10-K

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. YES ☐ No ☒

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Act. YES ☐ No ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes ☒ NO ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to submit such files). Yes ☒ NO ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). YES ☐ NO ☒

The aggregate market value of the voting and non-voting common equity held by non-affiliates of Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp. (SRNG), our predecessor, on June 30, 2021, based on a closing price of $9.96 for SRNG’s Class A common stock, was approximately $250.5 million.

As of March 17, 2022, there were 1,080,456,818 shares of Class A common stock, 391,147,458 shares of Class B common stock, and 288,000,000 shares of non-voting Class C common stock outstanding.

This report includes forward-looking statements regarding, among other things, the plans, strategies and prospects, both business and financial, of Ginkgo. These statements are based on the beliefs and assumptions of the management of Ginkgo. Although Ginkgo believes that its plans, intentions and expectations reflected in or suggested by these forward-looking statements are reasonable, Ginkgo cannot assure you that it will achieve or realize these plans, intentions or expectations. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Generally, statements that are not historical facts, including statements concerning possible or assumed future actions, business strategies, events or results of operations, are forward-looking statements. These statements may be preceded by, followed by or include the words “believes”, “estimates”, “expects”, “projects”, “forecasts”, “may”, “will”, “should”, “seeks”, “plans”, “scheduled”, “anticipates” or “intends” or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements contained in this annual report on Form 10-K (“Annual Report”) include, but are not limited to, statements about:

rapidly changing technology and extensive competition in the synthetic biology industry that could make the products and processes Ginkgo is developing obsolete or non-competitive unless it continues to collaborate on the development of new and improved products and processes and pursue new market opportunities;

These and other factors that could cause actual results to differ from those implied by the forward-looking statements in this Annual Report are more fully described under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this report. The risks described under the heading “Risk Factors” are not exhaustive. Other sections of this Annual Report describe additional factors that could adversely affect the business, financial condition or results of Ginkgo. New risk factors emerge from time to time and it is not possible to predict all such risk factors, nor can Ginkgo assess the impact of all such risk factors on the business of Ginkgo, or the extent to which any factor or combination of factors may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance. You should not put undue reliance on these statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. All forward-looking statements attributable to Ginkgo or persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by the foregoing cautionary statements. Ginkgo undertakes no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

Investing in our securities involves risks. You should carefully consider the risks described in “Risk Factors” beginning on page 51 before making a decision to invest in our Class A common stock. If any of these risks actually occur, our business,

financial condition and results of operations would likely be materially adversely affected. Some of the risks related to Ginkgo’s business and industry are summarized below. References in the summary below to “we,” “us,” “our” and “the Company” generally refer to Ginkgo.

•

Our business could have to restructure, we may not meet expectations of investors, or we may have materially different financial results than expected, any of which could have a significant negative effect on our financial condition, results of operations and stock price, which could cause you to lose some or all of your investment.

•

If we were to be deemed an “investment company” under the Investment Company Act of 1940, as amended (“Investment Company Act”), applicable restrictions could make it impractical for us to continue our business as contemplated and could have a material adverse effect on our business.

•

Our multi-class stock structure entitles only our employees and directors to acquire and hold Ginkgo Class B common stock which has a greater number of votes per share than Ginkgo Class A common stock, which may affect whether stockholders hold or purchase Ginkgo Class A common stock.

•

Issuing Ginkgo Class C common stock may increase concentration of voting power in Ginkgo Class B common stock, which could discourage potential acquisitions of our business and could have an adverse effect on the trading price of Ginkgo Class A common stock.

•

We currently own and may in the future own equity interests in other operating companies, including certain of our customers; consequently, we have exposure to the volatility and liquidity risks inherent in holding their equity and overall operational and financial performance of these businesses.

•

Failure to pursue strategic acquisitions and investments, achieve projected milestones or maintain and expand customer partnerships could have an adverse impact on our business.

•

We are subject to regulatory and legal scrutiny for our use of genetically modified organisms (“GMOs”), biological, hazardous, flammable and/or regulated materials and DNA sequencing synthesis.

•

If our customers discontinue using or are not successful in developing, producing and manufacturing products using the engineered cells and/or biomanufacturing processes that we develop, our future financial position may be adversely impacted.

•

Our business partners may make announcements about the status of our collaborations, and the price of our common stock may decline as a result of announcements of unexpected results or developments.

•

Uncertainty about COVID-19 or another global pandemic could materially affect how we and our business partners are operating and may harm our business and results of operations.

•

The market may be skeptical of our novel and complex technology and use of genetically modified plant or animal cells and genetically modified proteins and biomaterials (collectively, “Genetically Modified Materials”), which could limit public acceptance of our products or processes and limit our revenues.

•

Failure to protect or enforce our intellectual property rights, trade secrets and inventions could harm our business, results of operations and financial condition and may result in litigation.

•

Our use of genetic resources and sequencing may subject us to obligations under the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization (the “Nagoya Protocol”).

•

We rely on our customers, joint venturers, equity investees and other third parties to deliver timely and accurate information in order to accurately report our financial results in the time frame and manner required by law.

•

We are subject to numerous federal, state, local and international laws and regulations related to our business and operations, and the failure to comply with any of these laws and regulations, or failure to comply with new or changed laws and regulations, could adversely affect our business and our financial condition.

•

We may incur significant costs complying with environmental, health and safety laws and regulations, and failure to comply with these laws and regulations could expose us to significant liabilities.

•

We may become subject to the comprehensive laws and rules governing billing and payment, noncompliance with which could result in non-payment or recoupment of overpayments for our services or other sanctions.

•

We and our laboratory partners are subject to a variety of laboratory testing standards, compliance with which is an expensive and time-consuming process, and any failure to comply could result in substantial penalties and disruptions to our business.

•

We are engaged in certain research activities involving controlled substances, the making, use, sale, importation, exportation, and distribution of which may be subject to significant regulation.

Unless the context otherwise requires, all references in this section to the “Company,” “Ginkgo,” “we,” “us,” or “our” refer to the business of Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. and its subsidiaries.

Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. That has never changed. Every choice we’ve made with respect to our business model, our platform, our people and our culture is grounded in whether it will advance our mission. Biology inherently offers incredible capabilities that we can only imagine in human-made technologies—self-assembly, self-repair, self-replication—capabilities that can enable more renewable and innovative approaches for nearly every industry. To realize this potential, we are building a platform for cell programming by bringing together unparalleled scale, software, automation, data science and reusable biological knowledge, enabling responsible solutions for the next generation of foods, pharmaceuticals, materials and more.

Ginkgo is building the industry-standard horizontal platform for cell programming. Our founders are engineers from diverse fields who, more than 20 years ago, were inspired by an astonishing feature of biology: it runs on digital code. It’s just A, T, C, and G rather than 0 and 1. But where computer bits are used to communicate information, genetic code is inherently physical and as it is read, physical structures are made. We program computers to manipulate bits, but we program cells to manipulate atoms. Cells are the building blocks of our food, our environment and even ourselves.

We use our platform to program cells on behalf of our customers. These “cell programs” (or “programs”) are designed to enable biological production of products as diverse as novel therapeutics, key food ingredients, and chemicals currently derived from petroleum. Through 2021, we have worked on 105 Cumulative Programs, which represent the cumulative number of unique programs Ginkgo has commenced in end markets as diverse as specialty chemicals, agriculture, food, consumer products, and pharmaceuticals. Biology did not evolve by end market. All of these applications run on cells which have a common code—DNA—and a common programming platform can enable all of them. Because of this shared platform, we are able to drive scale and learning efficiencies while maintaining flexibility and diversity in our program areas. Ultimately, customers come to us because they believe we maximize the probability of successfully developing their products.

Customers look to Ginkgo to overhaul their manufacturing processes or develop new products through biology. They might, for example, be looking to produce a particular chemical via fermentation, at a lower cost, with enhanced supply chain reliability or sustainability. Or perhaps the customer needs a microbe that will live and grow on the roots of corn and convert nitrogen in the air into usable fertilizer for a plant, resulting in improved plant growth. Or a customer might need an antibody that binds to and neutralizes a certain target, along with a way to produce those antibodies at scale. All of these programs and more run on a common platform at Ginkgo.

We care deeply how our platform is used and recognize biosecurity as a necessary complement to our cell programming work. Biosecurity is ingrained in our platform and in our ethos—we work collaboratively to help ensure responsible research conduct and deployment within our own work and within the broader synthetic biology community. We have additionally invested in developing targeted biosecurity and public health capabilities, including an initiative for pathogen biomonitoring at scale. Through this initiative, known as Concentric by Ginkgo, we serve as a system integrator to implement customizable and accessible biosecurity programs for monitoring and mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in thousands of communities across the country. We are dedicated to setting the industry standard for biosecurity as we continue to scale our platform.

The foundation of our platform includes two core assets that execute a wide variety of cell programs for customers according to their specifications: our Foundry and our Codebase.

●

Our Foundry wraps proprietary software and automation around core cell engineering workflows—designing DNA, writing DNA, inserting that DNA into cells, testing to measure cell performance—and leverages data analytics and data science to inform each iteration of design. The software, automation and data analysis pipelines we leverage in the Foundry drive a strong scale economic: we have scaled the output of the Foundry by roughly 3X annually since we started measuring it around 2015 (with the exception of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic) and over that time, the average cost per unit operation has fallen by approximately 50% every year. We expect to be able to pass these savings along to our customers, allowing them to take more “shots on goal” with their programs.

●

Our Codebase includes both our physical (engineered cells and genetic parts) and digital (genetic sequences and performance data) biological assets, and accumulates as we execute more cell programs on the platform. Every program, whether successful or not, generates valuable Codebase and helps inform future experimental designs and provides reusable genetic parts, making our cell program designs more efficient.

Figure 1: Our platform is used to design, write, and debug DNA code in engineered organisms to execute programs for our customers. Our Foundry leverages proprietary software, automation, and data analytics to reduce the cost of cell programming. Our Codebase consists of reusable biological assets that helps accelerate the engineering process.

As the platform scales, we have observed a virtuous cycle between our Foundry, our Codebase, and the value we deliver to customers. Sketched below, we believe this virtuous cycle sustains Ginkgo’s growth and differentiated value proposition.

●

Foundry: As we take on more work in the Foundry, we benefit from scale economics, which over time may lead to lower program costs. We expect that these lower costs, in turn, will drive additional demand for our cell programming capabilities.

●

Codebase: Cell programs also generate Codebase, which can drive better experimental direction and improve the odds of technical success, further increasing our customer value proposition, which we believe will result in additional demand.

Put simply: we believe that as the platform improves with scale, it drives more scale, which drives further platform improvements, and so on. We believe this positive feedback loop has the potential to drive compounding value creation in the future, as every new program we add contributes to both near-term revenues and has the potential to add significant downstream economics.

Figure 2: Ginkgo’s virtuous cycle: as we scale, we see greater efficiency and higher odds of technical success, which helps drive further scaling as our value proposition improves.

Our business model mirrors the structure of our platform and we are compensated in two primary ways. First, we charge usage fees for Foundry services, in much the same way that cloud computing companies charge usage fees for utilization of computing capacity or contract research organizations (“CROs”) charge for services. The total addressable market for biological research and development (“R&D”) services, including labor and tools, was estimated to be over $40 billion in 2021 and is growing strongly. Additionally, we negotiate a value share with our customers (typically in the form of royalties, milestones, and/or equity interests) in order to align our economics with the success of the programs enabled by our platform. As we add new programs, our portfolio of programs with this “downstream” value potential grows. Through these value shares, we are tapping into what industry sources expect to be a $2 to $4 trillion market for bioengineered products in the next 10 to 20 years.

We believe that cell programming has the potential to be as ubiquitous in the physical world as computer programming has become in the digital world. We believe products in the future will be grown rather than made. To enable that vision, we are building a horizontal platform to make biology easier to engineer. Our business model is aligned with this strategy and with the success of our customers, setting us on what we believe is a path towards sustainable innovation for years to come.

To fully tell the story of cell programming, we have to start four billion years ago. All living things evolved from a single cell, a tiny bubble containing the code that enabled it to assemble and reproduce itself. But, importantly, that process of reproduction wasn’t perfect; each copy introduced new mutations in the code. These changes are responsible for one of the most powerful and defining features of biology: evolution. Over eons, that first cell and all its progeny copied themselves, and their DNA evolved to create new functions: to eat new kinds of foods and to produce new kinds of chemicals, structures, and behaviors. As reproduction became more, well, interactive, organisms developed tools to borrow DNA from each other, accelerating the pace of evolution. These functions, and thus the genetic code programming the functions, stuck around when they helped the organisms survive and create more descendants. This went on and on for four billion years, leaving us the wild codebase of DNA that enables the diversity of life forms we see on the planet today.

