Category: Process Design & Scale Up Services

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.

Scaled Production of Cultured CBG with Cronos Group

Posted on by Jason Kelly

Back in June, we announced that we had launched commercial scale production of cultured CBG and had amended our agreement in order to enable Cronos to commercialize cannabinoids ahead of reaching the originally stated productivity targets. In that press release, we wrote that Cronos Group expected that the final productivity target for CBG will be achieved prior to September 2021.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve achieved that productivity target for the commercial-scale production of CBG! Reaching this productivity target for the strain producing the cannabigerolic acid (CBGA) molecule will support Cronos Group’s planned CBG product launch this fall. As a result of achieving this milestone, Cronos Group will issue to Ginkgo approximately 1.5 million common shares.

The CBGA molecule will be the fifth product going to market that has directly utilized the Ginkgo platform.

We’ve previously enabled or improved the commercial production of three cultured ingredients for our partners in the flavors and fragrances industry as well as for Aldevron when we improved the production efficiency for their vaccinia capping enzyme used in mRNA vaccine manufacturing.

Cell programming can enable access to rare and important molecules found in nature, including cannabinoids and many other valuable products. We’re proud to be able to help many different companies across industries develop strategies for using biology to innovate new products. We’re thrilled to see the progress our partnership with Cronos Group has made in the three years we’ve worked together and consider it a demonstration of how much can be accomplished when a leading-edge company leverages our platform.

Manufacturing Breakthrough for mRNA Raw Materials with Aldevron

Posted on by Patrick Boyle

The global biotech community has come together during the pandemic to develop and deliver multiple effective and safe vaccines for COVID-19. However, more than two thirds of the global population has yet to be vaccinated – one way to reach the rest of the world is through enabling more scalable production of the raw materials needed to make vaccines. Today, I’m excited to announce our collaboration with Aldevron, a world leader in manufacturing mRNA vaccines and raw materials. We’ve been working with them since earlier this year to optimize the production of an important component often required to manufacture mRNA vaccines and therapies: the vaccinia capping enzyme (VCE).

Through our collaboration, Aldevron is now able to produce over 10 times more VCE per batch than the previous process, a significant manufacturing breakthrough for this critical component.

Aldevron, who has a successful history manufacturing high-quality components for genetic medicines, has the exclusive rights to the protocol conditions for this newly developed manufacturing process.

When placed in our bodies, mRNA vaccines use ribosomes—the cellular machinery that reads and translates mRNA into useful proteins—to produce a viral antigen. Human mRNA is “capped,” meaning the beginning of the mRNA sequence is modified with a 7-methylguanylate molecule. This specific cap structure needs to be added to mRNA vaccines and therapeutics to ensure the mRNA is recognized by our ribosomes and prevent premature degradation of the mRNA. VCE is a common tool for adding this specific cap structure to mRNA in vaccine manufacturing. However, it’s typically expensive and difficult to produce in mass quantities. In partnership with Ginkgo, Aldevron is working to ensure that there are sufficient quantities of VCE to meet rising vaccine demands.

This manufacturing improvement is an exciting milestone for Ginkgo as we continue to expand the capabilities of our cell programming platform to enable customers in the pharmaceutical ecosystem to improve their products and manufacturing processes. Aldevron has been a great partner with us on improving VCE, which we believe is a key ingredient to scaling mRNA production globally. This breakthrough represents a momentous growth opportunity for them as they continue to bolster their expansive portfolio of products.

Tom Foti, President of Aldevron’s Protein Business Unit, shared his excitement: “I’m very excited about combining the additive strengths of Ginkgo Bioworks’ development expertise and Aldevron’s manufacturing horsepower to yield an optimized manufacturing method for vaccinia capping enzyme. Historically, this enzyme has been difficult to produce, and we believe this yield breakthrough will accelerate mRNA therapeutic and vaccine development for manufacturing teams around the world.”

Launching Commercial Production of Cultured Cannabinoids with Cronos

Posted on by Jason Kelly

One of the first commercial applications of cell programming that have launched off our platform is the ability to program brewing yeast so that they produce valuable ingredients during fermentation, essentially “brewing” new ingredients in a process that looks like brewing beer. These cultured ingredients can offer a more accessible and sustainable way to produce a wide array of important products, from fragrances to pharmaceuticals. Our partnership with Cronos Group, an innovative global cannabinoid company, is helping them produce a range of rare and often otherwise inaccessible cannabinoid molecules using this process.

I’m thrilled to share that Cronos is beginning their commercial production of the first such rare cultured cannabinoid product we are enabling for them, CBG. Given the progress of the program already achieved, we are amending our agreement in order to accelerate commercialization, which we hope will facilitate these products being first to market in Canada.

You can read more about our collaboration here, and view the press release here.