Ginkgo Bioworks www.ginkgobioworks.com
Posted: August 10th, 2021, 1:58 pm
After spending sometime thinking about the food science of the future over here, I'm now starting to home in on a few companies for better analysis. Ginkgo Bioworks look very interesting in addition to having a pretty funky soundy name. They seem to be in the process of fusing Biology, Robots and Software together.
Although I arrived at Ginkgo via a search for precision fermentation food factories with high ROCEs, it turns out that Ginkgo are involved in several application spaces:
Nucleic acid factories
Boston-based Ginkgo, which is backed by Bill Gates’s private investment firm Cascade Investment and hedge fund Viking Global, has worked on projects including helping optimize a piece of the manufacturing process of Moderna’s messenger RNA vaccine and making coronavirus tests.
....
Ginkgo’s manufacturing systems can produce the raw materials for such vaccines, including nucleic acids, which until now have never been produced at the scale needed to vaccinate billions of patients around the world.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health- ... NL1N2IA2C7
Super anti-biotics
The genome mining platform will “supplement Ginkgo's state of the art sequencing capabilities, extensive biological codebase, bioinformatics and machine learning tools for gene discovery and strain engineering expertise for active pharmaceutical ingredient production,” it adds. The move sees Warp Drive move away from antibiotics and focus predominately on cancer, a much more profitable area for the biotech, and its new owner.
...
Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, said: “Bringing Warp Drive Bio's deep expertise in genomics-based natural products discovery to Ginkgo's codebase is the key to unlocking new products, like novel antibiotics that can help combat the rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases. We are thrilled to welcome the Warp Drive genome mining team to Ginkgo to continue their important work and embark on this pivotal journey together.”
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/cro/ginkg ... roche-pact
Food production
In just a year, Ginkgo developed 6 prototype strains and produced product samples for benchmarking and early application testing. We then designed, built, and validated improved variants over the next 9 months. Within 2 years, Ginkgo developed commercial strains from scratch and developed fermentation and downstream purification processes that are now being used at kilogram-scale, with a projected 3 years time-to-market for the final product. The strain’s performance exceeded Motif’s specifications by >70%. We also identified a set of novel protein expression systems that exceed performance of best-in-class systems by 5-20 fold, thereby increasing productivity, reducing cost, and improving scalability over additional rounds of engineering.
https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/our-work ... e-of-food/
They seem to be doing this in partnership with an outfit that they spun off called "Motif Foods", but I'm not quite sure about the exact relationship there:
https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Artic ... based-meat
The firm have their fingers in other application spaces, biosecurity, agriculture, therapeutics. Not quite sure how to categorise them...a synbio consultancy perhaps?
More: I believe the firm is still privately owned? but is due to IPO very soon https://investmentu.com/ginkgo-bioworks-ipo-stock/. Perhaps people here who know more about IPOs will be able to decode some more about what that IPO document is saying. The CEO Jason Kelly is a co-founder (2008), can be found on twitter I believe, but I have not spent anymore time trying to figure out the authenticity of the whole outfit. Might be worth keeping an eye on.
Matt
Although I arrived at Ginkgo via a search for precision fermentation food factories with high ROCEs, it turns out that Ginkgo are involved in several application spaces:
Nucleic acid factories
Boston-based Ginkgo, which is backed by Bill Gates’s private investment firm Cascade Investment and hedge fund Viking Global, has worked on projects including helping optimize a piece of the manufacturing process of Moderna’s messenger RNA vaccine and making coronavirus tests.
....
Ginkgo’s manufacturing systems can produce the raw materials for such vaccines, including nucleic acids, which until now have never been produced at the scale needed to vaccinate billions of patients around the world.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health- ... NL1N2IA2C7
Super anti-biotics
The genome mining platform will “supplement Ginkgo's state of the art sequencing capabilities, extensive biological codebase, bioinformatics and machine learning tools for gene discovery and strain engineering expertise for active pharmaceutical ingredient production,” it adds. The move sees Warp Drive move away from antibiotics and focus predominately on cancer, a much more profitable area for the biotech, and its new owner.
...
Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, said: “Bringing Warp Drive Bio's deep expertise in genomics-based natural products discovery to Ginkgo's codebase is the key to unlocking new products, like novel antibiotics that can help combat the rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases. We are thrilled to welcome the Warp Drive genome mining team to Ginkgo to continue their important work and embark on this pivotal journey together.”
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/cro/ginkg ... roche-pact
Food production
In just a year, Ginkgo developed 6 prototype strains and produced product samples for benchmarking and early application testing. We then designed, built, and validated improved variants over the next 9 months. Within 2 years, Ginkgo developed commercial strains from scratch and developed fermentation and downstream purification processes that are now being used at kilogram-scale, with a projected 3 years time-to-market for the final product. The strain’s performance exceeded Motif’s specifications by >70%. We also identified a set of novel protein expression systems that exceed performance of best-in-class systems by 5-20 fold, thereby increasing productivity, reducing cost, and improving scalability over additional rounds of engineering.
https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/our-work ... e-of-food/
They seem to be doing this in partnership with an outfit that they spun off called "Motif Foods", but I'm not quite sure about the exact relationship there:
https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Artic ... based-meat
The firm have their fingers in other application spaces, biosecurity, agriculture, therapeutics. Not quite sure how to categorise them...a synbio consultancy perhaps?
More: I believe the firm is still privately owned? but is due to IPO very soon https://investmentu.com/ginkgo-bioworks-ipo-stock/. Perhaps people here who know more about IPOs will be able to decode some more about what that IPO document is saying. The CEO Jason Kelly is a co-founder (2008), can be found on twitter I believe, but I have not spent anymore time trying to figure out the authenticity of the whole outfit. Might be worth keeping an eye on.
Matt