Synthetic biology’s story begins mere decades ago, as biologists began to decode the molecular secrets of DNA. The billions-year-old tools of cells—enzymes that cut, copy, and paste sequences of DNA code—are now being leveraged by humans to read, write, and edit DNA in the lab. Polymerases that copy DNA are used to enable polymerase chain reaction (“PCR”) tests for COVID-19 and the CRISPR/Cas system from bacteria now enables editing of human genomes to potentially cure genetic diseases.

Today we are using these tools to learn from the full breadth of evolution and biodiversity to write new biological code. Simple soil bacteria produce everything from vital antibiotics to the smell of fresh rain. We can reuse elements of these DNA programs to make new products. Biochemistry is extraordinarily versatile; we’ve reused the same genetic code libraries across applications as diverse as fine fragrances, baking, and consumer electronics. We may be able to develop programs that can digest human-made “forever chemicals” that biology never encountered before.

As cell programmers, we operate with humility and respect for biology. Our tools are simply borrowed, and the history of biotechnology is a mere blink of an eye compared to the history of living things. Today, we write rudimentary code. We believe that someday our children will write poetry in DNA.

Figure 3: DNA strands are sequences composed of four chemical bases, or nucleotides, represented by the letters A, T, C and G.

Like computers, cells run on digital code. DNA strands are sequences composed of four chemical bases, or nucleotides, represented by the letters A, T, C and G. The letters along the strand encode the proteins that make up the cell and perform biochemical functions. The translation of DNA to RNA to Protein is known as the “central dogma” of molecular biology.

Figure 4: The translation of DNA to RNA to Protein is known as the “central dogma” of molecular biology.

“Traditional” genetic engineering uses special types of proteins from bacteria that can cut and paste DNA to move sequences from one organism to another. In 1982, Genentech Inc. partnered with Eli Lilly and Company to bring these techniques to market, producing human insulin inside the bacteria E. coli. Genetic engineers were able to cut the code for the human insulin protein and paste it into the genome of E. coli and “boot up” the sequence: the bacteria could now produce the human protein, which could then be extracted, purified, and used by diabetics. This life-saving development replaced a vastly more expensive and supply-constrained method of extracting insulin from animal pancreases.

Relatively simple proteins like insulin can be produced by transferring one gene sequence into a simple microorganism. Many other biochemicals require much more complex cell programming and are produced by a series of special proteins, called enzymes, working together. These enzymes transform a starting material, or “feedstock,” such as sugar, into a final product, such as an antibiotic, vitamin, or other valuable small molecule. In this way, biology also programs chemistry. Cell programmers can design such multi-enzyme “pathways” and transfer them into a cell to boot up. For example, the cell programs we’re writing for Cronos Group, Inc. to produce cannabinoids require many different enzymes to convert feedstock into cannabinoids such as cannabidiol.

Once the cell is programmed to produce a new molecule, it can produce the molecule and also replicate itself, creating an exponentially growing number of product-producing cells. Many products of genetic engineering are manufactured in facilities that look like breweries, taking advantage of the centuries old process of industrial fermentation to grow cells at high density, and transforming simple sugars into valuable products that can be extracted and commercialized.

Improved tools for cell programming, including automation, miniaturization, and data science, alongside the decreasing cost of DNA synthesis—writing DNA—are opening up new possibilities for cell programming. For each new program, Ginkgo’s organism engineers design, print, and test hundreds or thousands of different sequences for each step of a pathway, exploring the breadth of biological design space and improving the probability of success. We provide more details about our platform in the sections that follow.

The power of biology has never been more apparent. Synthetic biology was featured on the cover of The Economist in April of 2019. A few years later, billions of doses of a novel type of vaccine have been distributed, created by companies such as Pfizer and Moderna and made up of a form of biological code, mRNA. Our own cells read that code to produce viral proteins and stimulate our immune response to fight back against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We no longer question if biotechnology will transform a given industry, we simply question whether we are creative enough to imagine how, and whether we are ready to utilize biology responsibly.

Biology affects all of us, and we believe cell programming will change the world. Our customers are developing products with far reaching implications in health and the environment. This potential for extraordinary impact, which reaches to the core of who we are and everything about our natural world, requires extraordinary care in how the tools of cell programming

are built and used. Technologies reflect the values of the organizations that build them, so our commitment to Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) priorities and care must underscore everything we do.

We also must recognize that biotechnologies have not always reflected the values necessary for sustainable and equitable impact and, as a result, remain controversial. Indeed, companies that produce genetically modified organisms (“GMOs”) for human consumption are restricted from certain ESG indices, placing genetic engineering as a major ESG risk alongside the production of weapons, tobacco products, and fossil fuels. We hope to chart a new course built on care so that the world can benefit from the power of biological engineering while avoiding potential risks.

We face an urgent environmental crisis that is forcing us to reconsider how we make everything, from our homes, to our food, to our clothing. For centuries, we’ve treated nature as an infinite resource and infinite trash can, extracting raw materials, shaping them through industrial processes that spew out greenhouse gases, and then throwing them away. But these resources are not infinite and there is no “away.” The results have been disastrous—climate change, loss of biodiversity, and pollution have impacted every corner of our world and continue to threaten our way of life.

Cell programming and biological manufacturing are working to address some of the issues that are most contributing to climate change today, from fossil fuel dependency to agricultural emissions, and land use to plastic pollution. Ultimately, biology offers a fundamental shift in how things are made and disposed of: a world where things grow and decay, creating circular, regenerative processes.

There is significant concern that genetic engineering itself creates a form of genetic “pollution” in the environment, with genes from one context introduced into another. This is a concern we take seriously and consider deeply throughout the lifecycle of our programs to ensure that genes introduced will not cause damage—for example, by spreading antibiotic resistance or toxins. We care because the environmental release of certain genetically engineered microbes can also offer tremendous environmental benefit. For example:

●

Crop-associated microbes programmed with the nitrogen fixing properties of common soil bacteria may be able to reduce the use of chemical fertilizers, which have been estimated to contribute 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and account for 4% of natural gas consumption. This is the work of Joyn Bio, LLC (“Joyn”) our joint venture with Bayer CropScience LP.

And we are just getting started… we believe biology is our best tool to reverse the damage to our planet and chart us on a path towards sustainability in the future.

Technology isn’t neutral. Our values and biases are embedded in the technologies we make, in the applications we consider, and in the ways we address problems. Inclusion of those who have historically been left out of the development of new technologies is essential to building equitable and positive outcomes. Just as biological ecosystems thrive with more diversity, the inclusion of many different voices is essential to growing our company and to ensuring that the viewpoints of historically marginalized people are included in the development of our platform. We have many active efforts in recruiting and retaining diverse talent and will continue to invest in this work (see “—Our People & Culture”).

Marginalized people who have been left out of the development of technologies are also the groups most likely to bear the greatest harm, whether from climate change, pollution, or health disparities. The COVID-19 pandemic has made this inequality starkly clear—in the United States, it has been communities of color that have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and have had the least access to testing, treatment, and vaccination.

In March of 2020, we committed to $25 million of pro bono work to help accelerate novel diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines to help fight COVID-19. Our early work included efforts to improve the manufacturing of vaccines, with a goal to lower costs and increase accessibility of vaccines worldwide. Shortly thereafter, we launched Concentric by Ginkgo, a service to provide public health testing infrastructure for communities. Our pooled testing service was designed with accessibility and privacy as core design principles, to bring low-cost, easy-to-use testing to K-12 schools in the places that have been most affected by the pandemic. We partnered with school districts such as Baltimore City Public Schools to make

sure that our program was designed to serve the community and to build trust with groups who have been excluded, exploited and mistreated by biomedical research in the past.

These values and initiatives are not just a top-down corporate policy, they are an intrinsic part of our culture. Grassroots fundraising challenges to support local and international aid organizations are a regular feature of our internal messaging channels. One of our software engineers even programmed a free tool, @vaccinetime on Twitter, that helped thousands of Massachusetts residents find vaccine appointments.

Our culture is built on care, transparency, diversity, employee ownership and engagement, and a deep, humble respect for biology. Transparency is essential to how we operate, to enable sharing of the insights and tools that enable our platform to grow, as well as to build trust and accountability with all of our stakeholders. We have advocated for more transparency in our industry, including supporting GMO labeling, and seek to educate policymakers and the general public about the benefits and risks of synthetic biology through our advocacy efforts.

The individuals who work at Ginkgo and build our platform care deeply about how that platform is used and the impact our company will have in the world. We believe a workforce with strong equity ownership will make the wise decisions needed to build long-term value for our company, and a company whose long-term impacts make them proud. That is why we have implemented a multi-class stock structure that permits all employees (current and future), not just founders, to hold high-vote (10 votes per share) common stock. We believe that our multi-class stock structure will help maintain the long-term mentality we have benefited from as a founder-led company.

For more information, see “Risk Factors—Risks Relating to our Organizational Structure and Governance—Only our employees and directors are entitled to hold shares of Ginkgo Class B common stock (including shares of our Class B common stock granted or otherwise issued to our employees and directors in the future), which shares have 10 votes per share. This limits or precludes other stockholders’ ability to influence the outcome of matters submitted to stockholders for approval, including the election of directors, the approval of certain employee compensation plans, the adoption of amendments to our organizational documents and the approval of any merger, consolidation, sale of all or substantially all of our assets, or other major corporate transaction requiring stockholder approval.”

We have selected directors with decades of experience serving as leaders in the life sciences and technology industries. Our board of directors and management team will leverage that experience and consider the interests of stockholders, customers, employees, suppliers, academic researchers, governments, communities, and other stakeholders to pursue long-term value for our company and drive the sustained health of our global community. For more information, see “Risk Factors—Risks Relating to our Organizational Structure and Governance—Our focus on the long-term best interests of our company and our consideration of all of our stakeholders, including our stockholders, workforce, customers, suppliers, academic researchers, governments, communities and other stakeholders that we may identify from time to time, may conflict with short-term or medium-term financial interests and business performance, which may adversely impact the value of our common stock.”

Biology grows. Biology adapts and evolves. Biology heals itself and regenerates. Biology is also, remarkably, programmable, offering us the tools to work with biology to transform how we make stuff. With cell programming, we help our customers across industries grow better products. What does “better” mean? Better products might be more sustainable, have more stable and resilient supply chains, be more accessible, have higher quality and more consistency, and come with lower economic and environmental costs of manufacturing. They can also be truly transformative, fundamentally changing the field of possibilities for what products can do. We have supported many companies that are leveraging our cell programming platform to address some of the world’s most challenging environmental and social issues.

Biopharma has been a nexus of tremendous innovation in cell programming and synthetic biology. Just in the past year, we have seen the creation and broad adoption of a novel form of biological prophylactic in the form of nucleic acid vaccines. These vaccines contain genetic code that our bodies read to produce viral proteins and stimulate an immune response and antibody production. New nucleic acid vaccines can be programmed quickly, such as the booster vaccines being developed against emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants, offering the potential for rapid response to other future pathogens. They can also be programmed to target a number of other diseases. In the wake of the success of nucleic acid vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, new programs for HIV and cancer vaccines, among others, are accelerating.

Biologic medicines like insulin and other protein drugs and antibodies are also produced via cell programming, making a difference in the treatment of countless diseases. Over 20% of the therapies approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) in 2021 were biologics. In addition, new modalities enabled by cell programming, such as cell and gene therapies, microbiome therapies, and regenerative medicines, are beginning to come online. We believe human health and the ways we treat disease will be transformed by improvements in cell programming technology.

Ginkgo has been active in this field in recent years and we expect to significantly expand our support of therapeutic applications over coming years. From companies developing “living medicines” (Synlogic, Inc. (“Synlogic”)) to those involved in COVID-19 vaccine production (Moderna and others) to those developing novel antibiotics (Roche), we are using our platform to deliver transformational innovations across a range of disease areas.

Since the industrial revolution, manufacturing techniques have been extractive, wasteful, and unsustainable. Not only must we innovate new manufacturing methods in order to keep up with growing demand, we must also work to remediate issues we have caused historically, by cleaning up our environment and addressing climate change.

Ginkgo is not only working with customers to create cell programs that enable cost-efficient, renewable, and sustainable production of chemicals and materials, such as our work with Genomatica, Inc. (“Genomatica”), but we have also participated in the formation of Allonnia, a company focused on environmental remediation. Plastic waste and many of the pollutants that plague industrial manufacturing and extraction sites are novel in the course of evolutionary history, so biology has not yet evolved to degrade them efficiently. Cell programming can enable the discovery and development of new enzymes capable of degrading recalcitrant pollutants and recycling waste while entirely reimagining manufacturing for the future.

