Ginkgo Bioworks Partners with Google Cloud on AI for Drug Development

Ginkgo Bioworks and Google Cloud have inked a five-year strategic cloud and AI partnership, intended to enable Ginkgo to develop and deploy AI tools for biology and biosecurity. Under the strategic partnership, Ginkgo will work to develop new, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) running on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform across genomics, protein function, and synthetic biology, helping Ginkgo’s customers in fields as diverse as drug discovery, agriculture, industrial manufacturing, and biosecurity. In addition, Google Cloud will provide funding to help Ginkgo achieve certain milestones over the next three years.

“We believe that by partnering with Google Cloud, Ginkgo can supercharge our mission to make biology easier to engineer,” said Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. “The most pressing challenges of our generation require biological solutions, and we must figure out how to better leverage our collective capabilities and move faster.”

Ginkgo operates as a horizontal biological engineering and biosecurity platform, working to accelerate and de-risk scientific R&D projects for customers across industries. As of the most recent quarter, Ginkgo had over 100 active R&D programs on its platform with customers as diverse as Bayer, Biogen, Merck, Novo Nordisk, Sumitomo Chemical, and Syngenta.

Ginkgo also has a long history of collaborating with government partners on a number of national security priorities including sustainable manufacturing. Its biosecurity business unit, Concentric by Ginkgo, played a central role in the US response to COVID-19 and is working with the CDC and a growing list of international governments to develop biosecurity infrastructure, including pathogen detection and response.

Ginkgo anticipates its first model to be a foundation model for proteins. Once this foundation model has been successfully developed, it is expected to set the stage for a number of applications, including generative protein design, protein sequence optimization, and class specific protein functional engineering that could have broad commercial potential across therapeutics, small molecule production, gene therapy capsid engineering, and more. (Source: Ginkgo Bioworks Website, 29 August, 2023)