Category: Markets

Parent category for Ginkgo’s main market verticals

Ginkgo Receives Grant to Develop Innovative Live Cell Delivery Platform of Antibody Therapeutics for Treating HIV and Malaria

Posted on by Jennifer Wipf

We’re thrilled to receive a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation!

Under this grant, we will work to develop a live cell therapeutic that can produce antibodies to fight human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and/or malaria directly in the body.

Protein therapeutics have transformed the standard of care for many diseases — the best known example being insulin for diabetes — and have helped to extend lives across the world, thanks to revolutionizing treatments of diseases such as anemia, cancers, and certain genetic disorders. Yet access to these therapeutics remains a challenge, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), because of complex manufacturing processes and degradation during storage and delivery of such therapeutics. Developing a new therapeutic delivery modality for patients could increase accessibility and lower cost of treatment.

We will focus on creating a prototype engineered cell line that can express antibodies for the treatment of HIV and/or malaria via an implantable device.

Globally, approximately 39 million people live with HIV, which attacks the body’s immune system and weakens its ability to fight infection. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that nearly half the world’s population is at risk of malaria transmission, with 96% of malaria-caused deaths in 2020 taking place in the WHO Africa Region. The engineered cell line would be designed to act as a “cell factory” capable of delivering protein therapeutics to the patient for up to a year, or longer. This prototype cell line could potentially lead to protein therapeutic delivery systems that function as long-term and cost-effective treatments for these diseases.

Ginkgo, with support from the foundation, plans to use its expertise in mammalian cell engineering to engineer highly synthetic cell lines that have both high productivity and extended longevity.

We will use our expertise in genomics and systems biology to predict the genomic components underlying these complex cellular phenotypes. We will then utilize our expertise in genome engineering, including a fully automated clonal cell line generation workflow, to combine these features in a mammalian chassis. This engineered cell line will be combined with an implant device for continuous delivery of the therapeutic antibodies. If successful, the eventual product could create a novel delivery platform for antibody-based therapies in communities where access to such drugs is challenging.

Protein-based drugs were some of the earliest applications of cell programming for medicine half a century ago. We’re honored to be receiving support from the Gates Foundation to reimagine how these medicines are made and delivered so that we can open up access to these critical therapies. We look forward to leveraging our learnings from this project to ensure the success of future programs with our partners.

Learn more about Ginkgo’s biopharmaceutical services at https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/offerings/biopharmaceutical/.

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Advancing Discovery and Development of Precision Gene Editors with Arbor Biotechnologies

Posted on by Jason Kelly

We’re so excited to announce our new collaboration with Arbor Biotechnologies!

Arbor utilizes its computational metagenomic discovery engine and protein engineering expertise to identify and optimize genetic editors with the potential to treat a broad range of genetic diseases. The company’s portfolio of novel gene editors has significant therapeutic potential due to, among other things, their unique protospacer adjacent motifs (PAMs), which may enable access to nearly all sites in the genome, their varied cut types, which can potentially correct a wider range of diseases, their smaller editing technology, which allows the use of additional delivery technologies, and their high specificity, which can enable improved safety profiles.

Ginkgo’s expertise in high throughput exploration of genetic design spaces complements Arbor’s in-house capabilities, and the collaboration is expected to accelerate Arbor’s precision editor optimization campaign through massively parallel library design, automated mammalian cell experimentation and iterative AI-guided protein engineering.

“Patients are at the center of everything we do at Arbor, and we are thrilled to partner with Ginkgo to hasten the advancement of our precision editing technologies into therapeutic applications that have the potential to address diseases with high unmet medical need. Ginkgo’s expertise aligns well with our goals, and their technology will synergize with our in-house capabilities, potentially fueling a faster, more efficient expansion of our toolbox of gene editing technologies.”

Devyn Smith, Ph.D., CEO of Arbor

As we can see from the recent landmark regulatory approval of the world’s first CRISPR-based treatment, the gene editing landscape is rapidly advancing, with continuous innovation and optimization of novel technologies that are revolutionizing the way we consider and address disease. This collaboration with Arbor is an exciting project for us, as it gives us an opportunity to leverage our platform-driven approach to contribute to the gene editing sector’s fast-moving evolution.

We look forward to expanding our capabilities in this field by working with such an innovative pioneer as Arbor to power technologies with the potential for transformative impact.

