Category: Platform News

New Platform Venture: Launching BiomEdit

Posted on by Jason Kelly

BiomEdit intends to leverage Ginkgo’s platform to discover and develop microbiome-based animal health products to improve animal health, animal protein production, and livestock disease monitoring.

We’re excited to announce the launch of BiomEdit, a microbiome innovation company that is expected to discover, develop, and introduce novel probiotics, bioactive molecules, engineered microbial medicines and microbial monitoring services for animal health.

Microbiome science is a rapidly growing field creating breakthroughs in animal health based on the microbial communities that live in animals and their surrounding environment. BiomEdit intends to discover, develop and introduce differentiated products that address some of the greatest needs for innovation in animal health, including medicated feed ingredients, nutritional health and therapeutics for livestock and pet species, as well as biosecurity technology for animal disease monitoring.

BiomEdit is Ginkgo’s latest platform venture, created in partnership with Elanco Animal Health — a leading global animal health company.

In October 2021, Elanco announced its intention to carve out its microbiome platform and pipeline under the leadership of Aaron Schacht, BiomEdit CEO and former Elanco executive vice president of Innovation, Regulatory and Business Development, to concentrate and focus more resources on its high value late-stage Pet Health pipeline. BiomEdit is the result of this separation, and was developed with Ferment Co., the company creation studio that helps ideate and launch new companies across a variety of end-markets that use cell programming to support human and environmental health and well-being.

Elanco will contribute intellectual property and a pipeline of ongoing programs to BiomEdit, which will be staffed with members of the former Elanco microbiome R&D team. The team brings the expertise and experience needed to build on the foundation of microbiome work started at Elanco. By leveraging foundational programs from Elanco, intellectual property from both Elanco and Ginkgo, and an experienced team, BiomEdit should be well positioned as a stand-alone company to develop and launch innovative products to address unmet needs in animal health.

“Livestock producers and veterinarians are calling for new products that address antibiotic resistance and improve livestock sustainability,” said Mr. Schacht. “Coupling the platform, pipeline and deep expertise of the former Elanco microbiome team with Ginkgo’s unique screening and strain engineering capabilities will accelerate and amplify our ability to advance novel animal microbiome inspired products for animal health.”

“Elanco is excited to continue its participation in the microbiome by partnering with Ginkgo, Viking Global Investors and Anterra Capital to create the next-generation animal health innovation player,” said Jeff Simmons, president and CEO of Elanco Animal Health. “We wish Aaron and his team the best as they build out this novel innovation platform to address unmet needs in animal health, such as alternatives to antibiotics.”

Ginkgo has significant expertise in the discovery, design and monitoring of microbes at scale for a wide array of functions.

BiomEdit plans to leverage Ginkgo’s state-of-the-art cell programming platform to improve the design and development of probiotics, bioactives, engineered microbial medicines, and microbial monitoring services. BiomEdit joins other Ginkgo platform ventures such as Joyn Bio, Motif FoodWorks, Allonnia, Arcaea, Verb Biotics and Ayana Bio.

We are always on the lookout for opportunities to accelerate our partners’ abilities to address massive challenges, such as antibiotic resistance in livestock. Together, we see Ginkgo and BiomEdit addressing significant opportunities in the animal health industry with new breakthroughs based on microbiome science. We deeply depend on the health of animals in our ecosystem and supply chains; the potential applications for our cell programming platform in this area are far reaching.

In addition to the assets and intellectual property contributed by Elanco and Ginkgo, BiomEdit is launching with a targeted Series A funding raise of $40 million, with participation by Viking Global Investors and Anterra Capital. In exchange for their respective asset and intellectual property contributions, Elanco and Ginkgo are expected to retain approximately 40% combined proportional ownership of BiomEdit, on a fully-diluted basis, upon the completion of the Series A financing. Elanco’s ownership will be in non-voting shares.

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC acted on behalf of Elanco as sole placement agent on the financing.

Find the full press release here along with all of the latest news from the Ginkgo team.

