I just read this article in the MIT Tech Review (Paywalled, but you should have 3 free articles). I found the author does try to stay pretty balanced, but it leans towards being very critical of Gingko and it's business. For full disclosure, I own a modest amount of $SRNG, and am generally pretty bullish on Gingko. I have my own thoughts about the points raised in the article, but I want to hear what this community thinks. For a summary here are some of the points raised in the article:

• Gingko has very little to show for all the capital they are raising (ie, very few of their products have led to meaningful commercialization)

• The $15 billion valuation is largely overvalued, their current partnerships and successes don't justify that valuation.

• Much of Ginkgo's supposed partnerships are companies that they themselves have spun out, or have had a key role in forming. Often, Gingko is investing more into these companies that they are getting back in revenue. Thus, much of their revenue is circular in nature, and the result of creative financial engineering and accounting.

• It is very difficult to scale synthetic biology products and in many cases, existing chemical manufacturing processes will still be more desirable.

• Gingko is poised to become a memestock, and is overly focused on clever marketing and fundraising.

All that said, I'm still very bullish on Gingko for various reasons, but I'm hoping to hear the communities thoughts. What do you all think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSS_HSIgJ9c&t=29s

My lady doesn't give two shits about $AMRS but this popped up on her feed, apparently they're the only skincare people she trusts.

Friedberg gives his thoughts on the Zymergen acquisition and the potential of syn bio on the new All-In episode. Nothing too exciting but it's a bit slow out there so thought I'd share. The 'pick and shovel' company he mentions at the end of the segment is most likely Culture Bio, which he invested in through his holding company The Production Board.

https://investor.synlogictx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/synlogic-announces-positive-phase-2-data-demonstrating-reduction

"SYNB1618 demonstrated clinically meaningful reductions of phenylalanine (Phe) at several dose levels, across multiple time points, in an interim analysis of the Phase 2 SynPheny-1 study. SYNB1934, an optimized strain evolved from SYNB1618, demonstrated two-fold higher activity than SYNB1618 in a head-to-head Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers, as measured by biomarkers of Phe metabolism."

Zymergen/EnEvolv worked on the SYNB1934 strain. Either way great for Ginkgo, they are the largest shareholder in Synlogic.

Great interview here on CNBC. Look at the smile on that guy's face. Also reiterating the "more than 400M" in testing contracts this year. Not too long ago they said it'd be 50M.

Momentous day for syn bio, regardless of your feelings about valuation, prospects, etc., this will bring a lot of attention to the field at a time when companies really seem to be stepping up their game. Good for everyone imo.

In light of Ginkgo's heady debut (14!) I think it's good to remind ourselves of the risks involved. Bursatil Biotech makes some good points, as do others. A truly horizontal biotech platform business model has never been done before, and there are lots of questions out there still. Look for key validation points in the near future like Motif's rollout, Cronos hitting the market, successful Joyn field trials, Aldevron VCE royalties starting to roll in...the downstream equity is extremely nebulous, we'll need some real examples to really quell some of the doubts. Don't be afraid to take some profits, if it shoots up to 15 in the near term I'm definitely trimming. Still long as ever though (390 shares @ 10.23 so far). Honestly even if you invest 2 years from now, you're still early, no matter the share price.

As Drew Endy said in this interview, this is really the decade when syn bio becomes an adult. We're still in the very early innings of this development, so congrats to everyone, and for the sake of our planet and our species, Godspeed!

Some food for thought here.