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Accelerating Next-Gen Ag Biological Products with Agrivalle

Posted on by Jason Kelly

We’re thrilled to announce our new partnership with Agrivalle, a leading Brazilian agricultural biologicals company!

Together, we plan to build cutting edge technologies that can advance Agrivalle’s biological products, including next-gen fertilizers and biocontrol agents.

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Ginkgo is bringing its suite of advanced biology tools to this partnership.

Our Strain Optimization Services will be leveraged to improve the efficacy of Agrivalle’s biocontrol products. In planned future projects, we intend to work with Agrivalle to discover and optimize plant-compatible microbes that can provide crop nutrition, and to engineer organisms that can make compounds to specifically target certain pests. This, in turn, could help Agrivalle enhance the breadth and efficacy of their novel biological products and enable them to sell and license products to major players in agriculture across the globe.

Growers continue to have an increased need for effective and sustainable alternatives to pest control products.

Brazil has been home to massive growth in biologicals, thanks in part to regulatory frameworks that encourage innovation in the development of biologicals for sustainable agriculture. The Brazilian government has also made it easier for startups to finance manufacturing plants and to register biological products. This has led the country to become the largest biologicals market for agriculture, growing over 30% a year.

We are so excited to partner with Agrivalle on getting groundbreaking biological products into the hands of growers. Agrivalle is a vanguard of innovation in Brazil with proven R&D, manufacturing, and sales prowess, and we’re thrilled to help them optimize and advance their products as they seek to expand globally.

“Choosing Ginkgo as a strategic partner will enable Agrivalle products to be at the forefront of agricultural excellence. Having access to Ginkgo’s demonstrated technical capabilities and expertise in biologicals R&D will help us take our products to the next level and support growers who seek superior bio-based technology.”

André Kraide, CEO of Agrivalle
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To learn more about Ginkgo Strain Optimization Services, please visit https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/offerings/strain-optimization-services/.

Vivici Selects Ginkgo Bioworks to Extend Their Range of Novel Dairy Proteins

Posted on by Kevin Madden

Today, we’re thrilled to announce our new collaboration with Vivici!

Vivici is an innovative B2B ingredients startup company using precision fermentation to make animal-free dairy proteins. Through this collaboration, Vivici will leverage Ginkgo’s extensive capabilities in strain engineering, optimization and performance, to develop and commercialize a next generation of functional alternative protein.

Alternative Dairy Protein Production with Precision Fermentation

Vivici is on a mission to meet the world’s growing need for sustainable, nutritious and great tasting proteins. Recognizing the need for alternatives to traditional animal agriculture, Vivici employs precision fermentation techniques to produce animal-free dairy proteins with microorganisms. This innovative approach not only supplements the existing animal protein supply, but also paves the way for a more sustainable food system in the future.

Ginkgo’s Tech Solution: Strain Development at Foundry Scale

Ginkgo plans to support Vivici by delivering optimized strains for dairy protein production via precision fermentation. We intend to design and build an integrated library, screen for strains with the best protein expression, validate and grow the most promising hits, and then transfer the top performing strains to Vivici for evaluation. The aim is for these strains to enable optimal protein expression, superior functionality, and commercial-level titers.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with Ginkgo. Ginkgo’s scale and AI-driven approach to designing strains for protein expression is a differentiated offering. We are confident in Ginkgo’s capabilities to provide efficient, scalable strains that can support Vivici’s speed to market.”

Stephan van Sint Fiet, Vivici CEO

We’re so excited to support Vivici in its vision of meeting growing demand for animal-free protein alternatives. We’re here to help Vivici deliver on the promise that precision fermentation can lead to planet-friendly nutrition. We believe our speed and experience with dairy protein development, ultra high throughput screening, and fermentation scale-up can enable Vivici to successfully expand their current protein portfolio and bring new solutions to market. We’re eager to help Vivici enter the market as a provider of sustainable and nutritious animal-free protein solutions to a wide range of customers.

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Reusable Bacteroides Anaerobic Engineering Toolkit Completed with Persephone Biosciences

Posted on by Jennifer Wipf

Today we are pleased to announce the completion of our first collaboration together with Persephone Biosciences — a Bacteroides engineering toolkit!

Under the collaboration, both Persephone and Ginkgo have access to this reusable toolkit. Persephone will utilize the technology to develop a pipeline of microbiome therapeutics, and Ginkgo can use the technology as part of our broader platform offering for future customers.