Ginkgo Acquires FGen

Posted on by Nikos Reppas

Ginkgo acquires FGen and its ultra-high-throughput screening platform for strain development and optimization.

Ginkgo is excited to announce the acquisition of FGen AG (“FGen”), a Swiss company specializing in strain development and optimization. FGen has developed an ultra-high-throughput (uHT) screening platform built on nanoliter reactor technology. We believe that FGen’s technology will significantly enhance Ginkgo’s cell screening capabilities and enable Ginkgo to explore wider expanses of genetic design space, increasing the likelihood of finding enzymes, pathways, and strains or cell lines that meet the product specifications of our diverse customer base.

Ginkgo continues to invest in creating the premier horizontal platform for cell programming.

Ginkgo and FGen plan to close the transaction promptly. We expect that the integration of FGen’s platform will greatly increase the capacity of Ginkgo’s Design-Build-Test-Learn strain development engine, a foundation of our technology stack. By adding this new uHT screening platform to our its existing HT screening systems, we aim to be able to routinely analyze the performance of millions of pooled genetic prototypes. Our goal is to improve the quality of genetic designs that feed into our downstream workflows for strain characterization and validation. FGen’s platform is extremely flexible across organisms, pathways, and target products. The platform can be deployed to screen for both intracellular and secreted target products as well as both small molecules and proteins.

The uHT screening platform can accommodate diverse organisms including bacteria, yeast, filamentous species, and mammalian cells — all cell types that we use extensively at Ginkgo.

We’re committed to creating the premier cell programming platform by investing in and integrating best-in-class tools from around the world and deploying them broadly across our programs. We’ve worked with the FGen team for several years and believe their technology and world-class scientists will allow us to further improve our ability to explore an exponentially wider design space and deliver more value for our customers.

“Our team has spent the last decade building one of the most advanced screening platforms in the world in the hopes of enabling breakthrough discoveries and products across industries,” said Andreas Meyer, Chief Executive Officer of FGen. “We are excited to be welcomed onto the Ginkgo platform where we can deploy this technology much more broadly and better support customers and their world-changing work.”

Under the terms of the transaction, FGen will receive upfront payment and additional contingent consideration related to, among other things, the successful integration and deployment of the FGen technology across Ginkgo programs.

Find the full press release here along with all of the latest news from the Ginkgo team.

And visit FGen’s website to check out an art gallery showcasing their work. Here’s two selected pieces:

Five nanoliter reactor spheres, each reactor with filamentous fungi growing inside. The cell walls are stained blue, maing the entire image glow with a blue tint.
Filamentous fungi with fluorescent stained cell walls grown in nanoliter reactors. Credit: FGen
Two nanoliter reactors, each containing many bacteria. The bacteria are expressing a green pigment, illuminating the two reactors with a green tint. There is a scale bar that reads 20 micrometers.
Small nanoliter reactors with multiplicity of GFP-synthesizing bacterial cells. Credit: FGen

New Platform Venture: Arcaea

Posted on by Jasmina Aganovic

The products we traditionally use for personal hygiene and beauty can have large ecological impacts. Many of them use chemicals that are byproducts of fossil fuels or harvest ingredients from threatened or endangered ecosystems. What if we could grow the things that make us feel clean and beautiful, sustainably? Beyond environmental concerns, synthetic biology promises the possibility of products with new functions and a vision of nurturing our personal hygiene and redefining our sense of beauty.

Arcaea, LLC (Ar-kay-uh), incubated on the Ginkgo platform and formed under the name Kalo Ingredients LLC, was launched with the mission to build a new foundation for the beauty industry through expressive biology. The company sees biology as a valuable creative tool for self expression and aims to grow new ingredients and product experiences for beauty through the tools of the synthetic biology ecosystem fostered on the Ginkgo platform. By culturing industry-leading, safe, and sustainable ingredients, Arcaea intends to create a new supply chain for the industry that does not rely on petrochemicals or on harvesting and dwindling natural resources.

