For the production of medicines and various products of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries today use huge factories, where hundreds of chemical reactions to create the desired ingredients. But it has long been known that one of the most complex “chemical laboratory” is literally in each of us are cells of our body. And, according to representatives of the company Ginkgo Bioworks to produce different products using the cells — not such a bad idea.
It should be noted that Ginkgo Bioworks is already doing something similar by developing using of microbial bio-mills of various flavors, products for the perfume industry, fertilizer and so on.
“The ability of biological organisms to create a complex at the molecular level products are far superior to the best production system, ever created by people.” — said CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks Jason Kelly.
For the production of aforesaid products Ginkgo Bioworks previously used platform for genetic reprogramming, but limited to living organisms of lower order bacteria and yeast. Now the company opens a new factory Bioworks 4, where experiments will be run with the bioengineering of mammalian cells (including human) to achieve more good results.
Such became possible thanks to the acquisition of the company Ginkgo Bioworks startup Gen9, which gave them genetic bio-printer that prints the DNA fragments with a length of up to 10,000 base pairs. Moreover, equipping the factory Bioworks 4 opportunity for machine production cell lines can achieve much greater productivity.
“People at successful coincidence of circumstances can extract 24 samples of DNA for study. The robot will be able to retrieve more than 1000 samples for the same time. It’s like the difference between the first assembled manually by the vehicle and the serial models in the pipeline. We are just tired of doing things one at a time.”
While it is difficult to imagine what the result of the venture Ginkgo Bioworks, but they already have a first client in the face of one of the Boston pharmaceutical companies. At the same time, knowing what has already been achieved using microorganisms, we can only guess what heights can be achieved by using more highly organized cells.
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