The technology comprises a set of generalizable genetic tools which can facilitate rapid Bacteroides engineering, including in the high-throughput anaerobic engineering context. Over the course of this collaboration, Ginkgo incorporated our flagship hardware and software workflows under an anaerobic blanket, meaningfully extending its cell engineering platform capabilities to perform productively in an anaerobic environment.

Ginkgo and Persephone announced in April 2022 that we would collaborate to develop novel microbiome products based on the bacterial genus Bacteroides, a promising vehicle for stable and long-term delivery of microbial products. Through this collaboration, a high-throughput anaerobic cell engineering platform has been developed. With it, Ginkgo designed and screened hundreds of promoters, shuttle vectors, ribosome binding sites, and terminators to characterize their efficiency and expression levels and selected parts across the expression range for the final toolkit.

While Persephone plans to utilize the Bacteroides technology for the rapid generation of therapeutics from its planned and ongoing oncology biomarker studies, Ginkgo may leverage the toolkit to address a wide range of customer needs and applications, including for customers developing microbiome based therapeutics.

At Ginkgo, we are growing our network of partners and striving to provide a platform to all the innovators that have a vision of using biology to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

Continuous improvement to our platform is key, and together with Persephone’s expertise in the microbiome and with bacterial strains, we’ve improved yet another valuable offering in a therapeutic area of interest to many of our partners.

“We’re delighted with the results of our collaboration with Ginkgo Bioworks. The resulting technology offers us previously unimaginable inhouse scale, that promises to save us valuable time as we seek to rapidly generate therapeutics from our oncology biomarker studies, including our ongoing ARGONAUT trial. This in turn could enable us to bring much-needed better health outcomes – across a range of cancer types – much sooner than would otherwise be possible.”

Stephanie Culler, co-founder and CEO of Persephone Biosciences

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

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Developing Dairy Proteins with QL AG

Posted on by Ginkgo Bioworks

We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with QL AG to develop dairy proteins!

QL AG will tap into Ginkgo’s extensive capabilities in strain engineering to support its goal of providing the market with high-quality nutritionally equivalent dairy proteins.

The alternative dairy market has grown by tens of billions of dollars in recent years.

Yet, current dairy alternatives still fall short of consumer criteria on critical factors like taste and texture.

“By accessing Ginkgo’s platform, QL AG can help reduce the cost of producing dairy proteins with fermentation. We are excited to pursue our goal of making a quantum leap in alternative agriculture by leveraging Ginkgo’s unique capabilities in producing strains at high titers and scaling fermentation processes.”

—Roger Föhn, CEO and co-founder of QL AG

Dairy proteins provide an exciting opportunity to leverage our platform, as they have traditionally presented product developers with significant challenges around protein productivity, economics, and functionality for efficacy across different applications. We aim to solve such challenges with our deep expertise in protein engineering, novel bioactivity and biochemistry identification, high-throughput expression, functional studies and scale-up capabilities.

To learn more about Ginkgo Protein Production Services, please visit https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/offerings/protein-services/.

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

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Enhancing Meaty Taste of Mycoprotein with Nosh.bio

Posted on by Ginkgo Bioworks

 

Today we’re so excited to announce a new partnership with Nosh.bio, a German startup developing highly functional ingredients from fungal biomass for animal-free products. Nosh.bio will leverage our Ginkgo Strain Optimization Services to screen for protein-producing fungi strains with superior sensorial profiles. By leveraging Ginkgo’s ultra high throughput encapsulated screening capabilities, the program aims to produce a mycoprotein that delivers a rich, savory, and natural meaty taste when used in food products.

The Challenges with Animal-Free Protein

Companies developing animal-free protein still face challenges in creating tastier, less processed, and affordable alternative-protein products. Nosh.bio has built a technological platform that uses fungal biomass to create animal-free single-ingredient animal meat alternatives from mycoprotein for human nutrition.

For meat-alternatives, red meat — like a juicy steak — remains the most challenging product to be developed, and current alternatives contain many ingredients and chemical additives. Nosh.bio aims to leverage their highly efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective production process to create a single-ingredient animal-free product that tastes and feels just like red meat, while being healthier than an animal product.

