Recently flush with cash, Seaport District-based biotech unicorn Ginkgo Bioworks partnered with Berkeley Lights Inc. The Emeryville, Calif.-based startup specializes in digital cell biology.
This biotech partnership, valued at $150 million, will bring Berkeley Lights' optofluidic platform, a technology platform that captures, manipulates and characterizes individual cells, into Ginkgo's genetic engineering foundries.
Simply put, Berkeley's digital cell biology platform speeds up drug discovery and development for cell therapies and improves gene editing. So far, the technology has found applications in human reproduction, agricultural biology and synthetic biology, one of Ginkgo's interest areas.
Berkeley Lights claims its platform can shrink the time taken to complete biological experiments from months to days.
“We’re exponentially improving our ability to engineer biology every year, and new technologies, like Berkeley Lights’ platform, are essential to maintaining that pace of improvement,” Ginkgo Bioworks co-founder and Head of Foundry, Barry Canton said in a statement. “The Berkeley Lights team has already had an incredible impact in pharma — including cell line development and antibody discovery — and we believe this partnership will bring about a step-change in the speed and scale at which we engineer biology for applications across a variety of industries. We hope to move not just Ginkgo initiatives forward, but the entire biotech sector.”
In June, Ginkgo teamed up with Cambridge-based therapeutics company Synlogic to develop drugs using Ginkgo’s bacteria engineering platform to treat rare diseases. With Synlogic, which develops therapeutics focused on probiotics as drugs, Ginkgo entered into a service contract to program nine new program cells over the next 12 months. Additionally, the company invested $80 million in Synlogic for a 25 percent stake.
More recently, Ginkgo closed a $290 million Series E round, putting its valuation at $4 billion. The startup now has the distinction of being the most valuable venture-backed company in Greater Boston.
