Science is always important, but lately the Boston biotech space has been explosive with new fundings, launches and other signs of growth.
The latest major round of funding was announced by Ginkgo Bioworks, which raised $70 million from Illumina and existing investors.
Ginkgo Bioworks markets itself as the “Organism Company.” It can create, design and modify microorganisms to serve certain purposes. That can involve manufacturing engineered yeasts to help with fermentation, creating enzymes to break things down on the molecular level and so on. The ability to do this comes from the company’s DNA-sequencing technology and lab automation hardware.
But Ginkgo raised this new funding to take its technology in a slightly different direction. The company is currently in the process of building an epidemic monitoring and diagnostic facility to allow for large-scale COVID-19 testing. The company believes that the United States will need a larger scale of testing resources in order to get ahead of the pandemic, and this facility will help it provide that.
These COVID-19 tests will be run on Illumina’s next-generation sequencing technology, which is a machine about the size of a washing machine and can process tens of thousands of tests at the same time. This technology is still in its early stages, but Ginkgo plans to make some of its capacity available to public-health departments at no cost.
“As programmers of DNA, we recognize rapid pandemic response as an essential technology that must be built alongside biological engineering,” Jason Kelly, CEO and cofounder of Ginkgo Bioworks, said in a statement. “The infrastructure we are building for next-generation sequencing is critical for responding to the current pandemic, as well as providing early detection and response for the future.”