Ginkgo Strain Optimization Services

To enable this advanced alt-protein product, Ginkgo aims to discover and deliver a strain of fungi with higher native proteins involved in achieving the rich meat taste, juiciness, and color that Nosh.bio is seeking. To do so, we plan to execute a mutagenesis and screening campaign with our proprietary encapsulation and screening technology (EncapS). This can make it possible to search through up to 1 million strain variants in a single run and select the best performing candidates for further development. Using such an improved strain can help Nosh.bio develop a mycoprotein that is superior in taste, color, performance, and nutrition.

“Nosh.bio is eager to enable the transition from animal-based to animal-free products. Our affordable, high quality plant-based ingredients can build a product that’s even closer to meat in taste and texture than alt-protein options currently on the market,” said Tim Fronzek, CEO and Co-Founder of Nosh.bio. “What really excites us about partnering with Ginkgo is their accelerated screening technology that can help us pinpoint and develop a super ‘meaty’ mycoprotein.”

Leveling Up the Alt-Meat Protein Industry

We’re thrilled to partner with Nosh.bio and help level-up the alt-meat protein industry to deliver sustainable products that taste closer to real meat than ever before. Our proprietary encapsulation and screening technology can expeditiously deliver valuable insights that enable our partners to optimize their R&D efforts and overall product.

To learn more about Ginkgo Strain Optimization Services, please visit https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/offerings/strain-optimization-services/.

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

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Optimizing Cell-Free Carbon Fixation Process for Biomanufacturing with Ensovi

Posted on by Kevin Madden

Today we’re thrilled to announce a new partnership with Ensovi!

Ensovi has a platform for the cell-free transformation of carbon dioxide (CO2) into Acetyl-CoA, which can then be converted into many other products, such as precursors to flavorings, supplements, pharmaceuticals or even fuels, using Ensovi’s end-to-end, cell-free biosynthesis approach.

Ensovi will leverage Ginkgo Enzyme Services to help optimize this process.

Under the terms of the agreement, we will support the discovery and development of enzymes needed to bring Ensovi’s cell-free biomanufacturing platform to market.

Companies in the chemical industry are searching for more sustainable, yet cost-competitive, manufacturing alternatives to decarbonize supply chains. The ability to use CO2 as a feedstock can enable carbon-neutral or -negative manufacturing processes with reduced feedstock costs and risks, as well as provide better alternatives for companies that have costly CO2 waste streams.

By partnering with Ginkgo to discover and design bioengineered market-ready enzymes, Ensovi anticipates being able to extend its cell-free biomanufacturing system broadly into fine and commodity chemical manufacturing.

“We believe our modular cell-free system holds powerful potential to economically transform CO2 – the primary greenhouse gas emitted through human activities – into so many different useful materials. Our collaboration will draw on Ginkgo’s extensive enzyme discovery and design capabilities, allowing us to accelerate our continuous process of pathway discovery and enzyme optimization to further reduce costs and expand our supported product portfolio.”

Richard Harrison, co-founder and CEO of Ensovi

Ginkgo Enzyme Services offers partners end-to-end support for the discovery, engineering, optimization, and scale-up of enzymes for diverse applications. Through the partnership, Ginkgo will leverage its suite of services, including metagenomic enzyme discovery, as well as enzyme optimization for function and stability to support Ensovi’s applications.

Ensovi’s cell-free biomanufacturing system is a pioneering solution for the chemical industry and beyond. We’re eager to leverage our synthetic biology platform and advanced enzyme discovery and development capabilities to enable Ensovi to optimize and extend the cell-free transformation of CO2 into sustainably produced products.

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Multi-Target RNA Discovery Collaboration with Pfizer

Posted on by Jason Kelly

Today we’re thrilled to announce a collaboration with Pfizer focused on the discovery of RNA-based drug candidates.

Pfizer will leverage Ginkgo’s proprietary RNA technology to advance the discovery and development of novel RNA molecules across priority research areas. Ginkgo will receive an upfront payment and is eligible to receive research fees and development and commercial milestone payments, up to an aggregate total of $331 million across three programs. Ginkgo is entitled to potential further downstream value in the form of royalties on sales.

RNA therapeutics that encode proteins with the potential to treat or cure diseases represent an exciting new approach in medicine with the possibility of far-reaching application.

Our RNA technology combines high-throughput screening of the behavior of RNA constructs with a multi-parameter design framework to identify novel natural and synthetic elements optimal for a particular application. We will deploy these capabilities with the goal of achieving efficient production, circularization, improved stability, and enhanced translation of each RNA construct.