By harnessing the power of biology, Arcaea is poised to produce highly sustainable products that can deliver new functionality and performance across skincare, bodycare, haircare, and aesthetics.

The company will be led by Jasmina Aganovic, a chemical and biological engineering graduate from MIT. She brings more than a decade of industry experience translating innovation in beauty through brands and products at various beauty companies, including Fresh and Living Proof and the innovative microbiome beauty company Mother Dirt, which changed the way we think about clean and healthy skin. Jasmina saw the powerful role that biology can play in the cosmetics industry, which prompted her interest in creating tools to better realize its potential. She joined Ginkgo as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, where she spent the last two years building the foundation for Arcaea.

“Through Arcaea, we see biology as a creative tool that will drive the next generation of products and innovation. We can now access many more molecules on earth ethically and sustainably, and therefore can unlock unlimited and previously unimagined possibilities for beauty,” said Aganovic. “By bringing together new advances in technology with designers, brand builders, and leaders from every point of the supply chain, we can spark a change across the entire ecosystem to create an industry that is reflective of the future we want to see for the industry.”

Arcaea has raised $78 million in Series A funding from a consortium of strategic and financial investors including Cascade Investment L.L.C., Viking Global, CHANEL, Givaudan and Wittington Ventures. This Series A financing round brings together a mix of expertise across the value chain of the industry. It will enable Arcaea to initiate multiple technical programs across key categories in beauty to develop a pipeline of ingredients and brand launches and create a world of previously unimaginable possibilities in beauty, such as: a fragrance that no one on earth has ever smelled before; proteins that can memorize hair styles; contouring through skincare and not just makeup; and biological filters that protect skin from the elements.

“One of the most impactful things we can do at Ginkgo is support entrepreneurs and help them accelerate their timelines to make incredible things happen with biology,” said Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo. “We are thrilled to see Arcaea launch and begin its journey to deliver creative solutions to the beauty industry through biology.”

Read the press release here.

The End of the Beginning: Ginkgo Goes Public

Posted on by Jason Kelly

Last Friday, the Ginkgo team and their families rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange announcing our debut as a publicly traded company under the NYSE ticker DNA, after raising $1.6 billion to accelerate our mission to make biology easier to engineer. You may have seen our vision of a future grown with biology covering Manhattan from Wall Street to Times Square.

Photo Credit: NYSE

But this isn’t just about our vision. What do you see when you think of the future? We want everyone to dream of a better future and then build it using biology. We’re building a platform to make biology easier to engineer, and we’re building it for you.

Ginkgo’s growth supports the entire synthetic biology ecosystem. We couldn’t have reached this point in our journey without the help of an incredible group of partners, investors, and individuals. Regardless of whether you’ve collaborated directly with us or have cheered us on from the sidelines: we’re grateful for your support.

Together, we’re engineering cells to produce essential components for mRNA vaccines to increase their access around the globe. And across the country, we’re supporting schools to safeguard their communities by helping them monitor and limit the spread of COVID-19. Our platform is unlocking access to rare and important molecules found in nature, including compounds from cannabis as well as fragrances and flavors that are difficult to extract in nature. Our platform has even been used to address the ecological challenges in the meat and dairy industry by helping create animal proteins without the need for animals.

But all of this work is just the end of the beginning. Ginkgo will continue to develop an ecosystem that supports a wide diversity of products and dreams. Together, we believe we can grow anything.

If you want to learn more, I recommend reviewing the resources on our website:
• Our blog shares exciting new developments and passion projects.
• Our investor website also has many resources as you look to understand Ginkgo including several presentations.

The founders and I owe a huge thank you to the Bioworkers, past and present, and their families. Without their time and effort, we would have never made it this far. Thank you for your vision, for making our platform such fertile ground: we’re looking forward to seeing how we can grow together.

New Platform Ventures: Launching Verb Biotics, Ayana Bio

Posted on by Jason Kakoyiannis

Today we’re announcing the launch of two new companies via the Ferment Consortium: Verb Biotics and Ayana Bio.

