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Ginkgo Bioworks (DNA): Building Life On Demand
A New Era For Biotech
Over time, knowledge about medicine and biotechnology has changed in successive important phases. At first, it was mostly about understanding natural biochemical processes. Then, synthetic chemical drugs started to alter these processes. Then, bioengineering allowed for the production by GMO microbes of cheap and safe insulin, growth hormone, etc.
Today, many technologies are converging to open another era of biosciences: Big data, AI, automation, precise genetic engineering, advanced analytics, etc.
This phase of newly engineered organisms and therapies is not just correcting or replicating what nature made, but instead creating from scratch entirely new capacities. This could be a radical new tool for solving most of the modern world’s problems: plastic pollution, climate change, sustainable agriculture, non-polluting industrial production, biosecurity, incurable diseases, regenerative medicine, longevity treatments, etc.
Managing to tackle this entirely new tech stack, on top of the already complex setup of medical research, clinical trials, or industrial facilities, can be difficult, even for industry leaders.
This is why specialized companies are emerging to provide their expertise as a service with “Research-as-a-Service” or “organisms-on-demand” new forms of offering. And leading this emerging sector is one company: Ginkgo Bioworks.
(DNA )
The Origins of Ginkgo Bioworks
The company was founded in 2008 by five MIT scientists, to produce GMO bacteria for industrial applications. The core idea was that most projects using modified microorganisms have to repeat separately the same steps before reaching a usable product.
Instead, a company like Ginkgo could perform these steps once and then license multiple products from this common technological and biological base.
Think of a cell. It’s kind of like a little machine that runs on digital code, very similar to a computer, except in this case the code—instead of zeros and ones, it’s A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s.
So synthetic biology is programming cells like we program computers, by changing the DNA code inside them. We’re sort of like cell programmers for hire. Our job is to make the cell do what our customers want.
Ginkgo was the first biotechnology company to join the famed Y Combinator start-up accelerator program in 2014 and was at one point one of the world’s largest privately held biotech companies, valued at $4.2 billion in 2019.
The company went public in 2021 through a SPAC merger and managed to secure the NYSE ticker DNA, previously held by biotech pioneer Genentech (before its acquisition by Roche).
Ginkgo’s Unique Services & Infrastructure
Ginkgo Automation
An original selling point for Ginkgo has been that it generated biological data in an automatized and consistent fashion.
This is a crucial development for biotech, as hard-to-replicate or compare studies have plagued the industry and any tentative attempts to systematize scientific discoveries.
Automation, instead of painstaking and slow manual labor by PhD-level researchers is also needed to keep control of costs.
To solve these issues, the company developed the Reconfigurable Automation Carts (RACs), a modular building block to create automatized biolabs, with robotic arms, wireless connection, and modular analytical device slots.
Source: Ginkgo Bioworks
They can then be connected with each other in order to create a sort of “assembly chain” for scientific experiments and bioanalyses.
Source: Ginkgo Bioworks
This solution is combined with a software offering, creating a flexible solution that can be adapted and modified in just days or hours, compared to more rigid research infrastructures requiring months of costly reconfiguration for new projects.
Ginkgo Datapoint
While Automation generates the biological data, Datapoint processes them into useful insights.
The key element is the quick generation of data that can guide further hypotheses, and the rapid iteration of new experiments to keep moving forward.
Source: Ginkgo Bioworks
With this service, Ginkgo can provide data that entirely belongs to the client, which is a competitive advantage to partnerships with other biotech or pharmaceutical companies.
Data can be generated in as little as 3 weeks, with over 10,000s of in vitro chemical and genetic perturbations in each cell type, and a large choice of analytical methods available to study the results.
The same system can be used for the quick generation of new antibodies, a type of molecule quickly becoming a key medicine in oncology and other medical fields. Ginkgo can screen up to 2,400 different antibodies in parallel, thanks to a $1B worth of automated wet lab infrastructure.
Source: Ginkgo Bioworks
Lastly, this technology can also be used to generate and test new mRNA sequences very quickly.
Source: Ginkgo Bioworks
Overall, these data could also be used to train AI agent specialized in biotech research, either directly by Ginkgo or by its clients if they are ready to pay for an unlimited access to said data. Or for that matter, maybe helping AI to compute in a more energy efficient way with organoids, micro-brain grown in lab and that can connect to silicon chips.
Ginkgo Bioworks Segments
Because the potential for custom bioengineered organisms and synthetic biology is so vast, Ginkgo has potential in many extremely large markets, notably agriculture, biologic pharmaceuticals, biosecurity, government programs, and industrial biotechnology.
Agriculture
As modern farming is under pressure from the need for more sustainable practices, invasive species, degrading soils, and climate change, new crop varieties are in high demand.
The company operates its own greenhouse facility and has access to 387,000+ strains of agronomic plants, as well as 2.7 billion genes in a private metagenomic database that virtually does not overlap with public gene databases.
The focus of this segment is split between crop protection (against pests and diseases), crop nutrition (fertilizers optimization), and plant traits (growth rate, yields, resistance to water or thermal stress, etc.).
Ginkgo’s products help create biocontrol for pests that otherwise need chemical treatments to not destroy the crops, like for example the partnership with Vitales to control critical soybean diseases in Brazil.
“Partnering with Ginkgo allows us to accelerate our timeline for bringing vital new biocontrol solutions to market. Ginkgo’s expertise in fermentation and formulation, with teams working collaboratively under the same roof, will speed up the development of economically viable product concepts.”
Fernando Eduardo Alves de Sousa – Biological Sciences, Vitales
Ginkgo’s client list in agribusinesses includes leading firms like the global leaders Bayer and Syngenta.
The partnership with Bayer is looking to replace nitrogen fertilizers with bacteria; nitrogen fertilizer consumes 5% of the total worldwide natural gas used and is responsible for 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Biopharma
As one of the largest money makers in the biotech industry, the biopharmaceutical sector is very important for Ginkgo. The company has secured relations with an impressive roster of large pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Biogen, Moderna, and Boehringer Ingelheim.
“We believe that Ginkgo’s unique combination of cell programming expertise, proprietary tools, and knowledge of biological systems make them an ideal collaboration partner.”
Alphonse Galdes – Fmr. Head of Pharmaceutical Operations & Technology at Biogen
