Cambrium and Ginkgo unveiled that they combined their capabilities to enable the rapid and cost-effective design of high performing, industrially relevant microbes for protein production.
Cambrium, a leading German start-up focused on the application of generative AI to protein design and synthesis, and Ginkgo Bioworks, which is building the leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity, announced the successful completion of their collaboration. Through the partnership, Cambrium and Ginkgo combined their capabilities to enable the rapid and cost-effective design of high performing, industrially relevant microbes for protein production.
Almost 2 years ago, Cambrium and FGen, a subsidiary of Ginkgo now known as Ginkgo’s Encapsulation and Screening team, announced a partnership to push the boundaries of data-driven metabolic engineering. Combining FGen’s expertise in microbial strain development and ultra high-throughput screening (uHTS) techniques with Cambrium’s Cloud Protein AI platform, the collaboration screened a vast quantity of cells to optimize their protein production.
The collaboration allowed scientists to map experimental data to in silico models, generating strain optimization insights and enabling faster convergence towards high performance protein production. It also enabled the isolation of novel cell lines which produced enhanced levels of high-value proteins. Through the collaboration, the teams were able to identify non-obvious engineering targets to significantly improve strain performance. In particular, the results show that, even with limited genome edits, it is possible to achieve significant increases across critical performance metrics in iterative fermentation cycles. With these advances, the partnership developed more efficient and cost-effective biomanufacturing methods for both companies and their partners.
“Partnering with FGen, and then Ginkgo, was a natural move to generate an immense amount of data to feed our AI algorithms,” said Dr. Charlie Cotton, Chief Science Officer of Cambrium. “By leveraging our respective strengths, we gained extremely valuable insights for both strain engineering and product optimization.”
“Using our ultra high-throughput screening (uHTS) capabilities and nanoliter-reactor technology, we were able to generate a vast quantity of data linked to specific phenotypes to feed the machine learning algorithms,” said Dr. Rocio Aguilar Suarez, Research Scientist at Ginkgo Bioworks. “By partnering with Cambrium, we were able to design a novel concept of strain engineering.”
The project was co-funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) in the framework of the Eurostars Project ArtIMiS (E!114792).