Food is inherently biological: it comes from life and sustains life. Cell programming can be leveraged to improve the availability of essential food and nutrition to a growing population, decrease the environmental impact and cost of food production, and provide consumers with increased choice.

We are working with some of the largest multinational agriculture companies, including Bayer (through our joint venture, Joyn Bio) and Corteva, to develop cell programs that would make crop production more efficient and sustainable, reducing synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and pesticide usage. In food, we have been active in flavors and sweeteners, and we are the principal cell programming platform for Motif FoodWorks, Inc. (“Motif”), a company that is making animal proteins without the need for industrial farming of animals, which launched its first product, HEMAMI™, in 2021.

Most physical goods have biological origins—from the petrochemicals in our fabrics to fine chemicals extracted from plants—but industry does not necessarily leverage biology, or leverage biology efficiently, to produce these items. Petrochemicals, for example, are used in everything from our fabrics to our cosmetics to our paints. These chemicals and polymers are generally created in complex chemical and physical reactions from crude oil, but crude oil is just the result of millions of years of decomposition of previously living matter (they are fossil fuels after all). These biological building blocks can instead be programmed in a living organism to produce these items sustainably, without extracting natural resources. Even in areas where industry does leverage biology, such as extracting raw materials or fine chemicals from plants, we believe the current approaches are woefully inefficient or rife with social consequences.

We have helped some of the world’s largest fragrance companies such as Givaudan use fermentation to much more efficiently produce rare molecules typically extracted from plants. In a related field, we are also supporting Cronos in their effort to biosynthesize cannabinoids, with the goal of reducing cost, improving purity and predictability, and enabling production of rare molecules. We also helped launch a new company in 2021, Arcaea (formerly Kalo Ingredients, LLC), which is focusing on leveraging biology, from proteins to the microbiome, to build a suite of innovative and efficacious personal care products.

For several decades in the computing industry, software ran entirely in local environments: companies built and ran their own servers and customized their applications. The dominance of software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) software and cloud computing over the past decade has demonstrated the value in having common architectures and enabling horizontal platforms. What

users may have sacrificed in customizability, they more than gained in innovation, efficiency, and scalability. We believe Ginkgo is ushering in a similar transition in cell programming, a programming discipline with the power to shape living things and grow applications across the physical world.

Given the breadth of application areas and the potential of biology (see “—The Impact of Cell Programming”), we believe that the end markets for bioengineered products will be enormous. Industry sources estimate that in the next 10 to 20 years, there will be approximately $2 to $4 trillion of annual direct economic impact from these products, with significant secondary effects. But these applications reflect only what we can already imagine. As we develop a greater ability to program biology and direct it towards novel and more challenging applications, the spectrum of possibilities will undoubtedly grow. Computers were used for little more than counting for decades; we firmly believe the most valuable applications of cell programming are not yet apparent.

Figure 6: Industry sources estimate a $2 to $4 trillion total addressable market for bioengineered products between 2030 and 2040.

Large existing market for “on prem” cell programming research and development

Cell programming today is done in a highly inefficient, distributed manner reminiscent of the early days of computing. Essentially every organization looking to innovate in biology builds its own biology labs in the same way that individual tech companies used to set up their own servers instead of using cloud computing. Scientists spend hours moving liquids around rather than designing novel experiments just as computer programmers once spent most of their time physically writing and debugging code (by punching cards, for example) rather than designing new applications.

Because of the way cell programming is done today, intellectual property that could be useful for multiple applications is tied up by exclusivities that delay the progress of the field overall. Ginkgo’s platform breaks down these silos and democratizes access to the most advanced technologies in the field, enabling customers of all sizes to more efficiently drive innovation.

According to industry sources, the market for cell programming R&D is approximately $40 billion and growing rapidly. This work is being done in a distributed manner, sacrificing benefits from scale and learning economies. Approximately 60% of the spend today is on labor—scientists designing and executing experiments—while the remaining 40% of this is spent on “tools”—things like DNA synthesis, reagents, and equipment. Ginkgo brings efficiencies to both elements of this existing market.

•

Labor: When scientists leverage advanced automation, they can both reduce error rates and free time otherwise spent performing manual work (e.g. pipetting liquids from one plate to another). Freed from the burden of manual programming, scientists have more time to practice the art of cell programming: designing the direction of experimentation, mining data for new insights or exploring new techniques or application areas. This in turn increases the demand for programs as scientists retain a greater capacity for innovation and generate more ideas to test.

•

Tools: Ginkgo’s scale provides a cost advantage in two primary ways. First, we reduce the amount of capital investment required by our customers—an early stage company building on our platform may never need to build a molecular biology lab. Second, our proprietary technologies and scale economics drive down the marginal cost of each experiment. Combined, these factors have the impact of transforming what is typically a large fixed cost investment for a cell programmer into a much lower variable cost. This is akin to an IT department not having to build and maintain a costly bank of servers and instead paying a marginal usage-based fee to their cloud computing vendor. Additionally, and perhaps even more impactful, our Codebase provides host cells, genetic parts and associated data for our customers that are unavailable elsewhere and which may reduce the total amount of work required.

As the cost of computing power declined exponentially in computer programming, the demand for computing power increased exponentially as developers dreamed up more and more sophisticated applications. We expect the same to be true in cell programming: as our platform scales in capability and capacity, we hope that the range of applications accessible to cell programming will likewise expand in breadth and sophistication.

We believe that Ginkgo is changing the structure of the biotechnology industry. In much the same way that cloud computing centralized hosting services and ushered in a wave of SaaS software companies, Ginkgo is scaling the capabilities needed to program cells. By making these tools more accessible, we hope to usher in a wave of innovation in both “hardware” (life science tools) and “software” (cell programs).

At Ginkgo, we have always admired the symbiotic and regenerative nature of biology, which sits in stark contrast to the often extractive nature of existing technologies. We are often asked who we think the “winners” and “losers” in the industry will be as Ginkgo scales, as if it is a given that our growth must come at the expense of others in the ecosystem. We reject that notion. As our platform scales, we seek to drive benefits for all existing players in this ecosystem:

Figure 7: Schematic of the synthetic biology industry structure. Ginkgo connects and integrates the hardware and tools provided in the technology layer, creating a platform that can be used by cell programming customers who are building products for end market use.

Program Layer: Ginkgo enables and accelerates product companies, which historically have had to vertically integrate

Ginkgo is not a product company; we are an enabling platform for product companies in a range of end markets. We do not seek to “pick winners” and focus instead on building our platform rather than investing in product-specific risk. Platforms require scale and a relentless focus on innovation while taking a product to market requires many specialized functions that vary depending on the product:

Once the product is developed, major investments are also needed to manufacture, distribute, and market the product. These are the jobs of our customers, the product companies.

Historically, product companies have had to invest in their own R&D capabilities, building their own labs and hiring their own scientists. This investment is inefficient due to lack of scale and drains resources away from application testing and product development. Ginkgo’s platform is not application-specific. The same engineering tools can be used for programs in completely different application areas: cells all run on the same genetic code. As product companies develop their products on Ginkgo’s platform, they gain efficiencies and increase their probability of success. New companies that build on our platform never need to make the fixed capital investments to start a lab from scratch; they are able to leapfrog and compete effectively against established companies.

Technology Layer: Ginkgo collaborates with life science tools companies to drive technology advancements

Because we’re constantly thinking about how to enable the next several years of exponential scaling of our platform, we have good insights into future bottlenecks and welcome the opportunity to collaborate to build technologies that will break through those barriers. We are the largest customer for many of our strategic suppliers and, as such, play an important role in advancing new technologies. As a result, we are often able to secure preferred access, often including custom development and leading economic terms, to next-generation technologies and pass those benefits along to customers.

We expect to continue to invest in and support the development of emerging technologies in this space. In certain areas where Ginkgo has unique needs, we may acquire technologies directly, as we did with Gen9, Inc.’s DNA assembly platform, which was particularly valuable for more complex DNA synthesis needs. In many other areas, we will support new and existing technology companies by placing anchor orders and partnering to develop technology roadmaps that break new ground.

By acting as a horizontal platform, Ginkgo can focus on what we do best (cell programming), our customers can focus on what they do best (bringing products to market in their industry), and our suppliers can focus on what they do best (building great hardware and tools). Biology did not evolve by industry and so cell programming is able to benefit from the scale and efficiency of a horizontal platform. Vertical integration is no longer required, allowing each layer of the ecosystem to flourish as we collectively enable more rapid growth across the industry.

Ginkgo serves diverse customers across a variety of end markets. Some of these customers may have in-house biological R&D teams and others may have never thought biotechnology applied to their business. In either case, they come to us with a challenge—whether it is supply chain volatility, a race to develop an innovative new product, or an existential threat facing an industry on the wrong side of history—and we partner to enable a biological solution. We begin our relationship by working collaboratively to design the set of specifications for the end product(s) our customer desires. Our cell programmers then take that set of specifications and design an engineering plan to create a cell program that meets or exceeds that set of specifications. When we finish, our customers receive the final engineered organism (which either produces or is their product of interest) and a full “tech transfer” package for manufacturing and downstream processing (which they can implement themselves or pass to a contract manufacturer with our support). Our customers then take these organisms and/or purified products through the final stages of product development (e.g., formulations, clinical trials, field trials, etc.).

Our commercial team is organized to both establish new relationships with potential customers (traditional business development) as well as maintain and expand relationships with our existing customers (which we call “alliance management”).

Our business development team has both expertise in relevant industries (Consumer & Technology, Industrial & Environment, Agriculture, Food & Nutrition, Pharma & Biotech and Government & Defense) as well as expertise in our Foundry capabilities and synthetic biology. With this background we are able to identify industry or consumer challenges where biology can serve as a solution. Our categories of customers, independent of industry, include potential customers who have R&D teams with some synthetic biology capabilities where choosing Ginkgo can bring automation, scale, and codebase beyond their own; potential customers who are considering but have not yet built lab-scale capabilities where a partnership with Ginkgo allows them to spend their capital on commercialization efforts; and potential customers who are not yet working in synthetic biology whose industries or products stand to be disrupted by biological solutions. Our business development team, with support from our Codebase and Foundry team members, crafts solutions for each of these types of customers through a strategic discussion of customer needs and fit with Ginkgo capabilities.

To grow existing customers, our alliance management team, through close collaboration on our existing programs, seeks technical and business opportunities for our customers that serve as the basis for consideration of future programs. As our programs demonstrate technical success, our existing customers often bring their next strategic R&D needs to our attention.

While most biotechnology companies focus on building products within a fairly narrow scope, Ginkgo has uniquely pursued a partnered strategy across all end markets. This was not easy. For many years, our platform was less efficient than the status quo of an expert scientist working by-hand at a lab bench. In the early days, the only end markets willing to take a chance on our platform were those without in-house biotechnology capabilities. But as Ginkgo’s platform improved over time and with scale, we were able to win contracts in increasingly sophisticated end markets with more in-house biotechnology expertise. Today, our platform is diversified across all major end markets with marquee customers and a range of focus areas within each.

Figure 8: Cumulative Programs run by third-party customers on Ginkgo’s platform (excluding proof of concept projects and other exploratory work). Today, Ginkgo has a diverse set of programs across all major end markets.

Our customers include large multinational organizations with multibillion dollar R&D budgets as well as startups who are depending on us for essentially all of their bioengineering needs. While these customers and their focus areas may look very different, they are all important and valuable to Ginkgo. All of these programs leverage a common infrastructure, and as we demonstrate the value of this platform, we have the ability to grow significantly with our customers.

Ability to grow with our customers and increasingly complement existing R&D budgets

Ginkgo has grown substantially through inside sales with our existing customers. Some of our customers, such as Motif FoodWorks, never needed to build in-house cell engineering capabilities and so as they grow and expand their product pipeline, we expect their demand for our platform will increase and they will benefit from our improving scale efficiencies over time as well. The relative value of our platform compared to the next best option (building a lab, bioengineering team, and intellectual property from scratch) is immense, which yields extremely high retention rates for customers in this category.

Other customers may already have in-house cell programming capabilities. As Ginkgo demonstrates the value-add of our platform by successfully delivering on programs, we have the opportunity to grow our collaborations with them, complementing their core R&D capabilities. We don’t view this as a “replacement” of customer scientists with Ginkgo’s platform. Rather, we hope to expand our customers’ capacity and need for innovation—giving them more “shots on goal” and enabling them to invest more heavily in R&D as the return on investment of each dollar spent increases.

