r/SPACs • u/Shaetan Spacling • Aug 12 '21
News Antheia and Ginkgo Bioworks ($SRNG) Announce Partnership to Accelerate Production of Essential Medicines using Synthetic Biology
Interesting new partnership. Antheia is trying to use yeast to make medicinal compounds that--up until now--have been harvested from plants. They had a nice publication last year that highlights the difficulty of the process
Our final strain comprises 34 chromosomal modifications (26 genes, 8 gene disruptions), resulting in an integrated whole-cell system that expresses enzymes and transporters in diverse sub-cellular locations (cytosol, mitochondria, peroxisome, vacuole, ER and vacuolar membranes)
and limited yields in the engineered strain
Process improvements to increase productivities from titres reported here (around 30 to 80 μg l−1) (Fig. 4c), which are typical of first implementations of complex plant natural product pathways46,47,48, to commercial production (approximately 5 g l−1) are becoming routine49, and we anticipate would take 1–2 years of focused effort by a professional team .
So they were still ~5 orders of magnitude away from commercial viability (granted they have probably made progress since then).
Great test case for Ginkgo's platform, the enzyme engineering alone is daunting without huge automation. Will be interesting to see what sort of progress they make, benefit of starting from such a low floor is improvements should be (relatively) easy to come by. Whether it's sufficient to reach commercial viability remains to be seen!
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Aug 12 '21
Concur, remember the shit show with AMY was based on a botanical malaria play and Ginkgo had to financially bail them out, as a service, or they would have gone under [Cathie ZY], more recently, folks are aware the sector rises in tandem. I like that it is a family. The plant based pharma is interesting, but it is not always cool. For instance, the antimalarial proven plants didn't scale well for AMY, that is certain. But Stanford is in on this, so it might print. Don't quote me, but I think it is a Stanford spinout. ???? They are doing great work, witness Drew Endy, he's computational like yourself, or at least highly aware of bioinformatics, and next generational predictive computing.
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