Page 68 - Forbes - Asia (October 2019)

TECHNOLOGY
“We all do synthetic biology, but we are
a craft brewer and they are Budweiser.”
curately pluck the irregularly shaped colonies from the sur-
rounding jelly. The facility is quiet, with relatively few people.
Largely, the machines do the work.
The automation allows Ginkgo to test thousands, or even
tens of thousands, of designs on each project, Canton says,
compared with a traditional lab where a bench scientist
might be able to do ten. “We were inspired by what Intel and
others do in building their semiconductor facilities,” he says.
This winter, Ginkgo opened Bioworks 4, which will work
with mammalian cells.
Already, Ginkgo is the largest user of lab-printed DNA in
the world—Kelly estimates it uses about 25% of the total, or
about 50 million base pairs a month—and it recently pur-
chased Gen9, a supplier that specializes in long strands of
DNA. It also maintains a massive and growing “codebase” to
track and analyze what it has learned from each project. “You
can apply manufacturing theory to cells,” Kelly says. “The
more cell programming you do on our platform, the cheaper
and easier and faster you do it.”
Kelly believes that scale will allow it to succeed in a variety
of unrelated industries. “We all do synthetic biology, but we
are a craft brewer and they are Budweiser,” says John Garrett,
co-CEO of Glycosyn, which Ginkgo has partnered with to
more efficiently produce oligosaccharides, a healthy compo-
nent of breast milk, in E. coli (a boon for mothers who can’t
breastfeed but also potentially a treatment for maladies such
as Crohn’s disease).
The first major deal Kelly struck was with Bayer, the world’s
largest seed company since its acquisition of Monsanto. In
September 2017, the two created their Joyn Bio joint venture
with a $100 million investment, to develop seed coatings that
Jason Kelly in Ginkgo Bioworks headquarters in Boston.
66 | FORBES ASIA OCTOBER 2019
will enable farmers to use less chemical fertilizer. Soybean mi-
crobes have an enzyme that lets them take nitrogen out of the
air, but corn microbes do not, so Ginkgo is taking genes from
the soybean microbe and redesigning them to work in mi-
crobes that live on corn. It’s an early-stage big idea—world-
wide, farmers spend more than $150 billion a year on fertiliz-
er—that’s at least five years from market, even if all goes well.
“The challenge for any big company is how do you realistically
go after these moonshots,” says Joyn Bio CEO Mike Miille.
For Ginkgo, Bayer’s interest was a turning point. More deals
followed. With Canadian cannabis company Cronos, for exam-
ple, it is developing lab-grown rare cannabinoids that could be
used for appetite suppression and anti-inflammatory creams. If
Ginkgo can deliver the strands, it will get stock valued at more
than $200 million today. With Cambridge, Massachusetts-
based biotech Synlogic, it is working on living, gut-based treat-
ments for liver problems and neurological disorders.
In February, Ginkgo spun out Motif Ingredients which is de-
veloping vegan-friendly proteins that can be added to food to
replace animal products such as meat and cheese, with $90 mil-
lion in funding from Viking and others. And in May it acquired
the genome-mining platform of Warp Drive Bio, a subsidiary
of Redwood City, California-based Revolution Medicines, and
with it an agreement with pharmaceutical giant Roche to search
for a new class of antibiotics, a deal that could be worth $160
million, plus additional royalties if Ginkgo succeeds.
Kelly believes he could easily add 50 or 100 more part-
nerships or investments without maxing out. “Nobody has
cracked the puzzle at scale yet,” says Endy, now a professor at
Stanford and not affiliated with the company. “Jason, with his
business acumen, is testing an experiment with these joint
ventures. I think that’s a good way to approach it, and I hope
it works. But nobody has done that before.”
Back at Ginkgo’s headquarters, Kelly picks up a copy of
Knight’s first cellular computing study, written for the U.S.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency more than two
decades ago, and thumbs through it. Stopping at page 14,
where a graph shows zero sequenced genomes in 1995 rising
to just 10 in 1997, he lets out a loud laugh. “We just acquired
a database of 135,000 sequenced genomes.”
Today, he believes, synthetic biology is developing at a
similar pace to computing in the mainframe era. As the field
develops and creates products currently unimaginable, he ar-
gues, biology will help people live better lives, while mov-
ing away from chemical-based processes that lead to climate MICHAEL PRINCE FOR FORBES
change and environmental degradation. “Eventually,” he says,
“it should be a point of pride. You should want things made
with GMOs because they’re made with biology.” F