Transcript

Rapid Response: The promise and peril of engineering biology, w/Ginkgo Bioworks Reshma Shetty

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Hi, everyone, it's Bob. Today we're re-releasing an episode with Ginkgo BioWorks co-founder Resch Micheti, recorded in twenty twenty one. President Biden recently announced a new phase in the war on cancer, what he calls a cancer moon shot, where biotech will play a key role. The centerpiece is a new agency modeled on DARPA called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA H, which is being headed by an executive from Ginkgo BioWorks. This episode explains what synthetic biology is, the impact it's already had in fighting COVID nineteen, and the breadth of innovation it's enabling, not just in healthcare. But across multiple industries.

Since the episode was recorded, Ginkgo BioWorks has become a public company, and though its share prices suffered with a broader market in twenty twenty two, it remains a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Resch Machete's lasting lessons go beyond science to insights about how scaling doesn't necessarily need to follow a Silicon Valley formula. There's a lot to unpack. Let's get to it. This pandemic was gonna define how people thought about biotechnology for the rest of their lives. Biotechnology could either be something that people were afraid of, or it could be thought of as something that helps provide the tools for

Fighting back. Our mission at Ginkgo is to make biology easier to engineer. We The next decade can have huge beneficial impacts. To you know our food supply and how we grow and make our food, to our health and how we treat disease, to our environment.

To how we treat multi-drug resistant infections, let's go make this happen. Let's show the world what's possible with biology. When the pandemic came to Boston in March of 2020, it really hit home for us. Nobody had actually stood up mRNA vaccine manufacturing at scale. And so we launched a set of programs around mRNA vaccine manufacturing, including our collaboration with Moderna, to help try to drive down the cost and drive up the scale importantly. The technology we're working with is so important. This is not social media, this is not advertising, this is your life, right? This is our community, this is our food supply, this is our environment. That's Resch Micheti, co founder and COO of Ginkgo BioWorks, the breakthrough synthetic biology company.

After pivoting to Covid 19 response efforts in twenty twenty, Ginkgo recently announced plans to go public via SPAC acquisition at a reported fifteen billion dollar valuation. I'm Bob Safian. Former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group, and host of Masters of Scale Rapid Response. I wanted to talk to Reschma because Biotech could be the next engine of global innovation, and Ginkgo has a platform that serves a wide range of industries from food and agriculture to materials to healthcare.

Біотек Гінко анебдец да beating back ковід натин. Yet Reschma acknowledges that the stakes in engineering genes А естродинарь бізнес і фоли вас. She stresses the need for what she calls an unstable equilibrium in biotech development. To pair the ambition of Silicon Valley.

with a higher of care. I'm Bob Safian and I'm here with Fresh Michete, co-founder and CO of Ginkgo BioWorks, Rechmitt is joining us from the Ginkgo offices in Boston. As I ask my questions from my home in Brooklyn. Ratchet, thanks for joining us.

Thank you so much, Bob, for the invitation to be here. So first of all, congratulations on the recent announcement that Ginkgo will be going public via a spac later this year. It's very exciting. Fifteen billion dollar valuation. It's Kind of a coming of age moment for synthetic biology. I think that's right, yeah. You know, I first started in the field back in two thousand two when I was a first year graduate student at MIT and there I met Tom Knight who later became my co founder and he really inspired me with his vision of being able to program cells the way you program computers and

Fell in love with it. Fortunately I was a naive grad student and had no idea how hard this was gonna be, but you know that's what makes it fun. So for those less familiar with the term synthetic biology and with ginkgo. Can you describe what you do and what your platform provides? Yeah, here at Gingo we essentially program cells, you know, much the way you program a computer, right? So

It's sort of hard to believe, but at its core, biology is fundamentally digital. It's made up of A's, Ts, G's, and Cs. That's the DNA of your cells. The food you eat, the microbes in your environment. They're all have genomes made up of A's, Gs, Gs and Cs. And if you change the order of those A's, Ts and Cs, rewrite them, edit them, flip the base here or there, then you can introduce whole new functionality into the cell, change its behavior. And much like you would write a computer program.

And so at Ginkgo we've basically been working for the last over ten years now. To make the process of editing DNA, rewriting DNA easier. In some sense, you can think of what Ginkgo does as building like the editor, compiler, and debugger for biology. So you wanna be able to Write code, you wanna be able to edit that code, and you wanna be able to compile it into actual DNA that you put into cells, and then you wanna be able to see how those cells work and debug when things go wrong.