Verb—a probiotics innovation company—will focus on identifying and designing new strains of probiotic bacteria with advanced properties for human nutrition, health, and wellness. Ayana plans to support human health and wellness by harnessing bioactive compounds for use as complementary medicine.

Verb Biotics
The probiotics category is a $50B global industry that’s growing rapidly. As awareness and understanding of the human microbiome—the trillions of bacteria that live in and on your body—has grown over the past decade, there’s been tremendous interest in probiotic-enhanced foods, beverages, and supplements. Many existing probiotic products use strains of bacteria common to yogurt and other fermented products, but these strains have a number of challenges including limited shelf life, poor stability, and restrictive metabolic profiles.

Since Ginkgo has significant expertise in the discovery and design of microbes with a wide array of functions, Verb plans to leverage our high-throughput platform to perform sequencing, proteomics and metabolomics analysis, pathway design, cell culturing, and fermentation work in order to improve the design and development of probiotics.

Verb is launching with $30 million in Series A funding provided by Viking Global Investors and Cascade Investment.

Ayana Bio
To address issues ranging from supporting a healthy immune system, to aiding metabolism, to promoting healthy aging, consumers are looking for health products that are complementary to conventional medicine. Two categories of products that offer complementary health products—nutraceuticals and traditional medicines—represent over $400 billion.

The bioactive ingredients that go into products in these categories come from a range of natural sources such as medicinal plants and fungi. However, unsustainable harvesting, variability in the source organisms, and the methods of preparation all contribute to uncertainty around these important molecules and limit the potential for widespread use.

Ayana plans to collaborate with global industry leaders in consumer packaged goods, supplements, specialized nutrition, over-the-counter medicines, and traditional medicines to bring to market standardized bioactives that provide consumers with confidence in quality and reliability. Our cell programming platform will support Ayana’s mission to bring to market high purity, clean and reliable medicinal bioactives in convenient forms.

Ayana is launching with $30 million in Series A funding provided by Viking Global Investors and Cascade Investment.

Ferment Consortium
The Ferment Consortium is a company creation studio that works with Viking Global Investors and Cascade Investment to help incubate, fund, and launch new companies that use cell programming to support human and environmental health and wellbeing. (Psst! If you have a great idea of how to grow the future, Ferment Co would love to hear from you.)

Verb and Ayana join our other Platform Ventures: Joyn Bio, Allonnia, and Motif FoodWorks, which recently raised a $226 million Series B round led by Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and BlackRock.

New Platform Venture: Introducing Motif

Posted on by Jason Kelly

When people talk about the future of food, they often start by talking about how the human population is projected to reach 10 billion people by the year 2050. To feed a rapidly growing population with an expanding middle class on a warming planet, we’ll have to use new technologies and build new systems to grow and distribute food. But whether it’s about choosing our next meal or feeding a growing population, the stories we tell about the future of food are full of impossible tradeoffs between taste, cost, health, and the environment (think Soylent vs. Whole Foods). And when it comes to GMOs specifically, the tradeoff is even more stark. Will it ever be possible for food be sustainable, healthy, delicious, and affordable?

At Ginkgo, we believe that biotechnology is an essential part of the future of food, and we hope that it can give us more options, not fewer. We’re working towards a future where genetic engineering and cultured ingredients can help make foods that are more sustainable, healthier, delicious, and more accessible for everyone. It’s what drives our work with customers in the flavor & fragrance and food industries to make cultured ingredients and the work of Joyn Bio, our joint venture with Bayer engineering microbes for more sustainable agriculture.

Today we’re thrilled to be launching Motif Ingredients, a new company built on Ginkgo’s platform to address one of the biggest challenges and changes emerging for the future of food—protein. Recognizing the benefits to health and sustainability that come from a plant-based diet, consumer demand for complements to animal proteins has exploded in the past few years, for products ranging from oat milk to “bleeding” veggie burgers. Companies ranging from brand new startups to industry giants have rapidly innovated new foods based on alternative proteins, but there’s so much more to do to make these options as healthy, delicious, sustainable, and accessible as they should be. Motif Ingredients will use Ginkgo’s Foundry to discover and develop these necessary new alternative protein ingredients that can be made via fermentation, not animal agriculture.