We have demonstrated this with several customers. With one customer, an initial proof of concept program has turned into a broader strategic relationship with over nine programs today. With another, we launched a relationship with two programs, quickly expanding it to five by the end of the following year. The growth we have seen with our oldest customers means we continue to have significant customer concentration as it takes time for new customers to ramp up their use of Ginkgo’s platform. During 2021, two of our customers each contributed greater than 10% of revenue and collectively they accounted for 28% of total revenue, down from 39% in 2020. We believe customer concentration will decline over time even as we expect to continue to grow our relationships with existing large customers. However, our ability to grow with our customers requires us to maintain satisfied customers, and program or other operational setbacks could impede our ability to meet customer expectations and grow our business.

Our platform has now been validated by sophisticated customers across a range of industries. As we launch programs in new areas, those provide a toehold for future sales in that space. As an example, our pro bono project for Moderna, Inc. at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to enhance production of a key raw ingredient through process engineering provided a proof point and initiated us into this emerging segment, leading to a commercial relationship with another nucleic acid vaccine company, as well as a program to produce a key processing enzyme for mRNA vaccines. Similarly, the technical success of programs with Motif FoodWorks, Aldevron, and Cronos Group in 2021 attracted inbound interest from other potential customers.

It is still incredibly challenging to break into new industries and our ability to expand into new sectors may be harder than we expect. However, our recent progress in therapeutics has been a significant milestone given that we are ultimately competing against very strong in-house capabilities. We believe that as more proof points emerge across industries, the barriers to adoption will diminish.

Ginkgo’s platform combines a strong technical foundation with an ecosystem of supporting resources to maximize our partners’ odds of technical and commercial success. In the nucleus of our platform are our Foundry and Codebase, which our scientists leverage to complete customer programs. The Foundry is, in its simplest form, a very large, highly efficient biology lab, enabled by over a decade of investment in proprietary workflows, custom software, robotic automation, and data science and analytics. It is paired with our Codebase, a collection of biological “parts” and a database of biological data, which helps our scientists program cells. But great technology alone is not enough, and we are building a community and ecosystem around our technical platform that provides our partners with end-to-end support.

Cell programming projects involve a conceptually similar engineering cycle regardless of the specific product or market. Based on customer specifications, Ginkgo’s program team develops designs of proteins, pathways and gene networks (see Figure 5) that might meet the specification, leveraging public and proprietary biological knowledge bases (see “—Our Codebase—organizing the world’s biological code”). Those conceptual designs are developed using computer-aided design tools until the exact DNA sequences for those designs have been determined. Those DNA sequences are then “printed,” assembled and inserted into a cell to execute the new DNA code. These prototype cells are then studied and the output or performance of each is measured and compared to the customer’s desired specification. Learnings using data analytics and data science tools inform a new round of prototypes and this cycle is repeated until either the specification has been met or the customer decides to end the program.

The likelihood of technical success increases with each iterative engineering cycle and with the number of prototypes that are explored per cycle. However, with traditional tools for genetic engineering, each of these cycles can be slow, expensive and error prone. Many projects across the industry run out of budget or time. Conventional R&D teams often look to stay within budget by running rapid engineering cycles using largely manual tools and small numbers of prototypes per cycle. However, the inability to broadly explore the potential design space (there are more possible sequences of a 200 amino acid protein encoded in 600 DNA letters than there are stars in the observable universe) and the reliance on manual tools is a difficult handicap to overcome. Since people can only work so hard and since engineering cycles can’t be shortened beyond the duration of the physical steps, this approach has limited potential to improve in the future.

At Ginkgo, we invest in improving the tools and technology for programming cells in order to maximize program success within the constraints of customer timelines and budgets. We do so by scaling the number of prototypes that can be evaluated in each engineering cycle in an effort to reduce the number of cycles required to meet the customer’s specification and ultimately shorten project timelines. A typical screen for one enzyme step in a program might evaluate 1,000 to 2,000 variants to optimize function, of which the top 10 to 100 might be short-listed for further study. A relatively basic program might have 3 to 5 enzymes working in concert, and so in the process of optimizing the entire pathway, thousands or tens of thousands of enzymes and pathway combinations might be designed, built, and tested in the Foundry. The methods we use to increase scale also tend to reduce the average cost per prototype, which means that more prototypes can be evaluated for a given program budget.

Because diverse cell programs share similarities in process and code, many programs can be run simultaneously in a carefully designed centralized facility. This facility, where we use our investments in advanced cell programming technologies to manage diverse programs, is what we call our Foundry.

We make it possible to centralize many cell programming projects in our Foundry by deconstructing programs into a set of common steps and then standardizing those steps. For each step, we have built a specialized functional team that performs that step for all programs. Those teams define a set of standardized services that can be used in concert to execute an end-to-end cell programming process. Each team has access to scientific, software, and robotic engineering resources to replace manual ad hoc operations with standardized, automated, and optimized services. In addition to enabling scale, this approach ensures standard operating procedures, know-how, and human skill become encoded in software that can be more effectively debugged, monitored, controlled, and optimized.

Figure 9: A non-exhaustive summary of the functions performed throughout the lifecycle of a program in the Foundry. At each stage, learnings are generated, driving improved design cycles and functional optimizations.

While the engineering strategies described above have historically been relatively uncommon in the life sciences, they are obviously not our invention. Rather, we are inspired by the lessons from other engineering disciplines and seek to apply those to biology. Automotive manufacturing, semiconductor fabrication, and data centers, among many other industries, demonstrate how automation, data, economies of scale, and continuous improvement can produce compounding gains in scale, costs, and quality. Critically, routine performance of these strategies across dozens of projects gives us the data and experience needed to drive continuous improvement.

As described above, a key strategy in our Foundry is to increase the scale of our operations so that we can run more programs and more prototypes in parallel (i.e., large batch sizes). This approach benefits from operational efficiencies and economies of scale across many dimensions:

●

Continuous Learning and Improvement: The cumulative amount of work done as we scale leads to a better understanding about how to program cells. Much of this is then encoded in our Codebase, described below.

●

Purchasing Economies: By partnering with Ginkgo, our technology partners and suppliers can generate more value from a single account than they could from multiple smaller accounts, and that extra value is shared with Ginkgo.

●

Technology Specialization: Certain technologies that we leverage in the Foundry (such as acoustic liquid handling, automated bioreactors, and advanced mass spectrometry systems) are not easily leveraged or practical for smaller organizations. But for an engineering organization of our size, those investments can drive material improvements in cost efficiency.

These efficiencies and economies of scale can be observed empirically from a relationship we refer to as “Knight’s Law,” named after Tom Knight, one of our co-founders, and loosely inspired by Moore’s Law for semiconductors. As shown below, we have seen an exponential increase in the output of the Foundry over time alongside an exponential decline in the average cost per unit of output. While this trend was interrupted by temporary lab shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic and reduced capacity due to social distancing, we have since continued to drive our business towards achieving these metrics.

While Knight’s Law does not provide the full story on our development, it is a useful tool that allows us to continue to build efficiencies of scale. We continue to build our internal metrics around Knight’s Law and believe we can continue to drive this kind of capacity growth in the foreseeable future, though it is dependent on the development of new technologies, which inherently carries risk, and, like Moore’s Law, we will likely hit a limit over time. This feature compares to a conventional facility, where scaling is driven predominantly by the addition of employees, an exponential increase in work would be infeasible and the cost per unit of work would decline little, if at all.

Figure 10: The output of the platform increased by over 3X per year for 5 years (with the exception of 2020), and while we expect that kind of scaling to continue, there is no guarantee that we will be able to do so.

Figure 11: As the output of the platform has increased, our total R&D / operational costs per unit of output has decreased by approximately 50% per year.

We are frequently asked, and spend much time thinking about, whether it will be possible for compounding gains in output and productivity to continue for many years in the future. It is important to note that given significantly advanced tools, most steps in cell programming could be miniaturized to a point where single molecules of DNA and single cells are being manipulated and monitored. At that ultimate degree of miniaturization, the costs and timelines of cell programming could be reduced orders of magnitude from where they are today. Newly available microfluidic technologies, such as those developed by our partner, Berkeley Lights, Inc. (“Berkeley Lights”), point to the reality of this future of cell programming at the single-cell level. Additionally, because many of the enabling tools of cell programming are biological in nature (e.g., polymerases and CRISPR), we are able to point the platform at itself, developing new biological tools to reduce the number of steps or the complexity of a certain operation. For example, we could develop better gene editing enzymes or novel ways to screen cells in a multiplexed format using biological sensors. It is easy to theorize about these types of developments, however they are hard to execute, we will undoubtedly run into roadblocks along the way and we will have to invest significantly in developing new technologies in order to enable the types of improvements we seek to achieve.

Recent advances in machine learning, molecular simulation, and other computational techniques also hold great promise to improve our ability to program cells. We believe our Foundry is well-positioned to build the kind of large, well-structured datasets that such computational approaches need to succeed. In time, we believe computational approaches will reduce the need for certain kinds of experiments (for example, we already use machine learning to make protein and enzyme design projects more efficient). If computational approaches can replace certain sets of experiments, we expect to use the recovered Foundry capacity to work on ever-more complex cell programming challenges. The reality is that the cells that we program today accomplish relatively simple functions, such as: “produce as much of molecule X as possible.” Programming cells for complex functions, such as live-cell therapeutics, responsive building materials, multicellular organisms, etc., will require sophisticated sub-systems for environmental sensing, intracellular information processing and feedback, and a multidimensional program that responds to such environmental stimuli. Only when we can deliver such sophisticated programmed cells will we have truly unlocked the potential of biology, and we see the Foundry as being an integral part of the platform for doing so.

Codebase is a familiar term to software developers but is a new concept in biology. Modern software firms develop their own (typically proprietary) codebase of source code and code libraries that can be leveraged by their software developers to more easily create new applications than they could starting from scratch. Additionally, vast repositories of debugged code are

shared publicly so that programmers across application areas can leverage prior art in order to innovate faster. This allows software developers to focus their time and effort on developing new features rather than recreating existing logic. Ginkgo’s Codebase is comprised of reusable genetic parts and strains that can be repurposed in new cell programs. We are continually investing in better ways to characterize functional biological code to drive increased reusability. In addition to the raw performance data we generate through our Foundry experiments (more than 24.8 million strain tests run as of December 31, 2021), we have also incorporated many public databases for genetic sequences and have a proprietary data set of over 3.8 billion additional sequences that we leverage in our designs.

Engineering biology is complex—one of the reasons that Foundry scale is important is that it remains highly difficult to predict the performance of a biological “part” in a given context from a DNA sequence alone. The genomics revolution has outpaced biologists’ ability to test the functionality of each DNA sequence as it was discovered, particularly because most of the community is still performing biological experiments by hand without the benefit of automation. Each program performed at Ginkgo involves testing thousands or millions of DNA sequences; with a small fraction of those ending up in our final engineered cells. For that reason, high-performance biological sequences—the handful of designs from thousands of candidate designs that meet our performance goals for an experiment—are hard-won assets and form a key component of Ginkgo’s Codebase. Not to be discounted, the “losing” designs are still valuable, helping inform more effective campaigns in the future that avoid known failure modes.

Figure 12: Our Codebase incorporates both biological assets from nature as well as engineered assets and data from our Foundry experiments. Because the Foundry enables us to test many thousands of prototype enzymes, pathways, and strains in individual engineering cycles, we are able to quickly expand the range of characterized biological assets in our Codebase.

In some ways Codebase is a “parts catalog” that we can draw from when developing a new organism. As Ginkgo performs more projects, we contribute new parts to our Codebase that can be reused in new contexts. For example, we developed novel synthetic promoters (DNA sequences that can turn on the expression of a gene of interest) that allowed us to increase production of proteins in yeast. Initially, we tested thousands of designs to arrive at a select number of promoters with high performance. Now those high-performing promoters can be reused in any program that involves producing a protein in yeast; they are a modular piece of genetic code. Over the past 20 years, our team has supported efforts to build these kinds of parts libraries—the International Genetically Engineered Machine (“iGEM”) Parts Registry and AddGene are two notable examples of initiatives to make reusable parts available to researchers in the community. But despite these efforts, we continue to see intellectual property siloed within organizations across the biotechnology industry, leaving many without the additional intellectual property they need to develop their programs. Ginkgo’s Codebase allows our customers to draw from a broader set of biological assets than any single company would develop for a given application. The scale and diversity of our programs have allowed us to develop a large Codebase that grows with the addition of each new program and can be opened to the broad swath of partners and cell programmers using our platform.

