An Artificial Opportunity

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The Boston area, although not as fertile as the Silicon Valley, still generates unusual start-ups with regularity. Ginkgo BioWorks is one of them, and not just in its name. The firm manufactures and supplies biological parts, to be assembled by other companies inside factory microorganisms. Ginkgo was set up two years ago by five PhDs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Ginkgo has grown without venture capital, and has become one of the most-watched startups in synthetic biology, an emerging subject that is promising to rewrite several industries. Ginkgo started with an automated process for assembling genes. When biotech companies genetically engineer organisms, they do it painstakingly, sewing genes together slowly using specialised enzymes. Ginkgo’s process lets it not only assemble genes quickly, but also provide a large number of different versions of a gene assembly, a process that would take too long to do manually.

The New Genesis
Ginkgo’s products are now keenly sought by industries eager to find efficient and safe ways of making products. Its expertise is also sought by companies that use biology to make products that are never found in nature. Says Reshma Shetty, one of the founders of Ginkgo: “We are moving away from depending only on synthesised DNA for our growth.”

For example, Ginkgo has a $6-million project, with other institutions, from the US Department of Energy to engineer bacteria E Coli to make fuels using carbon dioxide from the air. Making fuel directly from carbon dioxide is one of the dreams of synthetic biology, and is generating a large amount of business activity, including from Craig Venter, the US scientist and entrepreneur who made headlines the past week by making a large piece of synthesised DNA work inside a living cell. Venter’s fame is itself focusing attention on synthetic biology, but the subject is attracting funds for making useful products than creating artificial life.

Synthetic biology is now considered one of the hottest emerging areas in science and technology. The word derives from the practice of developing parts of organisms — usually genes — in the laboratory, and then making them work inside a living cell, in order to make useful products that are not otherwise possible.

In conventional genetic engineering, the genes are usually taken from another living organism. Observers think that the subject will play a key role in several industries this century, but it provides several opportunities even in the present. According to consulting firm BCC Research, the global synthetic biology market will grow from $233.8 million in 2008 to $2.4 billion in 2013. But this size may mask the true impact of the industry, as industries such as energy, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, which use synthetic biology products could be worth tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

For chemicals and energy, there is a need to shift away from petroleum-based feedstocks and move toward economically viable bio-routes that use renewable feedstocks. Synthetic biology is a critical technology platform for achieving this objective, says John Bergin, market analyst at BCC Research, in a recent report. Synthetic biology thus could help these industries clean up and grow rapidly, but some of its promises may be realised a decade from now. No wonder the subject has caught the fancy of venture capitalists.

Consider the company Amyris Biotechnologies, based in Emeryville near San Francisco. Set up in 2003, it has so far raised $244 million in capital. Amyris is developing products in three areas: biofuels, malaria treatment and chemicals. It is supposed to commercialise its first set of products next year. This includes biofuels and the anti-malarial drug artemisinin. This drug is expensive and normally extracted from plants, but Amyris has found a cheaper and semi-synthetic route that has been now transferred to healthcare major Sanofi-Aventis.



Amyris, which has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) and is in a quiet period, could not comment for this story. Its IPO filing — and earlier conversations with investors — makes clear its unusual approach towards biofuels. Most biofuel companies are trying to make ethanol or biodiesel, fuels that are not quite as good as petrol or diesel.

Ethanol, for example, has only 70 per cent of the energy density of petrol. Amyris began by selecting the attributes that would make the perfect fuel, and then assembled — on paper — a list of compounds that would together make this fuel. It then designed metabolic pathways in bacteria that could make fuels with sugar as the feedstock. This is a fine idea in the lab, but not yet thought to be commercially feasible. So, until it perfects the technology on a large scale, Amyris could look at other ways of making its revenue. Artemisinin is one example, and chemicals — made in small quantities, not in millions of barrels like oil — could be another.

The Gene Catalogue
There are other companies attempting similar things, but in less ambitious time scales. Synthetic Genomics, also based in the Bay Area in the US, is trying to do a host of things using microbes with synthetic genes. Synthetic Genomics was founded by Venter. “Unlike Amyris, Synthetic Genomics is looking at commercialising technologies in a decade. This technology needs a lot of development to reach commercial stage,” says Eric Wesoff, senior analyst at San Francisco-based market research company Greenetech Media.

Synthetic Genomics has received an investment of $300 million from energy giant Exxon, and a commitment of another $300 million if its technology works as promised. The company is developing organisms that can produce biofuels using algae and plant mass, recover hydrocarbons, convert coal into useful products and do several other things. Synthetic Genomics funded a major portion of Craig Venter’s research that created the first organism with a synthesised gene.

There are several developments that favour Amyris, Synthetic Genomics and other synthetic biology companies. The cost of synthesising DNA is coming down rapidly and will soon reach a stage where it could be cheaper to synthesise DNA than clone it in the lab as is done now. Our library of genes is growing rapidly. Venter himself is supposed to have a library of 40 million genes. Scientists now have the sequence of the genome of over 350 organisms. Over the years, these would be synthesised and combined in labs to generate novel combinations that can change the world as we know it.

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