Category: Metabolic Engineering Services

Improving Production Efficiency for Vibrant Food Colors with Phytolon

Posted on by Jennifer Wipf

Phytolon and Ginkgo aim to leverage cell programming to produce vibrant betalain pigments across the full yellow-to-purple spectrum.

Scientists have developed hundreds of artificial food dyes by using the tools of synthetic chemistry to convert petrochemical sources into a wide range of colors. While artificial dyes are visually appealing and cheap to manufacture, many have been banned in food and feed due to health concerns. But now, the tools of synthetic biology offer an opportunity to tap into the vibrant colors of nature to produce more sustainable, yet equally vibrant, colors.

What if you could grow sustainable, vibrant dyes?

As consumers increasingly seek out more sustainable and nature-derived products, the food industry is working to find food colors that have equivalent pigment vibrancy to those found in petrochemical-based dyes but which come from biological sources. Phytolon, a growing startup company making natural food colorants, announced a partnership with Ginkgo today to produce vibrant cultured food colors via synthetic biology.

Phytolon has developed a proprietary process using precision fermentation of certain yeast strains to produce betalain pigments—red and yellow pigments naturally found in plants like beets and cactus fruit. Phytolon and Ginkgo are partnering with the goal of maximizing the production efficiency of purple and yellow betalain-producing strains to enable the creation of colors across the full “yellow-to-purple” spectrum. Under this partnership, Phytolon is leveraging Ginkgo’s ability to engineer biology at scale to work together on the production of these betalain pigments. The project aims to help maximize the business opportunity of Phytolon’s vibrant colors for applications in the food and cosmetics industries.

Synthetic biology helps make it possible to produce nature’s wide range of colors at scale.

“We’re excited to work with Ginkgo to develop natural food colors that can potentially outperform conventional artificial dyes in cost and performance,” says Dr. Tal Zeltzer, co-founder and CTO of Phytolon. “We believe biotechnology makes it possible to produce a wider range of colors than ever before that may outperform current benchmark colorants, and we look forward to building products that may meet and even exceed consumer expectations for healthier, sustainable foods, all while aiming to maintain industry requirements for high quality and cost-efficiency.”

We love enabling growing startups like Phytolon through our platform, using biotechnology to challenge industry norms and attempt to build a fundamentally better product than what’s on the market today. The planet needs new sustainable solutions, and we are excited to partner with Phytolon to support a more sustainable food system.

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

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.

Developing High-Efficacy Adjuvants for Vaccines with SaponiQx

Posted on by Jennifer Wipf

Adjuvants—substances known to enhance our immune response—are a key component of many existing vaccines. And while vaccines are one of the most powerful tools we have to fight pandemics, ensuring widespread access to efficacious vaccines continues to be a major challenge around the world.

SaponiQx, a new subsidiary announced today by Agenus, plans to use Ginkgo’s platform to drive innovation in novel adjuvant discovery and vaccine design.

Their efforts will focus on building an innovative adjuvant platform to deliver both sustainable manufacturing approaches and a secure supply of known adjuvants, as well as discover novel adjuvants and develop new, more effective vaccines utilizing optimized antigen-adjuvant pairings.

Ginkgo’s experience in metabolic engineering, enzymatic diversification, and process optimization can be applied to discover novel adjuvants and improve current manufacturing processes that can then be applied toward developing better-integrated vaccines. We’re proud that our platform is being used by companies across the vaccine supply chain to develop and manufacture the materials necessary for life-saving vaccines.

Garo Armen, CEO and Chairman of Agenus and Executive Chairman of SaponiQx, had this to say: “Agenus is pleased for SaponiQx to collaborate with Ginkgo Bioworks to develop its novel saponin products from sustainably sourced raw materials, with a goal to meet the current demands placed on the vaccine industry for pandemic vaccines. The QS21 Stimulon™ adjuvant has shown long term efficacy and long-term protection in both commercially launched and experimental vaccines.”

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.

Accelerating Industrial Adoption of High-Performance Biomaterials with Cambium

Posted on by Ena Cratsenburg

We help companies across industries use synthetic biology to produce better, more sustainable products. Product developers are looking for sustainable alternatives to petrochemical-based materials while also looking to achieve unmet performance needs. Biomaterials can offer an answer to both of these needs; that’s why we’re excited about our new partnership with Cambium Biomaterials as they grow and bring next-gen biomaterials to market.

Cambium is redefining products by creating high-performance biomaterials that deliver step changes in performance and sustainability to industries as diverse as aerospace and renewable energy.

Cambium will leverage Ginkgo’s Codebase and high-throughput facility to accelerate their discovery, development, manufacturing, and commercialization of biomaterials that deliver superior performance and sustainability across a range of industries.

The initial cell programs will focus on materials that provide enhanced heat, flame, laser, and sensor protection.

Cambium designs new functional biomaterials and composites for use in diverse and extreme environments. They’ll work with Ginkgo to explore a diverse set of bio-based molecules and develop a library of bio-building blocks to support the manufacture of innovative biomaterial end products.

By enabling the design of organisms that can produce valuable biological products, Ginkgo helps accelerate the development of innovative, bio-based solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. This partnership deepens Ginkgo’s involvement in the biomaterials space following the launch of recent cell programs with other leading biomaterials companies.

Simon Waddington, CEO and co-founder at Cambium, shared: “We are excited to work with Ginkgo to not only expand the universe of these materials but also explore how to make them biologically. We expect this partnership to grow our pipeline and accelerate our commercialization timeline.”