And so Other organizations come to you to say, Hey, I'm looking for a cell that can do this, or like, can you help? My food sell be different or my Material cell be different? Is that what's happening? Customers come to us and they might fall into one of a couple different categories. So some of them are super sophisticated about cell programming, right? They might have capabilities in house and they already know, hey, I wanna make this molecule at this level of production and I want it to cost this much in my commercial scale production process.

Other customers are much less sophisticated about cell programming and more like, hey, this is my business, and I have this set of problems, and I was thinking that maybe biotechnology might be useful. Is there any relevance to any part of my business? And we talk about the problems they're facing and how biotechnology might be able to help. Maybe they're having supply chain problems. Maybe they're need a new functionality, a new material. Maybe they really want to drop their cost of goods. So When the pandemic hit, a lot of folks in the scienced for ways to respond, designing ventilators or tracking data with new apps. Right.

You guys ended up working with Moderna on their vaccines. You also looked at therapeutics. And the testing. How did Ginkgo go about getting involved? When the pandemic came to Boston in March of twenty twenty, it really hit home for us. And what struck us here at Genko was

That hey biology was suddenly having this dramatic impact on everybody's lives. And that this pandemic was gonna define how people thought about biotechnology for the rest of their lives. Biotechnology could either be something that people were afraid of, or it could be thought of as something that helps provide the tools for Fighting back. And we realized that in order to have an effective pandemic response, it was gonna need to be a multi pronged approach. We're gonna need to be able to test and isolate people who have covid. We needed to be able to find therapeutics to treat people who were already sick, and we needed to be able to come up with vaccines to prevent people from getting sick in the first place. And so Although we weren't very active in infectious disease at the time, we felt like we had in some sense a moral obligation to figure out how we might be useful in pandemic response.

And so yeah, we launched essentially a bunch of experimental programs to see how we might be useful. We realized that MRNA vaccines like the ones that Pfizer and Moderna worked on were gonna be potentially a very interesting solution, but we also knew that they were gonna be manufactured for the very first time. So assuming you found a vaccine that worked, Nobody had actually stood up MRNA vaccine manufacturing at scale. And we knew a lot about how to make some of the precursor components for mRNA vaccines. We knew a lot about how to make some of the enzymes that are needed in mRNA vaccine manufacturing. And so we launched a set of programs actually around mRNA vaccine manufacturing, including our collaboration with Moderna. To help try to drive down the cost and drive up the scale, importantly, of MRNA vaccine manufacturing for the world. And those are programs we continue to work on today. And when you were looking at these different options, was there a group of you that got together?

And you sort of divvied up who's working on vaccines and who's working on therapeutics. I mean we essentially almost did like a lean startup, right? Uh hypothesis building and figuring out if there was something we could do over the course of the next three months. And some ideas fell by the wayside, but others really took flight. And the two in particular that really had legs for us was around MRNA vaccine manufacturing, and then the second was actually around K through twelve testing. There's been a lot of discussion over the last year about the accelerated adoption of technology. Not necessarily an advance of the technology itself, but just more adoption to it. In terms of science, in terms of bioscience, is it the same pattern? Is it like heightened adoption of the things you already had in place?

Or has there been heightened development? Two. I think there's been a mix of adoption of existing technologies as well as new technology development. So MRA vaccines, for example, folks have been working on those technologies for a long time now. But COVID really brought the need for those on a worldwide scale, like into stark relief. So that's obviously a massive adoption that's happened.

But If you want to be able to make these mRNA vaccines at a scale that you can administer two doses to every single person on the planet, Obviously you need a ton of technological advancement on the manufacturing side. So I would say The adoption has actually driven the technology investments and development. I think what the pandemics has brought home for people is. One, biology is really important. It's core to our lives, it's core to our health, it's core to our food, it's core to our environment.

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Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered.

I'm Rana El Chayubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show.

Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. So As CO at Ginkgo, you're responsible for company building and scaling, as the rest of the scaling of

Biosciences going on. You mentioned to me that the approach and culture is different in Boston than in Silicon Valley. You told me move fast and break things doesn't work for us. Can you explain that? Yeah, you know, when you are working with as fundamental a technology as biology, it really requires a lot of care. thinking about the implications of this technology, how it gets adopted, who it benefits. and bringing a level of quality and rigor to the work is super important. And so when we think about building a company in Boston around biotechnology.

I think there are a lot of really great lessons that we can adopt from Silicon Valley technology companies, but we also have to do things a little bit differently just because the technology we're working with is so important. This is not social media. This is not advertising. This is your life, right? This is our community. This is our food supply. This is our environment. So you're talking about the risk of unintended consequences. And you're talking about this For business reasons and regulatory reasons, for moral ethical reasons?

