Ginkgo Bioworks

AUSTIN CHE: So my name is Austin Che. I affiliate with MIT as a PhD student in computer science Core 6. My company is Gingko Bioworks. We engineer organisms and started out of the research that we were doing at MIT.

My undergraduate training with traditional computer science. And when I-- what drew me to MIT's graduate program was I wanted to do something different than programming computers. I've been doing it for most of my career at that point. And so my advisor convinced me that the next era was programming biology instead of programming silicon. And so at MIT, my graduate work, I went and learned biology, I went into lab, and I learned that-- how to manipulate biology and program it using DNA as the code instead of a typical programming language.

Ginkgo was started in 2008 by four of my classmates, PhD students, were graduating at around that time plus my advisor who recommended [INAUDIBLE] also joined. So the five of us started around 2008-- we had all-- the four of us, the gr-- plus my advisor had been working in this field for a while. This was-- when we started grad school, this was a pretty new area-- synthetic biology-- and we wanted to take it to the next level.

We wanted to see if we could commercialize some of the ideas that we had. And we didn't-- the idea for the company was-- that we believed in-- agreed on the mission that we wanted to do this, we didn't have a specific technology that we were bringing out from our graduate work. It took us a couple of years to get to explore the fields, try different business models, and we didn't take we didn't take our first money until 2014. And so we were trying to explore the area, and trying to find the right fit, and I think now we've shown-- we've seen explosive growth and interest in the company.

At the heart of what we're trying to do is utilize biology as a technology. Silicon has been great at being able to process information. So we can program computers to move bits around, but it's not very good at interacting with the physical world. You can see good examples of macro size robots and things like that. Biology is great at manipulating atoms. We can precisely place them at the nanoscale. It can even go up to planet scale. It's not an exaggeration to say that this planet exists because of biology. And so what we are trying to do at Ginkgo is to learn how to harness that technology to build things and use biology as a manufacturing platform-- whether it's from chemicals or up to large larger things like-- bigger organisms or on a global scale. We think that biology has the has the solution and we just need to learn to utilize it. And so Ginkgo is trying to develop the tools, so that we can do that.

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AUSTIN CHE: So Gingko is working in a variety of different markets. Right now, we have, for example, customers and the flavors-and-fragrance industry. So, with our one of our partners, Robertet, who makes natural ingredients and sells them to perfume companies, we are working on a scent, and we've recently shown successful scale-up at the 50,000-liter scale.

So that's one kind of example of a project we're working on. We're also working on areas like bringing back extinct scents. So we have a project with looking at the genomes from extinct flowers and trying to see what scents that they could have made when they existed and bringing those back and seeing if that's interesting for the fragrance industry.

We're also in many other industries-- for example, cosmetics, nutritional supplements. And, like I said earlier, we view biology as a manufacture platform for making a wide variety of molecules. So anything that you can imagine, any chemical or anything physical, we think that biology should be able to do it. And there's a lot of areas we haven't tapped yet, such as pharma, human health, and areas where it is clear that biology can play a big difference. And so we are always looking for partners who have a need where they can use our platform to provide a solution to them.

So we use a variety of microbes right now, mostly yeast, some bacteria. Fundamentally, the way we approach problems and other companies in the space is that we are focused on making it easy across many different molecules. We're working on the platform.

When I was in grad school, a lot of the work that I was doing and people were working in similar areas, it's highly trained scientists at the bench, pipetting. So there was a lot of manual labor. And we didn't think that that's a very good use of how science should be done. And so the way Ginkgo works is that we've tried to bring all those things that can be automated into our foundry. We have well-defined interfaces, and we try to batch things together and take advantage of cost and scale and automation, so that the PhD scientist can spend their time thinking about how to design the organism rather than pipetting.

At the heart of biology is the code, which is DNA. So it's A, T, Cs, and Gs. We just have to learn which letters we want to put into the organism. So Ginkgo is the world's largest writer of DNA-- DNA synthesis. And recently we actually acquired a DNA-synthesis company, to bring it in house.

So we write a lot of DNA. So that's the first step, for engineering an organism, is to figure out what letters you want to write. And then the second step is to write those letters, to print those, print that DNA.

And after that, then, once you have a piece of DNA, you have to put it into a microbe, test it, and scale it up. And hopefully it makes what it is that you're trying to do.

Ginkgo is currently working a lot in the chemical industry and making chemicals, but we see our platform, manufacturing platform, to be useful in a lot of different areas. And we hope to be able to find partners that we can work with, in pharma or in other areas where we haven't even thought of, that we can apply our biological tools for manufacturing or for organism-engineering to bring value to new partners.

AUSTIN CHE: Gingko's platform is an end-to-end solution for engineering organisms. Very few entities out there are able to write as much DNA as we can-- not just because they don't have the resources to write it; they don't know what to write. So Ginkgo knows how to scale DNA sensors at a level that no one else is able to do. Then we are able to process those samples at a scale that other companies are unable to do, also.

And so we have, from beginning to end, a pipeline for quickly turning out strains of new organisms and testing them. We've been growing our foundries and creating new foundries in the past years. So, recently, we opened Bioworks2, which was our second foundry. And we have just begun construction on Bioworks3, which is our third foundry.

Each round of our foundry, we're really starting from scratch. It's a construction party. We're starting from bare walls and designing it from the ground up. And so our model is kind of taking the iteration and learn what's the best from the previous rounds and try to build a new and better foundry each time.

So inside each one Bioworks there's a lot of robotics, there's a lot of equipment, that helps automate each of the steps of engineering an organism. But the way we put them together so that they cohesively go together is kind of our secret software, how we design a foundry, and what we're calling the foundry. And a lot of it is software, a lot of it is automation, and a lot of it is just knowhow of how to hook pieces together and to scale processes up.