Producing Rare, Natural Ingredients with Givaudan

Posted on by Kevin Madden

Nature creates all kinds of wonderful things that excite our senses: from fragrance and flavor molecules that smell and taste amazing to molecules that make cosmetics and foods have just the right texture. Many of these ingredients are found in very small quantities in the plants and other organisms that produce them. Extracting these valuable ingredients can be costly as well as hard or impractical to scale; they can be subject to supply chain disruptions and are increasingly at risk due to climate change.

Givaudan—the world’s leading flavors, fragrances, and cosmetic ingredients company—has signed a multi-program collaboration with Ginkgo to help address these challenges. Givaudan will leverage our long-established expertise in helping companies develop bio-based products. The goal of the programs will be to produce a number of innovative and sustainable ingredients using fermentation.

Through our work, Givaudan plans to provide a sustainable source of products that are currently only available in minute quantities in nature.

Givaudan will leverage our platform to accelerate the development of new ingredients as well as enhance their existing portfolio. The programs will use the natural world as inspiration to create an expanded creative palette for Givaudan.

We’re excited to work with Givaudan to enhance the palette of ingredients they use to develop their products. We plan to help Givaudan transform even the rarest and most complex nature-inspired ingredients into more sustainable products for consumers. Ginkgo believes that biology has the power to enable better and more sustainable products across many industries: from flavors and fragrances, to pharmaceuticals, to farming, and more.

Allison Haitz, Biotechnology Program Director at Givaudan had this to share about the news: “Givaudan has long prided itself on being a leader in innovation. This collaboration with Ginkgo Bioworks is the latest example of our commitment to offering the highest quality, natural products to our customers around the world. We are excited to use biology to unlock more wonders of nature in a sustainable way.”

The collaboration between Ginkgo and Givaudan spans multiple programs, with the possibility of adding more in the future. Companies across numerous industries use Ginkgo’s platform to find more effective, environmentally friendly ways to create products including food ingredients, flavors, cosmetics, medicines, and more. By enabling the design of organisms that can produce valuable biological products, Ginkgo helps accelerate the development of innovative, bio-based solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.

Producing Cultured Cannabinoids with Cronos

Posted on by Jason Kelly

Cannabis is a fascinating and rapidly growing industry, predicted to reach $57 billion worldwide by 2027. As legalization spreads, so too does our understanding of the potential benefits of the many different molecules present in the plant.

Beyond the better known THC and CBD, cannabinoids present in tiny quantities in the plant have the potential to be valuable in a range of pharmaceutical applications. Ongoing research has shown potential medicinal uses for indications such as chronic pain, nervous disorders, nausea, weight loss, and some mental illnesses.

But to unlock the value of these molecules, we first need to be able to access them. Today we’re announcing a partnership with Toronto-based Cronos Group to produce a range of different cannabinoid molecules through fermentation of engineered yeasts. It’s a large-scale and long-term deal, involving up to $22M for R&D along with a total of up to $100 million worth of Cronos common shares upon achieving pilot commercial scale.

The Science:
There are hundreds of different cannabinoids produced by different varietals of the plant. Long term breeding has led to strains that produce large amounts of THC(A) and CBD(A) (the A stands for acid, a different chemical form that is converted to THC and CBD when heated) but other molecules such as CBC, CBG, and THCV are present only in trace amounts, meaning that they are impractical or impossible to extract and purify from the plant. Without a cost effective supply, research into the pharmaceutical properties of these molecules has also been hampered. THCV, for example, has been shown at low doses to offer relief from anxiety without the appetite stimulating effects of THC, but so much is still unknown.

By transferring the DNA sequences for cannabinoid production into yeast, using the foundry and our existing high-throughput fermentation processes, we’ll work to construct strains that produce a range of different cannabinoids at high quality and purity, identical to those extracted from the plant with traditional methods. By capitalizing on the power of biological manufacturing, we can unlock access to medically important cannabinoids that can be scaled up and produced reliably.

An engineer works with an automated bioreactor system in Ginkgo's foundry

Why Cronos:
We’re so excited to be working with the Cronos Group on this landmark partnership. Cronos, based in Canada and with a presence across four continents, is a vertically integrated cannabis company that operates two licensed producers regulated under Health Canada’s Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations. Cronos, with access to an array of varietals and a deep expertise in plant genetics, has gathered extensive data on cannabinoids and their properties. This allows them to generate the best recipes for the full spectrum of cannabinoids, not just the most common ones.

We’ll be working to develop strains of yeast that can produce eight different cannabinoids. All the R&D work we’ll be doing at Ginkgo will of course be conducted in compliance with all U.S. federal laws regarding controlled substances, and we’re currently waiting for approval from from Federal and State agencies. Cronos Group intends to produce and distribute the cultured cannabinoids that result from our partnership globally, and has received confirmation that this method of production is permitted under the Cannabis Act—the legal framework that will regulate cannabis in Canada.

Cronos Group

As Ginkgo has grown, we’ve seen the power of biological engineering and fermentation to unlock the potential of a huge variety of molecules in several industries, from flavor and fragrance to pharmaceuticals. We’re thrilled to be working with Cronos as they build the world’s most innovative cannabinoid platform to bring these products to life.

For more, check out this article by Kristine Owram at Bloomberg: “Cronos Partners With Ginkgo to Develop Lab-Grown Cannabis”

***

Cultured Cannabinoids image at the top of the post by Karen Ingram.