Our mission at Ginkgo is to make biology easier to engineer. And so we want to be able to make these technologies accessible and available to improve human life. But if you're gonna make these technologies more accessible, if you're gonna open up the application space, you need to think about what applications are you going after. And you need to think about who stands to benefit and who doesn't. And so We don't pretend to have the all the answers, but I think we realize that in the past people sort of pretend or believe that the technology itself can be value neutral.

You can just be a platform company and not be an arbiter of who gets to use or develop your platform. We don't feel that way about our platform for engineering biology. We're building a platform for cell programming, and the people who develop and use that platform have a huge influence on how it gets deployed, on who benefits from it. And so I think developing a culture around care for that platform and how it gets used is super important to us. I think one of the things we find is that These are not easy questions to answer, right? And so Oftentimes what we're trying to do when we build the culture at Ginkgo is sort of build

We think of as unstable equilibriums, trying to strike the right balance between Ambition and care, or it's the right balance. between exploring the full potential of biotechnology, but also being thought about where it gets deployed. So it's you say unstable equilibrium. Like you want to have a balance there. But

You don't want it to be sort of a steady state. You don't want it to be static. Like the rules can't be too rigid. Yeah, so what is an unstable equilibrium in physics? Unstable equilibrium basically means the position of an object is a point where if it deviates a little bit on either side away from that position that's in, it'll move further away from the position. And so I think a lot of companies tend to end up In you know steady states that are not optimal. So as an example, a lot of the technology companies they end up in one of two steady states. They tend to be a small, very scrupulous, careful company where they never overstate what the technology can do. They're super rigorous. They're careful, but they never manage to grow to a state where they're really impacting the the entire world.

On the other hand There's an equally comfortable steady state that companies can end up in where they're high growth, they're super flashy, they're making all these big promises, selling a big dream, but they don't have the science and engineering to back it up. And so the question is how do we at Ginkgo achieve an unstable equilibrium in where We are being careful and rigorous and scrupulous about the science, but we're also painting the picture of what this technology can do, where it can go, so that we can capture people's imaginations and help them see and realize that future opportunity. And as part of that balance end up being that there may be clients who come to you who ask you to do certain things or have certain goals and you're like

Yeah, we could do that, but we're not going to. I think that is a possibility, right? I think usually with the applications that folks want, it's not so black and white of Oh yes we should do this or no we shouldn't. It's more that We need to think about the implications of what's gonna happen and think about how do we hopefully ensure that this technologies are used overwhelmingly for constructive purposes. So it's more about shades of grey. So you also mentioned to me this phrase unstable equilibrium talking about

The workplace at Ginkgo and the the challenge between workplace discussion and engagement on political issues and social issues and areas of potential Divisiveness. I think a lot of companies are sort of struggling with how do you handle workplace discussions of controversial topics, right? So whether it's politics, religion, social justice issues, diversity, equity, and inclusion, right?

And again, I think a lot of companies tend to relax into one of two steady states. Either they say Hey, we're gonna follow the Coinbase and Base Camp model. We're just gonna forbid any non-work related discussion at work because At work, people should be focused on work and we don't want to have the distraction of these other conversations. Or on the other hand, other companies end up in a different steady state where they say, Hey, we believe in free speech. Anybody should be able to say whatever they want. We're trying to be thought about these issues. How do you achieve that unstable equilibrium in which

people can focus on the mission, right? Because the idea that companies can somehow remain completely divorced from the political issues or the social justice issues that are surrounding them, I think is candidly a little bit naive. And so you need to strike the right balance. Enabling focus on the mission, but also enabling people to bring their full selves to work and talk about the issues that affect them and their day to day lives and can leave in their work at Ginko. Research science. Historically is Need slowly.

Patiently, years of work, gradually building to things. Does it still work that way? Is having that part of your culture. differ also from Silicon Valley where people are trying to Iterate and produce new releases every week sometimes.

I think one of the challenges with biology in general is that You can only iterate as fast as the life cycle of an organism, right? You know, you have to grow it, it has to replicate. And so, well, there are certainly some parts of our platform where we can iterate very, very fast. There are also others where it it just takes time and long term investment. One of the things we think about a lot is how do we strike the right balance between, you know, short term wins and those long term investments that other companies might not have the patience for.

And so sometimes we certainly have found that some of the biggest Frontiers and new advances that we've made come from just a first principles blind faith bet on the future. As an example of this, several years ago, we actually made a commitment to buy At the time ten megabases of synthetic DNA. At the time I think the biggest consumer of synthetic DDA was probably a a tenth of that, maybe less.

