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Sandie Allen
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Ginkgo BioWorks developing future fuels from E. coli bacteria
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Creating the fuels of the future will require breakthroughs in the emerging field of synthetic biology. It also might require a whole lot of E. coli.
Those are the convictions of Reshma Shetty and the other members of the team at Ginkgo BioWorks Inc. in Boston. The biotech firm has made energy a main focus through an unusual project — to produce transportation fuel through the use of a re-engineered E. coli bacteria.
“We liked it because it was a little off the beaten path, but also pretty compelling and a hard problem,” said Shetty, one of Ginkgo’s five co-founders.
In April, Ginkgo won a $6 million grant for the project from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, better known as ARPA-E. It was the largest award to any Bay State project in ARPA-E’s second round of funding, surpassing projects at MIT and other universities.
The project is a chance to test the promises of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology involves designing and producing new biological systems, or redesigning and reproducing existing ones. By working at the system scale, synthetic biology expands on genetic engineering, advocates say.
Ginkgo was founded in 2008 by four Ph.D. graduates from MIT and one of their professors, Tom Knight. Their goal is to make biological engineering faster, cheaper and less frustrating.
“Engineering in every other discipline is taken for granted, but we don’t have these type of tools in biology yet,” Shetty said. “That’s kind of what Ginkgo is all about, fundamentally — developing this pipeline of tools.”
Though a young company, Ginkgo has already created one set of tools and brought it to market — the BioBrick Assembly Kit. The kit, produced and sold by Ipswich-based New England Biolabs Inc., consists of a set of enzymes biologists can use to more easily cut apart and assemble new biological systems.
For the fuel project, Ginkgo elected to start with E. coli because it’s a relatively well-understood bacteria. The aim is to re-engineer the bacteria to fix carbon dioxide into liquid transportation fuels, such as gasoline, using energy from electricity. The project is set to kick off in July or August and last for three years.
Synthetic biology opens the door to a range of possible applications, but energy is probably the most exciting, said Matt Carr, policy director for the Washington, D.C.-based Biotechnology Industry Organization. “The possibility of developing a fuel that’s carbon neutral, or maybe even starts to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — something like that could completely transform the way we do business and live our lives,” Carr said.
Ginkgo’s project highlights the interest in producing new type of fuel in a more efficient manner, circumventing the need for crops or other biomass. Cambridge-based Joule Unlimited is exploring the concept as well, seeking to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide directly into diesel fuel.
Ginkgo and Joule are also among the companies that illustrate the convergence of biotech and cleantech, a key trend in Massachusetts, said Peter Abair, director of economic development at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. While five years ago there were two or three Bay State companies in the space, now there are eight or nine, Abair said.
At Ginkgo, the E. coli project is not the only distinctive aspect of the company. The company has not sought venture capital, and Shetty said all five co-founders take equal roles in running the firm. (Shetty is listed in a state filing as president, while co-founder Jason Kelly is listed as CEO.)
Shetty said the firm hasn’t needed VC thanks to a $150,000 loan from the city of Boston for the firm’s South Boston facility and a $4.1 million contract from ITI Life Sciences in Scotland for researching another new way of putting together genetic parts.
To that point, Shetty cautions that producing this new fuel for market is a long-term goal. The aim of Ginkgo’s three-year project is only to show that the conversion process is actually possible.
The goal after that is to attract follow-on investment to scale up the technology and prove it further, with the possibility of commercial deployment well down the road, Shetty said.
In any case, Ginkgo and its backers at the DOE believe the firm has laid a solid foundation for success — through the firm’s efforts at advancing synthetic biology.
“An engineering challenge of this magnitude,” Shetty said, “is only possible if you have better tools for engineering biology.”
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