Ginkgo Bioworks: Bringing us to the Future
The future of food. The future of biology. The future of technology. The future of cells. The future of manufacturing. All of this bundled up into a 15 billion dollar company, Ginkgo Bio-works. Ginkgo Bio-works has used its cell programming software to touch every aspect of our world, including helping Moderna process vaccines and scaling covid testing.
“What if we could grow everything?” Ginkgo Bio-works is building with biology, and making that possible. On the path to the future, Ginkgo has worked in strain improvement, enzyme discovery, new product development, biosecurity, and mammalian cell engineering.
How do they do it? Manipulating cell growth patterns to build with biology, is not a piece of cake. Through digital technology, they build software systems that can generate, process and store huge amounts of experimental data on scales that the world of biology has never seen before. They also streamline this process for generating data by building DDSI. They “play with the best tools”, through leveraging technologies like Amazon web services, react, redux, python, etc.
In 2018, Ginkgo Bio-works created a platform called Motif FoodWorks, a platform that is used to discover and develop new meat, dairy and plant based proteins. To feed the world, we need more than just traditional agriculture, we need new and innovative technologies to grow and distribute food. Their partnership with Motif centers has helped them develop commercial yeast strains and processes for protein production at a kilogram scale!
In under a year, they have developed 6 different prototype strains and produced product samples. Over the next 9 month, they improved their design an validated its concept future. Within two years, they developed commercial versions of these prototypes!
Even though Ginkgo Bio-works is bringing us to the future, it is leveraging the era of living medicines. Alongside Synlogic, they are programming microbe to treat complex disease in the gut with the magical powers of biology. The original problem that they were trying to solver surrounded the gut microbiome. There are essential amino acits that cant be synthesized by the bofy because the human pathways for catabolinzing these amino acids require many enzymes but the amount of genetic defects in those enzymes result in many different types of severe metabolic diseases. Learn more about how they solve that here (https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/our-work/the-era-of-living-medicines/ )