And so we said, Oh, hey, we're gonna place an order for ten times the amount of DNA over the next year and just figure out how we're gonna use it, right? And there was no expressed customer need for that. But we knew that both to advance the technology and to change the scale at which we were engineering biology, we needed to make that investment. And that sort of forward leaning bet led to uh the development of a bunch of technologies and we were able to then in subsequent years drive that to a hundred megabases of synthetic DNA and and even beyond today. And so Those types of bets are sometimes they're not justified if you pencil them out. If they're not justified by any sort of financial model. But there are leaps of faith that you make to help drive the technology forward. That kind of

Basic science feature. Often revolve around. Government funding, not coming out of a private organization. You know, I think in this country we actually do have a long history of companies investing in long term research. We have the Bell Labs, you know, IBM research. We do have a history of that. But I think you're right that in more recent years, That type of long term focus has been left primarily to academic labs and government labs. And to be clear, they play a super important role.

The reason we started Ginkgo is we felt that there were a set of problems and a set of things that we could do in a company setting that we couldn't do in an academic lab. So we can assemble a large team of people that are m a mix of Software engineers, automation engineers, chemists, biologists, geneticists. chemical engineers, you know, mechanical engineers, you name it. And all work on a common problem together, right? And so I think there are certain problems that really lend themselves to being done in a company where you can marshal a big set of resources and a huge diverse team of people towards a common goal.

There's some folks who are worried that in places like China the government or other Companies are pursuing certain kinds of bioscience work. That may not Be held to the same kinds of science standards. Is that like a competitive environment that you have to worry about?

So the interesting thing about biology is that it's everywhere. Right. And the tools for engineering and biology are pretty ubiquitous. So there are labs all over the world who have access to molecular biology tools. It's not trivial, right? Not just anyone can do it, but it's certainly very, very international and so I think when you then start to think about biosecurity and what does that mean, it means that

We can't take the same approaches that we've taken for, say, nuclear technologies. When nuclear technologies you can have a hope of sort of locking them up and restricting access. That doesn't work for biology, right? Um and similarly if you think about like the rise of the internet, I think we were candidly as a society slow on the uptake to think about cybersecurity. We pioneered the technology and advanced the technology and we didn't build in security along the way. I think one of the lessons from Covid, but that we were thinking about even prior to Covid was As you build the tools for engineering biology, how do you build in some biosecurity along the way?

It's not an easy question, and it it's not an easy w thing to do. But I think w one of the answers is that The very tools that we are building to make biology easier to engineer Are also the same tools that you can use to respond to biosecurity. Issues, and that's what we've seen with the Covet nineteen pandemic.

This is a public health crisis, and there are a set of tools that biotechnology can offer. To provide different layers of protection. our testing is coming from the enzymes that we're able to make, PCR tools for detecting like these viruses, right? Our therapeutics are coming from the antibodies we can engineer to help treat viral infections. Our vaccines are coming from MRNAs and other types of technologies that we've been investing in developing. For decades now. So it's very clear to me that the best security we can offer is

a very rapid response defense. That is our best protection against these types of things. Whether the threats are natural or engineered. And so Running fast, investing in biosecurities, I think an important thing for every nation to be thinking about. And in particular, I think Covet has shown us that biosecurity is not just important in its own right, it's also ends up becoming fundamental to the economy itself. What's at stake for Ginkgo right now? We built a five hundred person organization that's entirely focused on this goal of making biology easier to engineer.

And I would say that From my perspective The opportunity we have in front of us, both via the SPAC transaction and the additional resources that that's bringing to the table, as well as just the opening the COVID nineteen pandemic has provided and raising everyone's consciousness about the importance of biotechnology. I think uh we The next decade can have huge beneficial impacts.

To you know our food supply and how we grow and make our food, to our health and how we treat disease, to our environment and how we clean up the messes we've made in the past. to how we treat multi-drug resistant infections, there's just so many opportunities here for biology. And to me the Critical thing for Ginko is let's go make this happen. Let's show the world what's possible with biology. Well, Reshma, this has been great. I I really appreciate you sharing all of this with us. Thanks again so much for joining us and sharing your insight and your experience. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a wait what original.

The show is recorded remotely using sanitized audio gear. I'm your rapid response host, Bob Safian. Host for Masters of Scale is Reed Hoffman. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi. Ar producers are Jordan McCloud, Christina Gonzales, and Marie McCoy Thompson. Our music director is Ryan Holiday.

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