Cell programmers must consider not only the genes in the programs that they design, but also the ways that they interact with the cell that “runs” the program. Therefore, Codebase is more than just the individual modular parts we use to design biological programs. The organisms that have been optimized to run the programs, whether because they have been engineered for robust growth or because they are particularly adept at producing certain classes of products, are known as “chassis” strains. These strains can be reused across multiple programs, significantly reducing the amount of work needed to optimize a program and engineer a commercially viable organism. The breadth of Ginkgo’s customer base allows us to use these chassis strains in many more contexts than traditional industrial biotech players.

●

Our collaboration with Cronos Group Inc. involves the production of many different cannabinoids; these cannabinoids share common precursor molecules such that a single chassis strain can be modified to produce each product.

●

In 2020, Ginkgo acquired the assets of Novogy, Inc., a company that had been focused on the engineering of oleaginous yeasts to produce fuels and lubricants. At Ginkgo, these assets can be applied not only to fuels and lubricants but also fine flavors and fragrances, food oils, and even materials. A consequence of evolution is that biochemistry has repurposed the same biochemical pathways many times over in different contexts, allowing chassis strains to be redeployed in diverse contexts at Ginkgo.

●

In 2021, Ginkgo acquired Dutch DNA Biotech B.V. (“DDNA”). This team specializes in the development of filamentous fungi for protein production. Traditionally, filamentous fungi have been used for the production of industrial enzymes - typically enzymes that are native to fungi or close relatives. At Ginkgo, these fungal strains are being engineered to produce a broad range of proteins, including bacterial and mammalian proteins. These proteins are applicable to a wide range of end products, such as food and materials.

●

We aim to re-deploy Codebase assets in new contexts. In 2021, we launched our “Cell Development Kit” (“CDK”) product offering. Inspired by “Software Development Kits” (“SDKs”) used in the software industry, CDKs offer a standardized entry point for Ginkgo to input new projects on the Ginkgo platform. The first CDKs to launch are focused on protein expression programs. CDKs provide cell programmers access to the toolkit needed to get started developing commercial proteins, including access to pre-engineered host cells optimized for such protein production, specialized equipment, automation capabilities, genetic engineering expertise, insights garnered from Ginkgo’s Codebase and the applicable infrastructure to design, build and test a custom protein production microbe.

●

Ginkgo’s CDKs are designed to cut the cost of launching a cell program and speed up development timelines to build engineered microbes, for example, to determine whether a protein may be successfully and commercially produced. By simplifying the pathway for companies to get started on the Ginkgo platform with standard terms, a phased approach, low costs—starting at $100,000 for protein expression feasibility projects—and clear deliverables, the CDK can help de-risk projects prior to full scale technical development. In effect, CDKs allow us to more efficiently deploy useful Codebase and the cell engineering know-how we have accumulated to add new projects to the platform.

Our Foundry and Codebase are inextricably linked. Our Foundry scale allows us to generate unparalleled Codebase assets. These Codebase assets help us improve our designs and provide reusable parts and chassis strains that improve the efficiency

and probability of success of our cell programming efforts in the Foundry. As the capabilities of the platform improve, it drives further demand, which increases the rate of learning in our Codebase. The continuous learning and improvements inherent in this relationship is one of the key features of our platform.

Figure 13: We believe our initial CDKs can help cell programmers build proof-of-concept strains faster.

Ginkgo has long recognized that it is critical to build a true ecosystem around our technical platform. We have been inspired by the leading horizontal platforms in information technology, such as Microsoft Windows and Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), which built real developer communities and provided a range of value-added services on top of their core technology. Like these pathbreakers, who set the stage for a generation of computer developers, we too are trying to ensure that the cell programmers who build applications on our platform have the tools they need to succeed beyond the lab.

Figure 14: Ginkgo strives to create an ecosystem to ensure that cell programmers have the tools they need to succeed.

As in the early days of computer programming, it is still extremely expensive to program biology. For that reason, it can be easier for larger companies to make investments in innovation around this space. But Ginkgo’s platform gives small companies and innovators access to the same horsepower as larger players and obviates the need to invest in fixed laboratory assets, providing an even greater strategic benefit. To help address this discrepancy, Ginkgo has assisted in launching new companies (such as Motif and Allonnia) by bringing together strategic and financial investors to secure funding for these early stage companies. Going forward, we intend to leverage our own balance sheet and to partner with investors, enabling companies at all stages to benefit from our platform. We believe that, as Ginkgo’s customers demonstrate increasing success, there will be an explosion of capital for cell programming applications and a recognition of Ginkgo’s platform as setting the industry standard and providing the backbone for these development efforts.

Our job is to ensure that our cell programs can be executed at scale and we support our customers to ensure successful commercial scale manufacturing. We have built relationships with a number of leading contract manufacturing organizations and have demonstrated that we can transfer our lab-developed protocols to commercial scale (e.g., 50,000+ L fermentation tanks) with predictable performance. We have an in-house deployment team dedicated to supporting our customers’ scale-up and downstream processing needs. We have even helped certain customers, such as Cronos Group, Inc., acquire and build out their own in-house manufacturing capabilities and certain programs, such as our work with Moderna, Inc., focus on manufacturing process optimization.

Ginkgo takes responsibility for the cell engineering intellectual property generated through customer collaborations. Our scientific team works continuously with our intellectual property team to file patent applications and monitor for freedom to operate. We are also active in helping shape and influence the evolving regulatory landscape for biological engineering. While our customers are responsible for handling their own regulatory procedures on a product-by-product basis, our broader view and sphere of influence can help build understanding of and support for novel product classes.

We launched Ferment, our annual conference, in 2018. The conference highlights developments and thought leadership in the field and brings together scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, and suppliers. Our conference in 2021 brought over 700 participants to our headquarters in Boston. Even prior to launching Ginkgo, our founders focused on building community within the emerging field of cell programming. Tom Knight, one of our founders, was among the professors who launched the iGEM Competition in 2004, which has now had over 70,000 participants from over 40 countries take part in the competition (including dozens of Ginkgo employees and all five founders!).

Because Ginkgo serves both large market incumbents and smaller startups, our community also serves to facilitate introductions between innovators and those looking to invest in innovation. We believe that investors and large strategic companies have come to recognize Ginkgo’s platform as a key enabler of innovation and are keen to get to know the companies that are building with us. Those relationships can be the source of funding and go-to-market support for the earlier stage companies building on the platform, increasing the odds that they develop successful products.

The most powerful technologies require the most care. Biology is too powerful for us to not care about how our platform is used. We have and will continue to invest heavily to build and maintain trust in bioengineering as a technology platform across all layers of the industry. At the platform layer, we have focused on building robust biosecurity measures. At the application layer, we are proud to enable a diverse set of programs that drive towards environmental sustainability. We are committed to ESG practices and broad stakeholder engagement at a corporate level. We are also engaged in deep conversations around the implications and ethics of biotechnologies through many public forums, helping shape our platform to promote sustainability in our global community.

With a mission to make biology easier to engineer, we have always recognized the imperative to invest in biosecurity as a key component of our platform. We care how our platform is used, and biosecurity is a necessary complement to synthetic biology that helps us ensure our cell programming work is conducted and deployed responsibly. Consideration for biosecurity is ingrained into our cell engineering platform tools, as evidenced through our membership in the International Gene Synthesis Consortium (“IGSC”), and our application of their harmonized protocols to screen synthetic DNA for concerning sequences, as well as our ongoing work with national defense agencies aiming to develop experimental and computational tools that detect or prevent misuse of bioengineering.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we collectively witnessed the disruptive effects of a biological threat. The pandemic created a renewed sense of urgency for the need to counter biological risk, and triggered a paradigm shift for biosecurity in public and private institutions. Here at Ginkgo, this pandemic has deepened our resolve to advance global biosecurity and accelerated our capabilities to do so. At the start of the pandemic, we made a commitment of $25 million of free access to our platform for partner COVID-19 projects and launched a partnership with Moderna on process optimization for mRNA vaccine manufacturing. Since then, we’ve worked with Aldevron to deliver a breakthrough in the manufacturing of vaccinia capping enzyme for mRNA vaccines, and we’ve advanced discovery of therapeutics. We’ve also participated in the largest wastewater sequencing effort in the United States, supporting Biobot Analytics and the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (“HHS”) with genomic sequencing capacity.

Most strikingly within the biosecurity space, we’ve grown Concentric by Ginkgo into a trusted brand and successful business as a large-scale systems integrator to facilitate COVID-19 testing in communities across the country. We tackled a moment of global crisis head-on through the growth of an innovative, scalable, community-centered apparatus for robust health security.

Figure 15: Concentric’s pathogen monitoring network has conducted testing across most of the U.S. Map shading reflects all states in which Concentric has delivered testing since launching in 2020. Not all states have active testing programs as of March 2022.

Through this pathogen monitoring network, we've empowered communities to make informed public health decisions through the many waves of the pandemic. Our tools provide early warning of infection and provide communities with tools that can mitigate outbreaks. We’ve worked closely with national, state, and local public health authorities and educational leaders to make sure that our programs are aligned with broader COVID-19 guidance and mitigation strategies, and are capable of delivering timely data to inform public health decision-making. As a systems integrator, we developed customizable, low-burden programs based on the particular needs of educators, students, parents, guardians, and community members, and grew a world-class customer service system to support each local program in context. This work with educational institutions—organizations that represent the centers of our community—is a meaningful first step in building the pathogen monitoring capabilities critical to the prevention and mitigation of biological risks.

As we sought to evolve our COVID-19 monitoring platform to serve communities in other contexts, we developed strategic partnerships to complement our operational and technical expertise.

●

Our partnership with Eurofins’ Clinical Enterprise, serving the Northeast and South regions of the United States through the federally-funded Operation Expanded Testing program, enabled us to offer free testing to senior living centers, correctional facilities, early education centers, and other congregate settings, many in underserved communities.

●

Another partnership, with XpresCheck and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), to monitor incoming international passengers at four of the nation’s busiest international airports, allowed us to leverage our viral sequencing capabilities and led us to identify the first U.S. cases of two Omicron sub-variants, BA.2 and BA.3.

●

Earlier this year, we acquired Project Beacon COVID-19 LLC, a Boston-based social benefit organization focused on helping to increase the capacity, availability, accessibility and affordability of COVID-19 testing, and assumed responsibility for providing COVID-19 monitoring tools to communities across Massachusetts.

We are continually exploring where public and private partnerships can help us scale our platform and further innovate in pathogen biomonitoring.

Our dedication to biosecurity is deeper than our emergency response to the current global pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 will not be the last pathogen we face with pandemic potential, but if we take the necessary steps, it may be the last that catches us

unprepared. Ginkgo has been supporting and engaging with domestic and international organizations and governments to help shape the understanding of a robust biosecurity program beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, and we believe there is a meaningful commercial opportunity in such a program driven by increased awareness of the need for prevention and response systems. Given our experience to date, we believe we are well placed to take a leadership position as the biosecurity platform of choice. If we are to harness biology to engineer products for our health, food, energy, and environment as we drive the growth of a sustainable bioeconomy, we must also move with the same speed and vigor to secure biology.

The key input into our unit economics is a cell program. For each of these cell programs, we generate economic value in two primary ways. First, we charge usage fees for Foundry services, in much the same way that cloud computing companies charge usage fees for utilization of computing capacity or contract research organizations (CROs) charge for services. Additionally, we negotiate a value share with our customers (typically in the form of royalties, milestones, and/or equity interests) in order to align our economics with the success of the programs enabled by our platform. As we add new programs, our portfolio of programs with this “downstream” value potential grows. Because we typically incur no downstream costs (e.g., manufacturing or product development, which our customers manage), these value share payments flow through with approximately 100% contribution margin. This flexible business model allows for more predictable near-term revenue while not sacrificing our ability to create long-term value with asymmetric upside.

Figure 16: Ginkgo generates economics from programs in two primary ways. First, customers pay upfront fees to cover initial R&D costs for a program. Second, Ginkgo shares in the downstream value (typically in the form of a royalty stream, milestone, and/or equity share) generated by programs.

The first stage of a cell program consists of R&D work being performed on Ginkgo’s platform, leveraging our Foundry and Codebase. R&D is inherently risky and our customers recognize that this is a cost they will incur regardless of success and whether they are working on the program in-house or with a partner. Ginkgo provides a much more efficient platform to conduct this R&D work, encouraging companies to build on or adopt our platform.

