Page 65 - Forbes - Asia (October 2019)

TECHNOLOGY

The Life Factory

Customized organisms will revolutionize the way we manufacture everything
from car seats to cellphones. A group of MIT-trained scientists at $1.4 billion
synthetic biology startup Ginkgo Bioworks is brewing the building blocks

for our bioengineered future.

BY AMY FELDMAN

alk down Drydock Avenue in the old indus- pours into these firms, including $3.8 billion last year alone,
trial waterfront of Boston and you’ll be re- according to SynBioBeta founder John Cumbers. The promise
minded that the city remains a significant in- of the field is not just a proliferation of new products, but also
Wdustrial port. Trucks rattle past the working a reduction of the environmental harm that comes from our
dry dock. A FedEx shipping container terminal looms to the heavy reliance on petrochemicals.
south while the Coastal Cement Corporation anchors the These startups run the gamut from sellers of the DNA
street. Inside building number 27, Ginkgo Bioworks CEO molecules that are the building blocks of life to high-pro-
Jason Kelly and his four cofounders are working on a differ- file consumer companies. Plant-based-burger startup Beyond
ent industrial vision—one in which biology is at the core. Meat went public in May and is now worth nearly $10 bil-
This quintet of modern-day Frankensteins design, modify lion; its synthetic biology competitor Impossible Foods is a
and manufacture organisms to make existing industrial pro- venture-backed unicorn that recently began selling Impossi-
cesses cheaper and entirely new processes possible. ble Whoppers to fast-food giant Burger King. Bolt Threads,
It’s heady stuff. Fertilizing corn usually requires spraying valued at $700 million, makes bio-based spider silk for use in
hectares of farmland with a stew of nasty chemicals. Ginkgo textiles and skin care. At the other end of the spectrum, Twist
is working on bioengineered, environmentally friendly coat- Bioscience, the largest seller of synthetic DNA (which counts
ings for corn seeds that will fertilize themselves. Today, most Ginkgo as its largest customer), went public last year and
biotech drugs are nonliving proteins. Ginkgo is working on now has a market cap of nearly $1 billion.
creating living creatures, genetically programmed to seek and Ginkgo is the leader in organism engineering. “Ginkgo is
destroy disease, that would be ingested whole. category defining,” says Cumbers, who first met Kelly when
And that’s just the beginning. Recently Ginkgo recreat- they were struggling Ph.D. students (Cumbers at Brown, Kelly
ed the scent of an extinct Hawaiian hibiscus, blurring the line at MIT). “They pretty much created the whole idea of the or-
between what’s living and what’s dead. Ultimately, Kelly be- ganism being a product.” Founded by Kelly, former MIT pro-
lieves his company will power a science-fiction future where fessor Tom Knight and three other MIT Ph.D.s—Reshma Shet-
trees naturally grow into the shape of tables, seaweed morphs ty, Barry Canton and Austin Che—Ginkgo today has gained a
into car seats and smartphones repair themselves with a few toehold in fragrances, agriculture, food, therapeutics and can-
drops of sugar. That’s a long way off, but nearly 11 years after nabis with some two dozen customers and 50 active engineer-
founding Ginkgo, “it’s a little easier to talk about this and not ing projects. Ginkgo doesn’t create any of these products, but
sound like a crazy person,” Kelly says. by using data analytics and robotics to speed up the process
These are exciting times for companies like Ginkgo (named of discovering and making new organisms, Ginkgo will be at
after a dinosaur-era tree that’s a living fossil) that work in the their core. Revenue last year reached some $40 million, dou-
emerging field of synthetic biology. Spurred on by technologi- bling the previous year’s; it’s expected to double again this year.
cal and economic advances, particularly the plummeting cost part, by Kelly’s attendance last year at Warren Buffett’s annual
Ginkgo’s bigger bet is a portfolio approach—inspired, in
of DNA sequencing and the development of a precision gene-
MICHAEL PRINCE FOR FORBES themselves to start companies. Today, more than 600 compa- ates and invests in companies, including protein-alternative
Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. Ginkgo now cre-
editing tool called Crispr, entrepreneurs have been falling over

specialist Motif Ingredients, which Ginkgo recently spun off,
nies work in the space, according to SynBioBeta, a California
and Joyn Bio, its agricultural joint venture with Bayer. “That’s
firm that hosts the industry’s premier conference and main-
tains a database of synthetic biology startups. And that uni-
how we are scaling the business,” Kelly says. “It’s a Berkshire
verse is growing at a rate of 5% to 10% each year, as money
for biotech.”

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