Category: Protein Services

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.

Engineering Living Biotherapeutics for Gastrointestinal Health with Tantu

Posted on by Cecylia Ferrandon

Digestive disorders affect tens of millions of people in the U.S. each year, and current treatments don’t sufficiently promote gastrointestinal healing, resulting in many patients undergoing invasive surgeries to improve their quality of life.

But what if you could specifically design a living medicine—a microbe—that aids intestinal healing, transforming the way these patients are cared for?

That’s exactly what Tantu Therapeutics is trying to do. They’re working to create an orally administered, living biotherapeutic that will produce and apply anti-inflammatory therapeutic proteins directly into diseased sites in the gut. The living medicine aims to improve gut barrier function and faster mucosal healing in patients where systemic anti-inflammatory therapies are not enough.

And they’ve come to Ginkgo to help accelerate the research and development of this new therapeutic. We plan to apply our automated foundry to speed up the traditionally slow process of candidate strain construction and genomic integration and validation. Our goal is to accelerate Tantu’s first program and potentially help them reach clinical proof of concept in patients faster.

Tantu’s lead therapeutic candidate is an engineered microbe that produces anti-inflammatory and healing agents from inside the gut lumen—something that no clinically approved therapeutic currently does. Tantu’s local delivery strategy is designed to improve patient outcomes by reducing reliance solely on systemic anti-inflammatory drugs, which can suppress a patient’s immune system. Their living biotherapeutic products are being designed to complement proven approaches to further improve patients’ health and quality of life.

Through our platform, we’re able to support startups in the biotech industry as they bring new innovations to the field and society.

We’re excited to partner with a pre-seed company like Tantu; our goal is to reduce their time-to-market. Our program with Tantu gives us the opportunity to leverage our expertise in pharmaceuticals and support the development of a potentially transformative therapeutic for the millions struggling with digestive disorders.

Companies across numerous industries use Ginkgo’s cell programming platform to find more effective, environmentally friendly ways to create products including food ingredients, fragrances, cosmetics, medicines, and more. By enabling the design of organisms that can produce valuable biological products, we’re helping accelerate the development of innovative, bio-based solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.

Optimizing Silk Protein Production with Bolt Threads

Posted on by Ena Cratsenburg

We built our cell programming platform to make it easier for people to develop apps with biology. And while we love working on brand new ideas with partners, we also really love helping them improve their existing products and processes to make them more efficient and accessible. This week, we’re thrilled to announce Bolt Threads as our latest partner enhancing an existing product by running a cell program on the Ginkgo platform.

Bolt’s cell program seeks to improve the sustainability, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of their b-silk™ protein manufacturing process by leveraging our expertise in strain engineering.

Bolt is a biotechnology company creating the next generation of advanced materials. Their team of engineers and designers have spent nearly a decade at the forefront of the synthetic biology industry, securing partnerships with consumer brands including Kering, Stella McCartney, Adidas, and Lululemon to bring advanced biological materials to consumers around the globe.

In recent years, Bolt has developed b-silk protein, an innovative ingredient inspired by the strength and elasticity of spider silk. They’ve shown that the protein is able to deliver silk-like softness, provide powerful skin defense, and has the potential to sustainably replace synthetic ingredients—like silicones—in skin and hair care products.

While the protein is currently used in premium product lines like Vegamour, the new cell program will leverage Ginkgo’s strain engineering capabilities to improve their production efficiency of b-silk protein, scaling b-silk protein to more mass availability, and potentially unlocking further applications for the ingredient throughout the clean beauty and personal care industries.

We believe in the power of biology to transform every industry that produces physical goods and have built our platform to enable innovators like Bolt to bring their vision to life.

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.