Synthetic Biology Pioneer Ginkgo Bioworks Offers $25M Free Access to Its Platform for COVID19 Projects

Here's another example of a small company moving very quickly to offer solutions to the COVID19 infection.

Boston-based synthetic biology pioneer Ginkgo Bioworks today offered $25M of no-cost work at its biofoundries to accelerate the development of point of care diagnostics, vaccines, or therapeutics. Ginkgo is also offering access to its infrastructure companies or academics at no cost.

Why does this matter?

Over the past 5 years, Ginkgo has invested more than $400M to build a massive and scalable infrastructure for biotechnology R&D. 

The company offers discovery and development capacity for the manufacturing of nucleic acid-based vaccines. COVID-19 is a RNA virus. Ginkgo has DNA design and fermentation capacity inhouse. They can also help accelerate the discovery and production of enzymes capable of improving the production of vaccines. 

Several companies have announced the development of COVID-19 antibody drugs. If you remember your high school biology, your body contains antibodies to fight off infections. Antibody drugs are used as cancer, autoimmune and inflammatory therapeutics. Antibody design is not easy. Ginkgo supports antibody-based therapeutics development by generating 100s of different antibody designs to optimize promising candidates. In addition, the company can help screen antibiodies that neutralize the COVID-19 virus.

The current news is filled with stories about testing delays. In the early days of the infection, a test developed by the Centers for Disease Control produced invalid results. It took weeks to figure out how to fix the test so that states and local labs could use it. 

Ginkgo's platform enables the rapid discovery of enzymes that can improve certain types of diagnostics tests and offers researchers several tools to sequence patient samples for the virus.

The company is also offering connections to funding sources, both public and private, as well as sharing research and development information.

For more information, here's Ginkgo's announcement.