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Synthetic Bio Pioneer Ginkgo Raises $70 Million to Tackle Covid-19 Testing

Synthetic Bio Pioneer Ginkgo Raises $70 Million to Tackle Covid-19 Testing

(Bloomberg) -- Ginkgo Bioworks Inc. has raised $70 million in an effort to build out DNA-based Covid-19 testing on a massive scale.

The firm is best known for its efforts to design, modify and manufacture organisms to make industrial processes cheaper and more efficient — for example, it’s working to help program bacteria for treatments as living medicines. Now, Ginkgo is looking to repurpose the DNA-sequencing and automation infrastructure it developed to read and modify living cells to help address the nation’s shortfall of diagnostic testing.

The U.S. has vastly scaled up its testing and is now processing somewhere between 300,000 and 450,000 each day, according to The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer initiative to compile virus data. But those numbers still fall far short of the tens of millions that some experts have suggested are needed daily to reopen the economy safely and return to a new normal.

Synthetic Bio Pioneer Ginkgo Raises $70 Million to Tackle Covid-19 Testing

DNA sequencing, Ginkgo is betting, might allow those efforts to scale up far more rapidly and cheaply to help achieve that end. The company is worth about $4.2 billion, based on a September effort that raised $290 million. The latest round includes investors such as DNA-sequencing giant Illumina Inc.

“Massive scale Covid-19 testing is critical to ensuring our safe return to work and school,” Francis deSouza, chief executive of Illumina, said in explaining the company’s decision to back the Ginkgo project.

The majority of diagnostic tests for Covid-19 rely on a technique to process patient samples known as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. Machines that process PCR tests can only handle a few thousand samples each day, at most. Next generation machines, designed to make DNA-sequencing cheap by process many samples at once, could potentially process hundreds of thousands of tests each day.

Ginkgo has made its current sequencing capacity available for free to epidemiological teams across the country.

“A facility of our size could process half-a-million tests each day,” Jason Kelly, co-founder and chief executive officer of the Boston-based firm, said in an interview Wednesday. “I would like Ginkgo to be processing 10% of the national capacity.”

Ginkgo is not the only entity exploring a DNA-based approach to testing. In a non-peer-reviewed study published last month, Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University’s Broad Institute, described an approach using high-volume sequencing machines in which they added molecular bar codes to each patient’s sample, pooled the samples and sequenced them all at once. One of these high-throughput machines, Zhang said, could test 100,000 samples at once for almost $7 per test.

Ginkgo would use a similar approach to detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the disease Covid-19.

“We have been poorly served by existing testing; the methods by which we’re doing testing were never designed to scale,” said Richard Lifton, president of The Rockefeller University and a pioneer in using genetics to understand disease. 

Scaled-up testing, he said, will help answer questions that are still unknown, such as how many people with Covid-19 are truly asymptomatic and how commonly children are infected. While DNA-based tests would still face hurdles similar to many other tests in collecting and transporting samples, they could be processed at a far greater scale for a fraction of the price.

The new investment will go in part toward building a monitoring and diagnostic testing facility at Ginkgo’s Boston Seaport labs. Its test will require emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.

Kelly envisions a three-pronged plan to build out infrastructure to ensure better biosecurity in the future. Better surveillance technology needs to be in place to catch potential pandemics earlier, he said, pointing to efforts by some researchers to do things like sequence sewer waste for evidence of disease. In addition, there need to be quicker ways to create vaccines and scale up testing and tracing to contain outbreaks. Ginkgo is also providing support to Moderna Inc.’s efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine and synthesizing viral sequences for research use, among other things.

“We need, as a planet, to have in place epidemic response at scale,” he said.  “Especially as we are entering into a standpoint where it is easier and easier to engineer biology.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.