Customised organisms will transform the way we manufacture everything from car seats to cellphones. A group of MIT-trained scientists at $1.4 billion synthetic biology startup Ginkgo Bioworks is brewing a revolution
Walk down Drydock Avenue in the old industrial waterfront of Boston and you’ll be reminded that the city remains a significant industrial port. Trucks rattle past the working dry dock. A FedEx shipping container terminal looms to the south while the Coastal Cement Corporation anchors the street. Inside building number 27, Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly and his four co-founders are working on a different industrial vision—one in which biology is at the core. This quintet of modern-day Frankensteins design, modify and manufacture organisms to make existing industrial processes cheaper and entirely new processes possible.
It’s heady stuff. Fertilising corn usually requires spraying acres of farmland with a stew of nasty chemicals. Ginkgo is working on bioengineered, environmentally friendly coatings for corn seeds that will fertilise themselves. Today, most biotech drugs are non-living proteins. Ginkgo is working on creating living creatures, genetically programmed to seek and destroy disease, that would be ingested whole. Fake meat tastes gross. Ginkgo promises to make it taste better.
And that’s just the beginning. Recently Ginkgo recreated the scent of an extinct Hawaiian hibiscus, blurring the line between what’s living and what’s dead. Kelly believes his company will power a science-fiction future where trees naturally grow into the shape of tables, seaweed morphs into car seats and smartphones repair themselves with a few drops of sugar. That’s a long way off, but nearly 11 years after founding Ginkgo, “it’s a little easier to talk about this and not sound like a crazy person”, Kelly says.
These are exciting times for companies like Ginkgo (named after a dinosaur-era tree that’s a living fossil) that work in the emerging field of synthetic biology. Spurred on by technological and economic advances, particularly the plummeting cost of DNA sequencing and the development of a precision gene-editing tool called Crispr, entrepreneurs have been falling over themselves to start companies. Today, more than 600 companies work in the space, according to SynBioBeta, a Pleasant Hill, California-based firm that hosts the industry’s premier conference and maintains a database of synthetic biology startups. And that universe is growing at a rate of 5-10 percent each year, as money pours into these firms, including $3.8 billion last year alone, according to SynBioBeta founder John Cumbers.
These startups run the gamut from sellers of the DNA molecules that are the building blocks of life to high-profile consumer companies. Plant-based-burger startup Beyond Meat went public in May and is now worth nearly $10 billion; its synthetic biology competitor Impossible Foods is a venture-backed unicorn that recently began selling Impossible Whoppers to fast-food giant Burger King. Bolt Threads, valued at $700 million, makes bio-based spider silk for use in textiles and skin care. At the other end of the spectrum, Twist Bioscience, the largest seller of synthetic DNA (which counts Ginkgo as its largest customer), went public last year and now has a market cap of nearly $1 billion.
Ginkgo is the leader in organism engineering. “Ginkgo is category defining,” says Cumbers, who first met Kelly when they were PhD students (Cumbers at Brown, Kelly at MIT). “They pretty much created the whole idea of the organism being a product.”
(This story appears in the 13 September, 2019 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)