Ai Digital Biology

News Digest #247 - Twist's IPO, Ginkgo’s Bioworks4, iGEM’s winners, and Geltor’s Series A

Oct 31, 2018

Your guide to what's new in synthetic biology

Hi all,

Today is an exciting day for the synthetic biology industry as Emily Leproust, Twist Bioscience CEO, will be ringing the closing bell on the NASDAQ as Twist goes public today. Twist has priced its initial public offering of 5,000,000 shares of its common stock at a price of $14.00 per share. Emily said: “We are thrilled to take this next step in our evolution to continue to enable our customers to change the world by improving health and sustainability.” Read our story about Twist’s IPO here.

This week, Ginkgo Bioworks opened its latest biological engineering foundry, Bioworks4, which will be dedicated to the engineering of human and animal cells. Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder, says they're "thrilled to open Bioworks4 and look forward to contributing to the infrastructure that will one day make starting a pharma company as easy as starting an internet company, and simultaneously enable big pharma to be as agile as a startup.” Ginkgo also held their first annual Ferment conference in Boston last week.

Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, and Jason Kelly, CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks at SynBioBeta.

I was at iGEM last week seeing what the future holds -- check out the winners here. My photos above are of iGEM Aix-Marseille who developed a genetic bed bug trap! I also met Tiare Ribeaux of Counter Culture Labs at the Global Community Bio Summit 2018 organized by David Kong, which we’ll be writing up in a later issue of our newsletter.

Also, if you missed the SynBioBeta 2018 session on engineered cell therapies (sponsored by Synthego), you can read our writer Chris Patil’s excellent summary of the session here.In other news, Geltor announced $18.2 million in Series A financing to create high-value designer proteins by fermentation. The company is producing collagen for the beauty, nutraceutical, and food and beverage industries, while producing less waste and consuming fewer natural resources than the current process sourced from animal waste. Touchlight Genetics announced a collaboration with Janssen Biotech to evaluate the application of their novel DNA platform across a wide range of applications in genetic medicine. Charles River and Distributed Bio announced a partnership to create an integrated antibody discovery and development platform.

Alexander Lorestani, Co-Founder and CEO of Geltor, and Sarah Milsom, Group Business Development Manager at Touchlight Genetics.

Finally, Y Combinator announced a request for startups and nonprofits focusing on technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere. “It’s time to take big swings at stopping climate change and put more resources into work already being done”, writes Sam Altman. Our next course “Introduction to Synthetic Biology" will take place on January 24 at Impact.tech. Learn about the growing power of biology to perform useful tasks and make high value products from drugs to spiders silk, register here.

Have a great week!

John