We estimate that the unit costs of our Foundry cell engineering services are several times less expensive on average than the status quo (a customer doing equivalent R&D in-house, by-hand) and we expect that cost advantage to grow over time. We typically earn usage fees tied to the units of work that we perform on behalf of our customers’ programs. Initially, as we were building and validating the platform, these fees covered less than 20% of the costs incurred to execute a program as the platform was less efficient than the status quo. As our platform has matured and efficiency improved, we have steadily increased the portion of program R&D costs that are covered upfront by customers and we now expect that new programs are

structured to fully cover our direct costs, which will eventually enable us to earn a modest margin. Foundry usage fees provide a strong foundation of predictable revenue that is independent of any commercialization efforts by our partners.

As we continue to scale the Foundry and build Codebase, we expect to drive further efficiencies and decrease our average unit costs. This presents us with a strategic choice going forward. We could retain these efficiencies and increase our margins or we could pass these efficiencies on to our customers, increasing the number of shots on goal and, therefore, the likelihood of program success given a fixed budget. We believe the right choice for long-term value creation is to pass the savings to our customers, reducing the barriers to adoption and driving increased demand for our platform. Our Foundry usage fees are thus impacted by a number of drivers:

●

Number of active programs: We hope to dramatically increase the number of programs working on our platform over time, and if we are successful, we believe this will drive increasing usage fees.

●

Units of work per program per year: If our Foundry becomes more efficient and we generate more scale, we expect to be able to do more work per program in a fixed period of time, improving chances of program success.

●

Average price per unit of work: If we bring on innovative technologies or step change improvements in existing Foundry services, we plan to pass capability and cost improvements on to our customers. If these new technologies or services are adopted across programs, we believe the average price per unit of work will continue to fall over time.

●

Number of years per program: If our platform improves, we expect program duration to decrease over time. Some programs may still be charting new territories and take several years, but programs that are able to leverage substantial pre-existing Codebase (e.g., our Nth program in bulk protein production) should have shorter duration and, in general, greater Foundry capabilities should shorten program durations.

Figure 17: Illustrative drivers of Ginkgo’s long-term financial model and customer value proposition.

The multi-year nature of an average cell programming project means that our usage fees are predictable and recurring in nature. Additionally, given the lead times inherent in developing technical plans as part of a sales process, we have good visibility into new Foundry usage fee bookings. This provides a strong foundation for the business and allows us to be patient while we wait for downstream economics.

As the key enabling technology for our customers’ products, we are able to earn a share of the value of the products that are created using our platform. We are quite flexible and have structured a variety of value sharing mechanisms, including royalties, equity, and lump-sum commercial milestone payments. Because the economics to us should be roughly equivalent, we are generally agnostic on which form of downstream value capture we receive and the decision is typically based on customer size and preference, with archetypes described below.

Figure 18: Illustrative of the forms of downstream value capture received by Ginkgo, based on customer size and preference.

Because Ginkgo typically will have completed the program (and received associated usage fees) prior to realizing downstream value, cash flows from the downstream value capture component generally fall straight to the bottom line as we incur minimal to no ongoing support or delivery costs once the strain is commercialized. This dynamic creates opportunities for outsized returns as our clients successfully commercialize products built on our platform. As we add more programs to the platform over time, we expect downstream value share to contribute income, and therefore we believe our overall margins and cash flow profile will grow significantly.

In the second quarter of 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched our commercial offering of COVID-19 testing products and services for businesses, academic institutions, and other organizations in which we generate product and service revenue. We generate product revenue through the sale of lateral flow assay (“LFA”) diagnostic test kits, polymerase chain reaction (“PCR”) sample collection kits and pooled test kits, all of which we sell to our customers on a standalone basis. We generate service revenue primarily through the sale of our end-to-end COVID-19 testing services which consist of multiple promised goods and services including sample collection kits, physician authorizations, onsite test administration, outsourced laboratory PCR analysis, and access to results reported through a web-based portal.

Beginning in the first quarter of 2021, we launched our pooled testing initiative which focuses on providing end-to-end COVID-19 testing and reporting services to public health authorities. We are currently offering pooled testing and reporting services for K-12 schools across the United States, at airports through our partnership with XpresCheck and the CDC, as well as through other congregate settings such as our partnership with Eurofins. In the future, we believe that testing services may have a value proposition internationally and in other use cases including wastewater monitoring and air monitoring.

We have defined a unique business model over the past 13 years. The biotechnology industry has been product-centric for decades, with early horizontal platforms in life sciences frequently vertically integrating upon the development of the first successful product on their platform. As Ginkgo has embarked on this journey, we have studied and learned from innovators and established platform companies in other industries as we built our platform and business. We now benefit from significant historical investments, a virtuous cycle that grows with scale, and a strong business model that is aligned with our customers’ outcomes. These establish a strong sustainable advantage that we believe will help establish Ginkgo as a true industry standard.

Hardware, software and biological tools need to be tightly integrated to replicate our platform. We have spent over 13 years building the software, automation and data science to best support a high throughput, generalized platform and expect to continue investing in this area. Our software, automation and data infrastructure cannot be easily replicated without bringing together a number of rare, specialized skillsets. In addition, without the scale and demand to stress test a high throughput platform, we expect any newly developed platform would be suboptimal. We estimate that it took us over eight years of investment and iteration to reach cost parity with “by hand” cell programming. We believe competitors will find it difficult to

justify the investment in the software, automation and data science needed for high throughput operations before they acquire matching high demand.

As the only scaled horizontal platform in this space, we have the broadest number of programs that can be run on our platform, providing the highest potential for scale economics. Other companies choose to target specific markets and vertically integrate into products with high expected value. This has a tendency to overfit the capabilities of their R&D team to their targets. As discussed above, our continued scaling and investment in flexible tools that can apply to a broad range of end markets helps us drive efficiencies in the Foundry and Codebase across our diverse programs. Furthermore, as we scale, we are able to leverage advanced technologies that are only practical at scale and also may obtain preferred pricing with a number of suppliers. Competitors may be unable to source equivalent technology or negotiate similar pricing without first achieving scale, a feat that is difficult to do with a narrowly focused R&D platform.

In addition to a raw scale economic, we also accumulate knowledge and reusable Codebase from each program that runs on the platform. Every program benefits from the programs that came before and generates benefits for other current and future programs. These learnings and reusable assets are cumulative, extremely hard to replicate, and increasingly valuable to our customers. Because our learnings are generated by the work we execute in our Foundry, the scaling in our Foundry drives a scaling in our rate of learning. Thus, there is a recursive element to our platform: as the platform gets better, it also improves faster—we are excited to make this advantage of our platform available to our ecosystem of cell programmers.

Our platform drives value for customers along two dimensions: reducing the cost of laboratory work via automation and increasing the probability of technical success due to cumulative data and learnings. Our financial model is aligned with those factors. As we gain efficiency, we drive further demand for cell programming, which drives our Foundry revenue up. As both demand and probability of success increase, our risk-adjusted value share also increases. Our model only requires we share in a small fraction of the downstream value created by our programs, providing our customers the opportunity to generate and retain significant value. Ultimately, this encourages broader adoption of our platform across industries.

Furthermore, we seek to maintain close relationships with our customers, supporting their work, and earning their loyalty and satisfaction. The breadth and highly integrated nature of our platform makes it inefficient for a customer to simultaneously work with Ginkgo and any theoretical competitor. As there is not yet a standard interface for cell programming, it requires an upfront investment to learn how to choose and design programs to make the best use of our platform. Thus, customer retention is high and there are substantial switching costs.

Just as the top software programmers want to work with the latest technologies, we believe the top cell programmers will be attracted to our industry leading platform and access to its unique capabilities. Our ability to hire and retain the best cell programmers as internal users and developers of our platform pushes us to continually improve and also builds a base of Ginkgo-trained experts. If these Ginkgo trained cell programmers move on to roles and opportunities in product-specific companies, we expect they will become ambassadors for the Ginkgo approach in their next role, expanding our reach into potential customers.

Let’s face it, GMOs have an image problem. This image problem has led to activities by the first generation of genetic engineering companies that backfired: lobbying against transparency in labeling laws, trying to “rebrand” GMOs with different terminology, and other efforts that have failed to build trust and engagement with stakeholders. We have taken a different approach. Rather than avoid the term, we’ve championed transparent labeling, sought to engage and build trust through open dialog, and enthusiastically embraced the potential for GMOs to do great things. We don’t seek to make GMOs acceptable through branding; we aim to make GMOs that people love.

Doing so requires care and attention to both the technical and social aspects of our platform and its impacts. This means investing in biosecurity and, as noted above, embedding it into our platform and how we operate. This also means engaging with the social complexities of science and technology with a diverse group of people. We strive for a company culture based on a foundation of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (see also the sections titled “—The Impact of Cell Programming—ESG is in our DNA” and “—Our People & Culture”), and aim to engage different perspectives through our creative residency and through our magazine, Grow. Through both our internal and external efforts, we seek to engage with the realities of what has made genetic engineering an ESG risk historically, and work towards equitable and positive impact.

We are seeking to usher in a new paradigm for cell programming. It took us over eight years of basic research and investment in software, automation, data science and scale to reach parity with the status quo of individual scientists conducting experiments by hand at a lab bench. It took us several more years to demonstrate business model maturity: delivering a platform with enough value-add to customers that we could cover the cost of cell engineering R&D programs while building Codebase and sharing in the downstream value of our programs. We believe that we are now at an inflection point where we believe we have the opportunity to become the industry standard. We see several drivers of this evolution and growth.

As discussed above, our platform improves with scale and to date we have observed a positive feedback loop between our Foundry and Codebase. As we scale capacity and demand on the Foundry, we expect our average unit costs to fall, creating a better value proposition for our customers as their program budgets stretch further and drive more demand. Similarly, Foundry output also grows our Codebase, which supports better program execution, creating a better value proposition for our customers as well.

We occupy over 300,000 square feet and maintain state-of-the-art machinery and laboratory equipment. We have built more than 50 custom integrated work cells, consisting of robotic automation systems, mass spectrometry, fermenters, sequencers, and more. We have the capabilities to engineer dozens of species of organisms from bacteria to fungi to mammalian cells. We have worked on enabling products as varied as polymers, bacterial therapeutics, bulk protein production, novel antibiotics, fine chemicals, and more.

We have been able to work on a diversity of programs while consistently driving efficiencies in the Foundry with scale. We expect to accelerate growth in capacity by integrating new technologies across our existing footprint, building new Foundry space, and investing in software, automation and data to increase utilization.

We have now established proof points of success in a diverse set of end markets, in several cases far exceeding our customers’ specifications. When engaging with existing customers or potential new customers in similar or adjacent industry

verticals, we can point to these case studies of success to demonstrate the value of our platform. This reduces the barriers to adoption, helps us grow our customer base, and increases the number of new programs under contract. Importantly, the reusable Codebase we generate from these new programs enables us to stay ahead of vertically focused competitors.

Once we establish a relationship with a customer, there is significant room to expand the scope of our program engagements. We are able to grow with our customers and/or expand into other existing pockets of R&D spending. We have seen customers expand from one early program to five or ten programs a few years later and each new logo we add has the potential to become a true platform partner.

When we work with companies from their inception (or at least from the inception of their biotech investments), we enable them to avoid significant fixed cost investments and benefit from our economies of scale. Our relationship with these customers is extremely strong, as we are the core technology powering their R&D efforts. As a result, when these customers scale, their usage of our platform typically scales commensurately. For companies with existing, established biological capabilities, as we demonstrate the value of our flexible platform, we are able to grow our relationships to complement their core capabilities and increase the probability of success.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of assuming that new disruptive technologies must subsume existing ways of working. When hosted servers and SaaS started rising in prominence, corporate IT teams had to wrestle with changing integrations and demands. Some information technology departments were resistant to moving “off-prem” because they felt they were effectively outsourcing their jobs. In response, the leaders in this field, such as Dell, would sometimes hire their customers’ information technology departments and find them jobs within Dell simply to get past this internal resistance. The reality was that these technologies were ushering in a much more substantial era for information technology, which dramatically increased the demand for this type of talent. This centralization of the model (from every company having large information technology departments building customized code to a broader array of specialized software vendors) didn’t come at the expense of information technology and digital technologies, but enabled its flourishing across all industries. We see something similar happening in biotechnology today. Internal R&D teams are typically both very excited to learn about the power of our platform but are also understandably nervous about what “outsourcing” work to Ginkgo might mean for the future of their teams. We have the opportunity to help them see the benefit in a true partnership with Ginkgo.