Motif Ingredients is launching today with $90M in Series A funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Fonterra, Louis Dreyfus Company, and Viking Global Investors. Our investors come from both high tech venture capital and traditional food producers that have been feeding the world for more than a century, all believing in our platform’s ability to deliver more alternatives for everyone’s “food future”. Motif will operate from Ginkgo’s offices in the Boston Seaport and leverage our foundries to discover the next generation of alternative proteins. We’re also excited to welcome industry veteran Jon McIntyre to the team as Motif’s CEO. Formerly the head of R&D at Indigo Ag and prior to that, a Senior VP of R&D at PepsiCo, Jon brings a wealth of experience in global food systems and alternative proteins to Motif.

A platform for discovering the next generation of food proteins

Proteins in animal products like meat, dairy, and eggs are essential for the taste, texture, nutrition, health impact, and overall experience of many foods that we eat. Food proteins have unique structural and functional properties, whether they are egg proteins giving a dessert its fluffy texture, or milk proteins protecting a baby’s digestive system from dangerous bacteria. Motif will make different proteins like these via fermentation of engineered microbes, without animal agriculture, to create a rich palette of alternative protein ingredient options for people developing new foods.

An introduction to Motif’s technology by Karen Ingram

Ginkgo’s platform enables biological engineers to deeply study thousands of different protein options across a vast space of biological diversity, discover the proteins that provide the greatest functional benefit, and increase their accessibility at large scale. There is so much that we don’t yet know about even the most common foods, so the ability to search this breadth of biological diversity is essential. Even in the last 5 years, hundreds of new proteins have been discovered in milk and eggs that confer benefits to people who eat them. With Motif, we’re on a mission to explore all that animal proteins have to offer, to enable the next generation of alternative proteins.

Beyond cow’s milk and hen’s eggs, there are also foods with vital benefits that are impossible to access in large amount sustainably, such as sturgeon eggs, camel milk, and everything in between. Just one year ago, scientists discovered a new protein in platypus milk that has surprising antibiotic properties. Using DNA sequence analysis and synthesis, Motif’s scientists will be able to discover and produce hundreds of proteins from many different animals, to understand how their milk and eggs nourish and sustain life in its earliest stages and identify important new ingredients.

At Ginkgo, we are always learning from the creativity of biology and the full breadth of biodiversity to grow better, more sustainable products. We’re so excited to work with Motif as they look to biodiversity to find the proteins that will enable new creativity in food. We’re thrilled to welcome Motif to our platform and to support the next generation of chefs, food designers, and food visionaries who need new ingredients and tools for the future of food.

For more about Motif, visit their website at motifingredients.com. You can also follow them on Twitter and Instagram, and sign up for their newsletter.

Accelerating Automation in Organism Design

Posted on by Jason Kelly

Ginkgo taps Transcriptic’s robotics software to further accelerate automation in organism design

Today we’re announcing a collaboration with robotic cloud laboratory Transcriptic. Through a five year agreement valued at more than $10 million, we will incorporate Transcriptic’s cutting-edge robotic automation software into our Boston-based foundries. The combined technologies will bolster our automation capabilities and engineering capacity, strengthening our platform and cementing a foundation for continued growth.

Our foundries currently rely on software and robotics to automate work on organism design across the flavor and fragrance, enzyme and agricultural industries. This collaboration builds upon our existing platform, bringing Transcriptic’s unique expertise in flexible lab automation to supercharge designers’ efficiency. Transcriptic’s software integration will automate new parts of our experimental design process, adding greater flexibility and remote monitoring capabilities. With this collaboration, we will double our current monthly foundry output, increase the speed and efficiency of product delivery to existing customers, and establish a flexible platform that can better scale to meet the needs of the ever-expanding biotech industry.

