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“When a young biotech company can hire people to write irrelevant magazine-style articles, times should be good.” battered Dirk Haussecker is a knowledgeable biotech stock picker active on Twitter.
Kelly says the magazine was inspired by Think, A periodical published by IBM beginning in the 1930s. “Why did they do that? Well, no one knew what a computer was,” says Kelly, who sees Ginkgo playing a similar role as a herald for the possibilities of genetic engineering.
During a podcastStat News reporters compared Ginkgo to a “meme stock” or “stonk” that is positioned to appeal to trends that pursue an investing public, regardless of its business fundamentals. When the SPAC deal is finalized in September, the company will trade under the stock symbol “DNA”, which was once owned by Genentech, the first hero of the biotech scene. “Ginkgo Bioworks doesn’t deserve to use the DNA code,” said Stat stock reporter Adam Feuerstein.
SPACs are a Wall Street trend This presents an IPO route that is little less than the usual review of a company’s financial outlook. Will Gornall, a business school professor at the University of British Columbia, believes that while they democratize investors’ access to hot sectors, they can also overestimate the value of companies. Some agreements like IPO of Richard Branson’s space company Virgin Galactic Holdings, did well, but the five electric car companies that went public through SPACs were later beaten by what Bloomberg said.wild“corrections.
Gornall can see a bookie’s logic in Ginkgo gambling. Stock market profits in recent years have been driven by only a handful of tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, and are now worth more than a trillion dollars each. “If there’s even a 1% chance that biology is the computer of the future, and this is the company that made it, this valuation might make sense,” Gornall says.
Other people’s products
Since its inception, Ginkgo has spent nearly half a billion dollars building laboratories, many of which are equipped with sophisticated laboratory instruments such as robots, gene sequencers and mass spectrometers. These “foundries” allow it to test for genes inserted into microorganisms (usually yeast) or other cells. It claims to be able to create 50,000 different genetically modified cells in a single day. A typical purpose of a foundry project is to evaluate which of the hundreds of versions of a particular gene is particularly good at converting, for example, sugar into a particular chemical. Kelly says customers can use Ginkgo’s services instead of setting up their own labs.
What’s missing from Ginkgo’s story is the blockbuster products from its research service. “If you’re labeling yourself ‘synbio,’ that means you’re setting the bar for success high – you’re saying you’re going to the moon,” says Koeris. “You’ve raised so much money against a great vision that soon you need to have a transformative product, whether it’s a drug or a crazy industrial product.”
Kelly says that to date, Ginkgo’s engineering of yeast cells has led to the commercial production of three odor molecules. Robert Weinstein, president and CEO of the US arm of flavor and additive manufacturer Robertet, confirmed that his company is now fermenting two such molecules using yeast designed by Kelly’s company. One, gamma-decalactone, has a strong peach fragrance. The other, massoia lactone, is a clear liquid normally isolated from the bark of a tropical tree; Used as a sweetener, it can be sold online for $1,200 per kilogram. Running a fermenter year-round can produce several million dollars’ worth of such a specialty chemical.
GINGKO BIOWORKS
According to George Church, a professor at Harvard Medical School, such products do not yet deliver on the promise that synthetic biology will drastically change production. “I think tastes and smells are a far cry from biology’s vision that it can do anything,” Church says. Kelly also struggles to reconcile the “destructive” potential he sometimes sees for synthetic biology with what Ginkgo has accomplished. The church caught my attention A May report in the Boston Globe It’s about Ginkgo’s merger with Soaring Eagle. In it, Kelly said his firm is an attractive investment because the world is becoming familiar with the extraordinary potential of synthetic biology, referring to covid-19 vaccines made from messenger RNA and animal-free proteins in new plant burgers like those from Impossible. food.
“The article was a list of achievements, but the most interesting achievements were others,” says Church. “It doesn’t look to me like it added up to $15 billion.” Still, Church says he hopes Ginkgo will succeed. The company is not only his “favorite unicorn”, but also took the remains some of its own synthetic bio ventures after it went bankrupt (recently sold a company to Zymergen). How ginkgo performs in the future “could help or harm our entire space,” he says.
While Ginkgo’s work didn’t lead to blockbusters, and Kelly lets it be “frustrating” that the biotech has taken so long, she says other customers’ products are coming soon. NS The cannabis company CronosThe Canada-based says it will sell intoxicating pineapple-flavored candy containing CBG, a molecular component of the cannabis flower, by the end of the year; Ginkgo helped show how the compound is made in yeast. A spin-off from Ginkgo called Motif FoodWorks, says hopes to have a synthetically produced meat flavor this year as well.
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