“RNA therapeutics are proving to be an important platform to advance the world of scientific innovation, and with progress in synthetic biology we have the potential to create new RNA treatments that may benefit patients worldwide. Access to Ginkgo’s proprietary platform will help enable Pfizer to search for novel and exciting RNA constructs with improved stability and expression that could lead to more effective treatments.”

Will Somers, PH.D., Head, Biomedicine Design, Pfizer

Billions of patients around the world have already benefited from advances in RNA-based technologies.

We’re thrilled to be able to help enable the discovery and development of novel drugs using this powerful modality by applying our platform technologies which are designed to program RNA for maximum therapeutic effect. Ginkgo’s approach enables and accelerates discovery across different disease areas and modalities for our partners, who bring deep expertise in drug development. We can’t wait to leverage our broad and deep RNA Codebase and deploy our Foundry to enable the era of programmable medicines with the Pfizer team.

To learn more about Ginkgo’s RNA Therapeutics offering, visit our webpage.

Ready to talk to our team about your RNA project? Get in touch here.

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

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Ginkgo Awarded DARPA Contract to Reimagine the Manufacturing of Complex Therapeutic Proteins

Posted on by Jason Kelly

We’re pleased to share that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that we have been awarded a 4-year contract worth up to $18 million to reimagine how to manufacture complex therapeutic proteins.

As a performer on DARPA’s Reimagining Protein Manufacturing (RPM) project, we aim to deliver revolutionary advances in on-demand protein manufacturing by leveraging Cell-Free Protein Synthesis (CFPS) to enable rapid, high-yield, distributed production of human therapeutic proteins that support national security objectives. We will lead a team comprising representatives from Imperial College London, led by Prof. Paul Freemont, Nature’s Toolbox, Inc., led by Alex Koglin, and consultant Michael Feldhaus (former Executive VP of Antibody Discovery at Adimab).

There is growing recognition that pharmaceutical supply chains are at risk. One way to meet this challenge is distributed manufacturing at the point of care. Imagine a future where drugs, including complex biologics, are produced locally or in a widely distributed manner on-demand. We’re very excited to be working with DARPA to make that future a reality.

Replacing cell-based methods with cell-free methods

Therapeutic proteins bearing so-called “post-translational modifications,” such as antibodies, cytokines, and clotting factors are particularly important in the marketplace and to DARPA, as are subunit and conjugate vaccines. Half of the top-selling drugs used to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases are such therapeutic proteins; many are also used as medical countermeasures to treat or prevent disease, injury, or death related to chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear threats. Through this program, we hope to transform how therapeutic proteins are made, replacing cell-based methods with cell-free methods. Traditional centralized, large-scale manufacturing methods have usually sufficed, but increasingly there are use cases where rapid distributed or on-demand manufacturing is needed, such as supplying of therapeutic proteins to geographically isolated locales, providing hospitals and clinics with point-of-need rapid production of medicines from common precursors, and improving our ability to mount rapid and targeted responses to natural or man-made biological threats and emergencies.

Traditional production methods rely on weeks- to months-long construction of bespoke cellular organisms that have been engineered to produce the desired therapeutic protein during days-long fermentation processes. Even with standardized methods, it typically takes months to achieve the first useful production of a biological drug. Post-expression isolation and purification are equally challenging: each unique process is costly and time-consuming to develop.

Enabling the rapid prototyping of enzymes for diverse therapeutic and nontherapeutic projects

Cell-Free Protein Synthesis (CFPS), by contrast, brings the key advantages of greater speed and flexibility than cell- and fermentation-based production. Significant improvements are needed to make CFPS competitive with traditional therapeutic protein production, however, primarily with respect to efficiency and the identity and homogeneity of post-translational modifications. In this program, we seek to address these challenges and hope to enable the rapid prototyping of enzymes and other proteins for diverse therapeutic and nontherapeutic projects. One aim of the project is to create production methods that are compatible with Good Manufacturing Practices, thereby facilitating adoption by the pharmaceutical industry.

We will leverage innovative technologies enabled by our high-throughput, automated Foundry and our proprietary genetic data Codebase, a portfolio of reusable biological assets which includes more than one billion proprietary gene sequences. Our synthetic biology platform, coupled with our extensive expertise in iterative Design–Build–Test–Learn-driven biological engineering, enables the rapid prototyping, optimization, and development of proteins, enzymes, metabolic pathways, and whole organisms under commercial-scale manufacturing conditions processes.

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

What will you grow with Ginkgo?