The vast majority of programs being run on the platform today are being run and managed by Ginkgo program teams—in-house scientists and engineers who are managing the R&D project to meet a customer’s specifications. But we now have a couple early examples of certain customers, those with more in-house biotech expertise, interacting directly with our platform. Over time, we would like to build in enough standardized interfaces that a distributed network of scientists could access the platform directly through a well-defined integration and self-service layer. This transition will allow our program teams to devote more of their efforts to developing Codebase assets, enabling more rapid scaling, and reducing the barriers to adoption by our customers. There are significant technical hurdles for us to overcome in developing this technology, but it is on our near-term roadmap and we are constantly thinking about how to “productize” individual workflows on the platform.

As described above in “—Our Platform,” we believe we are building the industry standard developer platform for cell programming. In much the same way that early computing platforms and operating systems built real communities around their platforms in the 80s and 90s, we intend to build a community of developers building on the Ginkgo platform. As we invest to expand this ecosystem of services for cell programmers building on the Ginkgo platform, our value proposition to cell programmers increases and we become more ubiquitous.

A company is made of people. We have sought to bring together a diverse and multidisciplinary group of people who share in our mission to make biology easier to engineer. Today, our extensive cross-functional team is collaborating to build our ecosystem, from organism designers to automation engineers, software developers to people operations, business development to facilities management, finance to molecular biology.

We’ve strived to grow a culture based on care. As engineers, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of ourselves simply as tool builders. Tools can be used in many different ways, both good and bad, and engineers often discuss their tools as value neutral. But tools reflect the social beliefs and biases of the people who make them: today this is becoming increasingly apparent, with more and more evidence of algorithmic bias being built into AI systems, facial recognition, and much more.

As designers of the largest horizontal platform for cell programming, we are keenly aware of the need to care about how our platform is used. More significant than the impacts we have seen from digital platforms on our social world, biology is our health, our bodies, our food, and our environment. As we build the tools for programming biology, we must also care how those tools are used, and ensure that the risks and benefits are transparently and equitably shared.

As of December 31, 2021 we had 641 full time employees. Building a horizontal platform for cell engineering and a biosecurity offering requires collaboration between diverse skills and functions. It also requires deep technical expertise. Our employees are dedicated to the following functions:

●

Platform functions including organism engineering, design, DNA synthesis and assembly, genome engineering, protein engineering and characterization, transformation and transfection, next generation sequencing, assay development, ultra high throughput screening, analytical chemistry, synthetic chemistry, directed evolution, and fermentation

●

Shared enabling functions including legal, people, operations, finance, information technology, information security, facilities, environmental health and safety, procurement, shipping and receiving, inventory management, laboratory operations and media preparation

In addition to our full-time employees, our success would not be possible without the collaboration and support of the broad network of partners, contractors, contingent workers and temporary staff who make up the Ginkgo team.

Technologies reflect the values of the people who build them. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are valuable and necessary in their own right, but we believe that it is essential to build a diverse team where people from different backgrounds are included and empowered to speak up and shape the growth of this technology. We are committed to growing a diverse team and continuing to empower an inclusive culture with strong employee ownership and engagement.

The full breadth of Ginkgo’s diversity and inclusion cannot be captured in demographic statistics, just as demographic categories cannot capture the full spectrum of diversity of human experience; however, we collect and report these numbers for transparency and as a lagging indicator of our efforts. As of December 31, 2021, 43% of our full time employees self-identify as an underrepresented gender (not cis male) and 12% self-identify as coming from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group in science and engineering (Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander). We are not yet satisfied with these numbers and all teams have objectives around increasing diversity and building a culture of inclusion to ensure that diverse perspectives thrive.

As a private, founder-led company, we were able to infuse the organization with long-term strategic thinking. The long-term engagement and mentality of our employees can be seen in our turnover: voluntary attrition is well below the industry average.

The individuals who work at Ginkgo and build our platform care deeply about how that platform is used and the impact our company will have in the world. As of December 31, 2021, our team owned over 30% of Ginkgo shares outstanding, and we hope to maintain the long-term mentality we have benefited from as a founder-led company now that Ginkgo is a public

company. We believe a workforce with strong equity ownership will make the wise decisions needed to build long-term value for our company and build a company whose long-term impacts make them proud. That is why we have implemented a multi-class stock structure that permits all employees (current and future), not just founders, to hold high-vote (10 votes per share) common stock. We believe that our multi-class stock structure will help maintain this long-term mentality and encourage long-term equity ownership by our employees, thereby resulting in increasing employee ownership over time. For more information, see “Risk Factors—Risks Relating to our Organizational Structure and Governance—Only our employees and directors are entitled to hold shares of Ginkgo Class B common stock (including shares of Ginkgo Class B common stock granted or otherwise issued to our employees and directors in the future), which shares have ten votes per share. This limits or precludes other stockholders’ ability to influence the outcome of matters submitted to stockholders for approval, including the election of directors, the approval of certain employee compensation plans, the adoption of amendments to our organizational documents and the approval of any merger, consolidation, sale of all or substantially all of our assets, or other major corporate transaction requiring stockholder approval.”

To our knowledge, there are currently no other companies that serve all industries covered by our horizontal cell programming platform. The solutions and applications offered by potential competitors vary in size, breadth, and scope, and given our broad set of application areas, we could face competition in many different forms. We also face competition from customers’ internal R&D departments and other research solution providers that largely conduct genetic engineering by-hand. We also compete against companies that seek to utilize synthetic biology technologies to develop specific products or target certain end markets. Additionally, competing platforms may emerge from various sources, including from joint ventures and partnerships between well-capitalized technology and life sciences companies. We identify the following three groups as our principal set of competitors:

The main source of competition we encounter is from potential customers choosing to build or maintain in-house cell engineering teams and capabilities. This status quo includes building out laboratory space and then hiring a team of highly trained scientists to conduct research “by-hand” with limited scale efficiencies. Some internal R&D operations maintain a full suite of capabilities and can design, build and test relatively complex pathways while others may have certain internal capabilities and need to outsource other elements to CROs. We believe this is far less efficient for the customer and likely to yield worse outcomes as customers get fewer shots on goal for a given program budget.

That said, it can still be very difficult for companies to choose to trust Ginkgo with their R&D efforts versus building more traditional “on prem” labs. Smaller companies may feel like they’re “betting the farm” on Ginkgo, while larger companies may be sensitive to displacing existing R&D teams. As such, a key focus area for us is reducing the barriers to adoption for the platform by de-risking the upfront investment for earlier-stage companies and by helping larger companies integrate their scientists closely into our workflows and empower their scientists to manage requests directly so we feel more like a resource and partner than a fully outsourced provider. Investing in these areas is a key focus area for us going forward.

Examples of traditional “synthetic biology” companies that have been vertically integrated from their founding with a focus on building products using synthetic biology include Amyris, Inc. (“Amyris”), Zymergen, Genomatica, Novozymes, DuPont, and DSM. Additionally, the vast majority of therapeutics companies that are leveraging genetic engineering have in-house capabilities, including Biogen, Novo Nordisk, Vertex, Regeneron, Bayer, and many others. These companies may be viewed as competitors to Ginkgo because they are creating products, using cell programming, that may compete with the products Ginkgo is enabling for our customers. However, as a horizontal platform, we view these companies not as competitors but as potential customers and focus not on “beating” them but rather on demonstrating our value proposition.

Within certain end markets, Ginkgo may compete against vertically-focused biotechnology companies providing cell engineering R&D capabilities to customers within a narrow set of end markets. While we believe the siloed nature of these companies limits their long-term potential, in the near-term, we may have a harder time penetrating those end markets given the incumbent vertical specialists in that space. The vast majority of these companies exist within therapeutic end markets given the history of cell engineering in that field. In theory, the expertise and learnings they develop from work in one field could be leveraged into neighboring end markets if these companies decided to adopt (and invest in) a more horizontal strategy. Examples of these vertically-focused platforms include AbCellera (antibody discovery), Codexis (enzymes), Senti Bio (cell therapy for oncology applications) and WuXi biologics (therapeutics).

We may also face competition from new entrants in the market, including well-capitalized technology companies with possible strategic interests in synthetic biology and its capabilities. Such companies may emerge as competitors given their access to capital, capacity to create multi-disciplinary teams across biology, chemistry, computer science and engineering, and flexibility to enter strategic ventures with life sciences companies.

Ginkgo protects each of these core assets—the Foundry and the Codebase—through a combination of patents and trade secret protections.

As of December 31, 2021, we had approximately 63 patent “families,” including patents held by the Company as well as by its wholly owned subsidiary Gen9, Inc. Some of these are represented by a Patent Cooperation Treaty (“PCT”) application with related national applications, as well as 16 pending provisional applications. We have over 58 issued U.S. and over 202 issued foreign patents, which includes European nationalizations, and approximately 69 pending U.S. non-provisional and approximately 150 pending foreign patent applications, including patents and patent applications acquired from third parties.

In addition to our proprietary methods and technologies, we also non-exclusively in-license certain intellectual property assets from third parties.

We intend to pursue additional intellectual property protection to the extent that we believe that it would be beneficial and cost-effective. We may abandon applications that are no longer relevant to our business. We cannot provide any assurance that any of our current or future patent applications will result in the issuance of patents. We also cannot assure the scope of any of our future issued patents or warrant that any of our patents will prevent others from commercializing infringing products or technology.


Delaware	87-2652913
(State or other jurisdiction of incorporation or organization)	(I.R.S. Employer Identification No.)
27 Drydock Avenue 8th Floor Boston, MA	02210
(Address of principal executive offices)	(Zip Code)


Title of each class	Trading Symbol(s)	Name of each exchange on which registered
Class A common stock, par value $0.0001 per share	DNA	NYSE
Warrants to purchase one share of Class A common stock, each at an exercise price of $11.50 per share	DNA.WS	NYSE


		Page
PART I
Item 1.	Business	1
Item 1A.	Risk Factors	51
Item 1B.	Unresolved Staff Comments	90
Item 2.	Properties	90
Item 3.	Legal Proceedings	90
Item 4.	Mine Safety Disclosures	90

PART II
Item 5.	Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities	91
Item 6.	[Reserved]	92
Item 7.	Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations	93
Item 7A.	Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk	112
Item 8.	Financial Statements and Supplementary Data	112
Item 9.	Changes in and Disagreements With Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure	112
Item 9A.	Controls and Procedures	112
Item 9B.	Other Information	113
Item 9C.	Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections	113

PART III
Item 10.	Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance	114
Item 11.	Executive Compensation	118
Item 12.	Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters	123
Item 13.	Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence	127
Item 14.	Principal Accounting Fees and Services	132

PART IV
Item 15.	Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules	133
Item 16.	Form 10-K Summary	137


Patent Family	Description	Application/ Publication/ Patent Number	Filing Date	Issue Date/ Status	Earliest Expected Expiration Date1
Owned by Gen9, Inc.
Methods and Devices for High Fidelity Polynucleotide Synthesis	Microfluidic devices and methods for assembling oligonucleotides by merging droplets containing oligonucleotide fragments with regions of complementarity	PCT/US2009/055267; WO/2010/025310	08/27/2009	Nationalized in: US	01/16/2030

Methods and Apparatuses for Chip-Based DNA Error Reduction	High-fidelity polynucleotide synthesis by generating complementary oligonucleotides to support bound single-stranded oligo (ss-oligo) in a microdroplet using enzymatic processes	PCT/US2010/057405; WO/2011/066186	11/19/2010	Nationalized in: EP, FR, DE, LT, NL, ES, SE, CH, GB, LI, and US	11/19/2030


Methods and Microfluidic Devices for the Manipulation of Droplets in High Fidelity Polynucleotide Assembly	Methods and devices utilizing droplet-based liquid manipulation on a substrate for assembling nucleic acids including steps of sequence error removal	PCT/US2010/055298; WO/2011/056872	11/03/2010	Nationalized in: US	11/03/2030

Assembly of High Fidelity Polynucleotides	Methods and apparatuses for preparing and/or assembling high fidelity nucleic acids on a solid support	PCT/US2011/020335; WO/2011/085075	01/06/2011	Nationalized in: US	01/06/2031

Methods and Devices for Oligonucleotide Synthesis	Devices and methods for the synthesis of polynucleotides and libraries of polynucleotides using manipulation of oligo-containing droplets on a support	US 8,716,467	03/02/2011	Issued 5/6/2014	05/12/2031
		US 9,388,407	03/31/2014	Issued 7/12/2016	03/02/2031
		US 9,938,553	04/08/2016	Issued 4/10/2018	03/13/2031
		US 15/908,726; US 2018/0195100	02/28/2018	Published