Increased scale of synthetic biology innovation

Transcriptic’s ability to translate organism designers’ vision into reality via lab automation is unparalleled, and brings an unprecedented scale to our organism foundry. Transcriptic shares our vision of leveraging the power of technology to transform lab experiments for more efficiency and scale. Automating the right processes allows our team to spend more time on what they do best: thoughtful design, analysis and delivery, so that together we can meet the continued demand from industries rethinking manufacturing with biology.

This licensing agreement is the first of its kind for Transcriptic, and a significant expansion of its current business model. Transcriptic engineers will be on-premise at Ginkgo, working side by side with organism designers to improve efficiencies within our foundries and further enhance the software together.

“The Transcriptic platform automates laborious lab processes to make research faster, less expensive and increasingly scalable,” said Yvonne Linney, Transcriptic CEO. “We look forward to bringing our technology to Ginkgo—a company at the forefront of organism design—in a completely new way, and build the future of biotech together.”

This collaboration will be foundational to a number of Ginkgo’s 2017 ventures and partnerships, including the work on a new company launched in partnership with Bayer. Announced last month along with an initial $100M Series A investment, the new company will carry out its strain engineering operations from Ginkgo’s foundry, and will focus on microbial design to aid nitrogen fixation in certain plants. Earlier this year, Ginkgo acquired leading synthetic DNA provider Gen9 to bring its technology for pathway-length synthesis in house, and today announced the purchase of one billion base pairs of DNA from longtime partner Twist Bioscience— the largest single purchase order in history. With the market share of synthetic DNA, Gen9’s DNA synthesis ability and Transcriptic’s software fully deployed on-site, Ginkgo continues its mission to build the industry’s strongest and most robust platform for organism engineering.

Find the full press release here along with all of the latest news from the Ginkgo team.

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

1,000,000,000 Base Pairs of DNA

Posted on by Ginkgo Bioworks

Twist Bioscience to Provide One Billion Base Pairs of Synthetic DNA to Ginkgo Bioworks to Support Expansion into New Industries

Ginkgo Bioworks and Twist Bioscience Continue to Drive Industry Growth

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. and BOSTON, Mass. – October 3, 2017 – Ginkgo Bioworks, the organism company, and Twist Bioscience Corporation, a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of rapid, high-quality synthetic DNA, today announced the expansion of a supply agreement for one billion base pairs of synthetic DNA – the largest volume supply agreement in the industry. The supply agreement will include genes up to five kilobases in length.

Ginkgo intends to use the one billion base pairs of synthetic DNA for work in its newest automated foundry for organism design, Bioworks3, opening in November 2017. The third foundry will be used in part by the new company that Ginkgo and Bayer recently launched with $100M in Series A funding focused on nitrogen fixation for sustainable agriculture. This supply of synthetic DNA will also fuel Ginkgo’s continued expansion into new industries for a wider breadth of companies to leverage the power of biology in their lines of business.

“An increasingly diverse scope of companies are looking to tap the power of biology to rethink traditional manufacturing, and demand for synthetic biology is at an all time high,” said Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks. “Our continued partnership with Twist allows us to meet those demands and scale our work so we can continue to bring biology to new industries. We’re excited to be at the forefront of this shift and Twist is a critical part of the equation.”

Twist Bioscience has been supplying synthetic DNA to Ginkgo Bioworks since November of 2015, when the companies announced an agreement for Twist Bioscience to deliver a minimum of 100 million base pairs of synthetic DNA over the course of 2016 — a quantity equal to approximately 10 percent of the total DNA synthesis market in 2015. Ginkgo is the largest consumer of synthetic DNA globally, and with this supply expansion, it is expected to order approximately one third of the global supply of synthetic DNA.

Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience commented, “We are thrilled to enable Ginkgo’s exponential expansion as we are the only provider of synthetic DNA capable of supporting their rapidly increasing DNA needs. Our ongoing collaboration, pairing Ginkgo’s tremendous organism design capabilities and Twist Bioscience’s core DNA synthesis scalability, showcases the growth of the bioeconomy by enabling the development of sustainable methods for producing new and important consumer goods.”

