Ginkgo Bioworks Opens Its Genetic Engineering Foundry

By Bio-IT World Staff 

March 18, 2015 | Ginkgo Bioworks announced this morning that its synthetic biology “foundry,” an 18,000-square-foot facility on the Boston waterfront designed to rapidly iterate through new prototypes of genetically modified organisms, is open for business. The company has also raised $9 million in its first venture funding round, after operating for its first seven years on contracts from organizations like DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Ginkgo is part of the first class of biotech companies to receive support from Y Combinator, a tech accelerator in San Francisco known for investing in firms like Reddit, Dropbox and Airbnb in their early stages. Like other members of Y Combinator’s freshman biotech class, Ginkgo claims to take an IT-style approach to biology, in this case by automating the process of inserting novel DNA into microbes. Proprietary software helps Ginkgo’s engineers design the vectors for inserting complexes of new DNA sequences, and a custom robotics system performs much of the hands-on lab work.

Ginkgo may be most like a tech company, however, in its drive for projects that can provide quick sources of revenue. While the company has pursued some contracts with the long time scales and high risks usually associated with the biotech industry — such as pharmaceutical partnerships, and arrangements with DARPA to create biofuel-producing microbes or bacterial communities that attack antibiotic-resistant infections — Ginkgo also works with the food and cosmetic industries to create yeasts that can produce custom flavorants or perfume extracts. These projects, such as an ongoing program with French fragrance designer Robertet to recreate rose oils in yeasts, are still scientifically demanding: natural scents are the product of perhaps dozens of genetic pathways working in concert. However, fragrances and flavorants have few regulatory barriers and offer high profits for small product yields.

While Ginkgo’s first foundry is now available for contract work, the company is already planning a second, more advanced facility, which it hopes to begin constructing in 2017.

Bioworks1, the "foundry" where Ginkgo conducts in synthetic biology projects. Image credit: Ginkgo Bioworks