oxidation. Hence the significance of the name Tiny Forge Supplements in the context of our product and its application as a molecular tool for life.