About Ginkgo Bioworks 
Headquartered in Boston, Ginkgo Bioworks uses the most advanced technology on the planet – biology – to grow products instead of manufacture them. The company’s technology platform is bringing biotechnology into consumer goods markets, enabling fragrance, cosmetic, nutrition, food companies, and more to make better products. For more information, visit www.ginkgobioworks.com.

About Twist Bioscience Corporation
At Twist Bioscience Corporation, we work in service of customers who are changing the world for the better. In fields such as medicine, agriculture, industrial chemicals and data storage, by using our synthetic DNA tools, our customers are developing ways to better lives and improve the sustainability of the planet. The faster our customers succeed, the better for all of us, and Twist Bioscience is uniquely positioned to help accelerate their efforts.

Our innovative silicon-based DNA Synthesis Platform provides precision at a scale that is otherwise unavailable to our customers. Our platform technologies overcome inefficiencies and enable cost-effective, rapid, precise, high-throughput synthesis and sequencing, providing both the quality and quantity of the tools they need to rapidly realize the opportunity ahead. For more information about our products and services, please visit www.twistbioscience.com. Twist Bioscience is on Twitter. Sign up to follow our Twitter feed @TwistBioscience at https://twitter.com/TwistBioscience.

 

Twist Bioscience Contacts:
Investors:
Argot Partners
Maeve Conneighton
212-600-1902
[email protected]

Media:
Angela Bitting
925-202-6211
[email protected]

Ginkgo Bioworks Contacts:
Media:
Jordyn Lee
347-382-9732
[email protected]

Why the Future of Synthetic Biology Needs a Platform

Posted on by Jason Kelly

SynBioBeta San Francisco 2017: Why the Future of Synthetic Biology Needs a Platform

Today, the Ginkgo team and I are attending the 6th annual SynBioBeta conference in San Francisco—an annual meeting that brings together leaders in the synthetic biology industry. I’m kicking off the day discussing why biology is the most powerful and advanced technology on the planet and Ginkgo’s mission is to make biology easier to engineer.

We’re witnessing an exciting shift in the biotech world. Companies big and small across a variety of industries—from enzymes to fragrances to agriculture—are realizing the power of biology as a better way to make everyday ingredients and products.

Last month, we partnered with Bayer to launch a new company—along with a $100M Series A investment—to improve plant-associated microbes, focusing on nitrogen fixation. Nitrogen fertilizer is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution, and we’re proud to be at the forefront of solving such a major problem with biology.

We hope this partnership serves as a major indicator for synthetic biology’s potential: big companies are looking to solve big problems with this technology. But more importantly, we believe the potential for biology doesn’t have to come with a $100M investment. Smaller companies are also rethinking manufacturing through biology, and we’re committed to being a platform that’s accessible to companies of all industries and all budgets.

Today we have three announcements that help cement our vision for being a universal and accessible platform for the biotech world:

• We’ve long-admired Transcriptic’s mission to make lab work less expensive and faster thanks to the power of automation. Today we’re investing over $10 million to bring their software into our foundries, to further improve our automation processes.
• We’re teaming up with Geltor, an 8-person company creating texturizing proteins for foods and cosmetic products, to help it make products faster and more efficiently. With our foundry, Geltor’s team can focus on product design and development, and more importantly make biotech timelines compatible with business cycles in the CPG markets.
• To support our growth, we’ll be purchasing one billion pairs of synthetic DNA from our longtime partner Twist Bioscience. It’s a historic purchase, and ensures we’re ready to support the needs of today’s customers and tomorrow’s partners.

I’m incredibly proud of what our team has built so far. We’ve designed a platform that powers  big and small customers, while allowing partners to build on top of our technology to create something even greater.  At the same time, I’m humbled by what lies ahead. We’re looking forward to meeting other consumer biotech companies this week at SynBioBeta to learn about their roadblocks and hope that Ginkgo can play a role in contributing to their success!