Synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks announced its $25 million commitment for free access to its platform in the development of a long-term solution to the COVID-19 crisis.  Companies building treatments that can stop COVID-19 can now avail of Ginkgo’s services:

For the manufacturing of nucleic acid-based vaccines:

• Provide process development capacity with Ginkgo’s large bank of ambr250 fermenters for production of vaccine DNA
• Assist in developing E. coli or alternative strains for increased production of plasmid or vaccine DNA
• Rapidly discover and produce enzymes capable of improving downstream in vitro processing steps specific to the development of mRNA-based vaccines
• Use Ginkgo’s high-throughput DNA synthesis capacity to rapidly synthesize and screen many designs for vaccine discovery and optimization

To support antibody-based therapeutics development:

• Support lead optimization of promising candidate Abs, specifically using rapid DNA synthesis to generate 100s of different Ab designs and inserting these into CHO cells at a precise set of location(s) using cell lines with pre-engineered landing pads
• Screening via virus neutralization or (lack of) antibody-dependent enhancement of infectivity leveraging rapid & high throughput screening on the Berkeley Lights Beacon (an optical microfluidics screening platform that we have in-house)

To enable point of care diagnostics:

• Rapidly discover enzymes capable of improving CRISPR/Cas-based nucleic acid diagnostics
• Use Ginkgo’s protein engineering pipeline to further improve key parameters such as diagnostic specificity and selectivity, limit of detection, temperature and storage stability, and overall robustness
• Synthesize swap-in/swap-out guide RNA components for CRISPR/Cas-based devices, allowing rapid updating as new viruses need to be detected
• Scale protein expression to rapidly optimize production of the enzymes needed for device manufacture

To provide research tools:

• Leverage Ginkgo’s NGS platform to provide viral sequencing of ~10,000 samples per day. Environmental samples could be sequenced at their facility and Ginkgo said it can partner with clinical labs to increase capacity for patient samples.
• Synthesize gene length fragments of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a variety of expression formats and distribute via plasmid repositories to vetted and licensed entities.

Ginkgo said it has invested ~$400M over the last 5 years to build a 100,000 sqft automated facility that is used today to support partners like Roche and Bayer with a broad range of infrastructure for biotechnology R&D.

If you are currently a company or academic lab that is developing a diagnostic, drug, or vaccine and are interested in leveraging Ginkgo’s infrastructure at no cost please email the company at covid-response@ginkgobioworks.com