Methods for Nucleotide Sequencing and High Fidelity Polynucleotide Synthesis	Methods of obtaining sequence information of target polynucleotides by performing sequencing by ligation and sequencing by polymerase-based reactions	PCT/US2011/036433; WO/2011/143556	05/13/2011	Nationalized in: US	05/13/2031

Microarray Synthesis and Assembly of Gene-Length Polynucleotides	Processes for in vitro synthesis and on-device assembly of long, gene-length polynucleotides based upon assembly of multiple shorter oligos synthesized in situ on a microarray platform	US 7,563,600; 7,323,320; 8,058,004; 9,023,601; 9,051,666; 10,450,560; 10,640,764; 10,774,325	09/12/2002- 02/18/2020	Issued 07/21/2009 -09/15/2020	09/12/2022
		US 17/019,448; US 2021/0062185	09/14/2020	Published
		PCT/US2003/028946; WO/2004/024886	09/12/2003	Nationalized in: AU, CA, CH, EP, FR, DE, DK, GB, JP, LI, NL	09/12/2023

Compositions, Methods, and Apparatus for Oligonucleotides Synthesis	Compositions and methods for high-fidelity polynucleotide assembly on solid support from oligos by adding variable length padding sequences to the ends of the oligos	PCT/US2014/025610; WO/2014/160004	03/13/2014	Nationalized in: EP, US, DE, GB	03/13/2034

Compositions and Methods for Multiplex Nucleic Acids Synthesis	Methods of producing target nucleic acid using pluralities of oligos with overhangs, in which overhangs of one plurality are designed to be complementary to overhangs of another plurality	PCT/US2014/026261; WO/2014/151696	03/13/2014	Nationalized in: AU, CA, CN, EP, IL, US	03/13/2034


☒	ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934


☐	TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 FOR THE TRANSITION PERIOD FROM TO


Large accelerated filer	☐	Accelerated filer	☐
Non-accelerated filer	☒	Smaller reporting company	☐
		Emerging growth company	☒


Methods for the Production of Long Length Clonal Sequence Verified Nucleic Acid Constructs	Methods and compositions for the production and isolation of high fidelity nucleic acids using high throughput sequencing of fragmented oligos which are tagged with unique barcodes at the 5’ and/or 3’ ends	PCT/US2014/048867; WO/2015/017527	07/30/2014	Nationalized in: EP, CH, DE, FR, GB, LI, NL	07/30/2034

Protein Arrays and Methods of Making and Using the Same	Methods and devices for preparing a protein array to generate and express a plurality of proteins from a plurality of nucleic acids on an array	PCT/US2011/060217; WO/2012/064975	11/10/2011	Nationalized in: EP, US	11/10/2031

Libraries of Nucleic Acids and Methods for Making the Same (Nucleic Acid Library and its Manufacturing Method)	Methods for designing and producing non-random libraries of nucleic acids using multiplexed polynucleotide synthesis in which complementary overhangs attached to specific sequences are hybridized and ligated to each other	PCT/US2014/067444; WO/2015/081114	11/25/2014	Nationalized in: AU, CA, CN, EP, IL, US	11/25/2034

Iterative Nucleic Acid Assembly Using Activation of Vector-Encoded Traits	Nucleic acid configurations and cloning strategies for progressively assembling a long nucleic acid product using a plurality of assembly cycles that each include assembling a vector and two or more inserts containing one or more regulatory sequences that activate vector-encoded traits when assembled in a predetermined configuration	PCT/US2007/019209; WO/2008/027558	08/31/2007	Nationalized in: US	08/31/2027

Methods and Devices for Nucleic Acid Synthesis	Methods and apparatus for the synthesis of polynucleotides on a support using primer extension to generate overlapping construction oligonucleotides and assembly of the polynucleotides of interest by hybridizing construction oligos onto anchor support- bound oligonucleotides	PCT/US2011/060243; WO/2012/078312	11/10/2011	Nationalized in: AU, CA, EP, BE, DE, GB, IE, LT, NL, CH, CN, DE, ES, FR, GB, IL, JP, LI, SE, US	11/10/2031

Methods for Preparative in Vitro Cloning	Methods and devices for the isolation of nucleic acids from libraries by tagging a population of nucleic acids	US 9,752,176	06/15/2012	Issued 09/05/2017	06/15/2032


	with unique oligonucleotide tags
		US 15/666,345; US 2018/0023120	08/01/2017	Published
		US 17/536,828	11/29/2021	Pending
		PCT/US2012/042597; WO/2012/174337	06/15/2012	Nationalized in: AU, CA, CN, EP, IL, CH, DE, FR, GB, LI, LT, NL, US	06/15/2032

Compositions and Methods for High Fidelity Assembly of Nucleic Acids	Methods, compositions and algorithms for designing and producing a target nucleic acid from blunt-end double stranded nucleic acids generated by digesting the same to create cohesive-end fragments with unique cohesive ends that anneal and are ligated in a predetermined order	US 13/592,827; US 2013/0059296	08/23/2012	Published
		US 17/373,324; US 2021/0380991	07/12/2021	Published
		PCT/US2012/052036; WO/2013/032850	08/23/2012	Nationalized in: AU, CA, CH, CN, DE, EP, LI, EP, FR, GB, IL, JP, LT, NL, SE, IE, BE, ES, HK, IS	08/23/2032

Device and Method for Nucleic Acid Manipulation	High precision, high selectivity nucleic acid singulation and assembly techniques using mechanical force generated piezoelectrically or acoustically to selectively expel or transfer one or more volumes of nucleic acids from a solid support	PCT/US2018/033823; WO/2018/217702	05/22/2018	Nationalized in: AU, CA, CN, EP, IL, JP, US	05/22/2038

Compositions and Methods for Site-Directed DNA Nicking and Cleaving	Compositions and methods for site-directed DNA nicking and/or cleaving, and use thereof in, for example, polynucleotide assembly to create sticky-end breaks in DNA so that the resulting fragments can be used for DNA assembly	PCT/US2015/039517; WO/2016/007604	07/08/2015	Nationalized in: EP, DE, GB, US	07/08/2035

Methods for Nucleic Acid Assembly and High Throughput Sequencing	Hierarchical assembly of target polynucleotides from construction oligonucleotides	PCT/US2013/047370; WO/2014/004393	06/24/2013	Nationalized in: AU, CA, CN, EP, CH, DE, FR, GB, LT, NL, SE, IL, JP, US	06/24/2033

Methods for Sorting Nucleic Acids and Preparative in Vitro Cloning	Compositions and methods for sorting and cloning of high fidelity nucleic acids by high throughput sequencing using unique barcode pairs (tag oligos) that may be sequenced	US 10,081,807	04/24/2013	Issued 09/25/2018	04/09/2035


	to identify a nucleic acid of interest
		US 10,927,369	07/18/2018	Issued 02/23/2021	10/17/2033
		US 17/152,202; US 2021/0139888	01/19/2021	Published
		PCT/US2013/037921; WO/2013/163263	04/24/2013	Nationalized in: AU, CA, CN, EP, CH, DE, FR, GB, LI, LT, NL, SE, IL	04/24/2033

Methods for Screening Proteins Using DNA Encoded Chemical Libraries as Templates for Enzyme Catalysis	Methods, compositions and devices for screening a protein library for proteins having a desired activity	US 9,150,853	03/13/2013	Issued 10/06/2015	03/13/2033
		US 10,308,931	08/31/2015	Issued 06/04/2019	07/27/2033
		US 16/397,314; US 2019/0249169	04/29/2019	Published

Owned by Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc.

Methods and Systems for Chemoautotrophic Production of Organic Compounds	Engineered chemoautotrophs (and methods for engineering such chemoautotrophs) including three metabolic modules: energy conversion pathways allowing use of energy from an inorganic energy source, carbon fixation	US 8,349,587	10/31/2011	Issued 01/08/2013	10/31/2031

	pathways, and product biosynthetic pathways to convert central metabolites into desired products, such as carbon-based products of interest

		PCT/US2012/62540; WO/2013/066848	10/30/2012	Nationalized in: US	10/31/2031

Methods and Systems for Methylotrophic Production of Organic Compounds	Engineered methylotrophs (and methods for selecting such cells) for efficiently converting C1 compounds into various carbon-based products of interest, including systems, mechanisms and methods to confer pathways for energy conversion, methylotrophy, or carbon fixation	PCT/US2013/073582; WO/2014/089436	12/06/2013	Nationalized in: US	12/06/2033

Methods and Genetic Systems for Cell Engineering	Engineered probiotics comprising a nuclease module designed to specifically target and degrade a nucleic acid, a synthetic mobile genetic element module capable of dispersing the system from one host cell to another, and an antibiotic-free maintenance module	PCT/US2015/022508; WO/2015/148680	03/25/15	Nationalized in: AU, CA, EP, JP, US	03/25/2035


Methods and Molecules for Yield Improvement Involving Metabolic Engineering	Methods and compositions relating to cells that have been engineered to reduce or eliminate proteins having enzymatic activity that interferes with the expression of a metabolic product	PCT/US2010/036902; WO/2010/141468	06/01/2010	Nationalized in: US	07/10/2030

Methods and Systems for Cell State Quantification* *(Co-Owned with R. Rettberg)	Engineered cells, and methods for engineering such cells, for genomic, transcriptomic, or proteomic analysis, using multiple peptide tags	US 9,506,167	07/27/2012	Issued 11/29/2016	01/07/2034

		US 10,119,975	11/29/2016	Issued 11/06/2018	07/27/2032

Protective Enzymes	Enzymes for protecting polymers from damage caused by fatty acids from secreted biological fluids such as sebum or sweat	PCT/US2018/050718; WO2019/055541	09/12/2018	Nationalized in CN, EP, HK, US	09/12/2038

Chimeric Terpene Synthases	Cells, enzymes, and methods for production of terpenes (which can be used as fragrances, pheromones, or antimicrobials, among other things) that are partially derived from sequences reconstructed from rare or extinct plants	PCT/US2019/018122; WO2019/161141	02/14/2019	Nationalized in: EP, HK, JP, KR, US	02/14/2039

Biosynthesis of Mogrosides	Cells, enzymes, and methods for producing mogrosides (high-intensity natural sweeteners) by fermentation	PCT/US2019/060652; WO 2020/097588	11/09/2019	Nationalized in: CA, CN, EP, JP, US	11/09/2039

Biosynthesis of Mogrosides	Cells, enzymes, and methods for producing mogrosides (high-intensity natural sweeteners) by fermentation	PCT/US2020/057067; WO 2021/081327	10/23/2020	Published	10/23/2040

Biosynthesis of Mogrosides	Cells, enzymes, and methods for producing mogrosides (high-intensity natural sweeteners) by fermentation	PCT/US2021/032251; WO2021/231728	05/13/2021	Published	05/13/2041

Biosynthesis of Cannabinoids and Cannabinoid Precursors	Cells, enzymes, and methods for producing cannabinoid compounds by fermentation	PCT/US2020/019760; WO2020/176547	02/25/2020	Nationalized in CA, EP, IL, US	02/25/2040

Biosynthesis of Cannabinoids and Cannabinoid Precursors	Cells, enzymes, and methods for producing cannabinoid compounds by fermentation	PCT/US2020/046838; WO2021/034848	08/18/2020	Published	08/18/2040

Biosynthesis of Cannabinoids and Cannabinoid Precursors	Cells, enzymes, and methods for producing cannabinoid compounds by fermentation	PCT/US2021/024398; WO2021/195520	03/26/2021	Published	03/26/2041


Biosynthesis of Cannabinoids and Cannabinoid Precursors	Cells, enzymes, and methods for producing cannabinoid compounds by fermentation	PCT/US2021/037954; WO2021/257915	06/17/2021	Published	06/17/2041

Biosynthesis of Cannabinoids and Cannabinoid Precursors	Cells, enzymes, and methods for producing cannabinoid compounds by fermentation	PCT/US2021/040941	07/08/2021	Pending	07/08/2041
Biosynthesis of Cannabinoids and Cannabinoid Precursors	Cells, enzymes, and methods for producing cannabinoid compounds by fermentation	PCT/US2021/054641	10/12/2021	Pending	10/12/2041

Rare Earth Element (REE)-Binding Proteins	Cells, binding proteins, and methods for recovering rare earth elements, including lanthanides	PCT/US2020/038808; WO2020/257702	06/19/2020	Nationalized in AU, CA, CN, EP, JP, KR, US	06/19/2040

Biosynthesis of Enzymes for use in Treatment of Maple Syrup Urine Disease (MSUD)*