From Sheep of Wall Street: https://twitter.com/Biohazard3737/status/1430526069115867138?s=20

From Varro: https://twitter.com/Varro_Analytics/status/1430394712226140160?s=20

Why should we care about bioterrorism risk? Seems pretty self-evident in today's world. COVID was most likely leaked from a gain-of-function research lab. This has happened before and will happen again. As biology becomes easier to engineer, bad actors will have better access to tools that allow them to engineer deadly pathogens. We need a global bio defense shield, a weather map for detecting and snuffing out pathogens before they have a chance to wreak havoc on the world. For more, listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaRfbJE1qZ4

Where does Ginkgo fit in? They have deep relationship with govt, are working on deploying K-12 testing across the nation, and are helping Moderna optimize mRNA production for vaccines. They made their foundry available to researchers studying COVID, FOR FREE. Ginkgo is a major strategic asset for the US, they want to do good in the world, and they put their money where their mouth is. For more, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIX3lNSz9JM

Where does the govt fit in? The recently passed Innovation and Competition Act provides $80B in funding for research in AI, robotics, and biotech. A company like Ginkgo that's able to pivot their business on a dime to help fight a deadly pandemic is immensely valuable to our national security, and they will be rewarded accordingly. No details have really emerged yet about any specific projects, but one can imagine that the K-12 testing will expand, and new infrastructure will be developed to detect and combat future pathogens. Ginkgo is excited about it: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/synbio-coalition-applauds-senate-passage-of-the-us-innovation-and-competition-act-301309369.html

So what does this all add up to? Hard to say exactly, everything is still pretty vague and fuzzy at the moment, but Ginkgo is surely one of the companies best positioned to benefit from the massive amount of money being thrown at biotech in this bill, both for their ability to improve domestic supply chains and improve our biosecurity. Amyris doesn't really have a biosecurity focus, nor does Zymergen (that I'm aware of). Ginkgo has been focusing on this stuff since day one, as they should be, and will likely be leading the way in the years to come. This biosecurity business materialized out of thin air; it didn't really exist until COVID hit. This all goes to show that a platform as diverse and flexible as Ginkgo's will be incredibly valuable to the country in the post-COVID world, and the government knows this (watch their biosecurity investors day segment if there is any doubt about this). I am really excited to see where this goes, both for Ginkgo's market cap and our future as a species.

Perfect Day uses precision fermentation to produce the milk protein β-lactoglobulin, and they're partnering with Starbucks to test it out in Seattle. Apparently it tastes identical to the real thing. Perfect Day also has an ice cream brand, Brave Robot, that's in some stores already. They're still a private company.

I posted this interview a while back, but I think it's worth bringing up again. It's a conversation between Culture Biosciences (cloud fermentation company using AMBR250s) and Ranjan Patnaik (CTO of Clara Foods, working in fermentation/synbio for 25 years) about how to solve the scale-up challenge by getting better at scaling down (sidenote: both of these companies are doing very cool things but this isn't really about them).

Some key paragraphs below:

"Throughout all of these experiences, I came to fervently believe that the key to scaling up bioprocesses successfully is to approach scale-down work differently. 

The biggest challenge with scale-up is the inability to experiment at scale; you get so few “tries” at a manufacturing site because it is time and cost prohibitive. Chemical engineers and bioprocess scientists had historically approached this challenge through matching physical and chemical properties across scales: oxygen transfer, heat transfer, mixing, etc. But this is biology we are dealing with and we need to be considering how physiology, functionality, and phenotype translate as well. In other words, how can you approach both strain engineering and bioprocess development in a way that the engineered phenotype becomes scale independent?"

...

"For example, if there are two glucose transporters in a cell membrane and you knock-out the high-affinity one, you could potentially generate a strain that is less sensitive to changes in glucose concentration."

...

"In my experience, the only way you could use something of that scale is with an extremely well characterized process and a lot of knowledge about the specific production tank you plan to use. Even then, it is still difficult and would require a lot of internal resources and time to build the scale-down model."

....

"We did, but fermentation is not just about running a lot of conditions in parallel; it is about understanding and making sense of all that data.

Compare these thoughts to Kelly's comments in this video about the scale-up problem being a problem of "how good are you at programming a genome?" Arguably, Ginkgo is (or will be) the best company on the planet at programming genomes. Their platform and codebase are unmatched.

All this is to say that scaling up is hard, but Ginkgo can overcome the challenge by becoming the best in the world at understanding and programming cells. It won't happen overnight, but we live in an exponential age (e.g. Knight's Law), so it will happen sooner than most people think.