Ginkgo Bioworks

Investments in AI and machine learning are also reshaping the landscape.

Ginkgo Bioworks' collaboration with Novo Nordisk to construct an autonomous lab highlights the increasing role of automation in optimizing R and D productivity.

Mithril's twenty million dollar Series A round further underscores this shift, focusing on developing an AI infrastructure platform for streamlined biopharma drug discovery processes.

The regulatory environment continues to evolve with notable challenges.

And so there, each one of those is the tech transfer handoff, right? Whether you're sending that to a lab in California or you're trying to build capacity around the world, that is a tech transfer.

It has to work in all of those settings in order for those samples to come back to Gecko's centralized lab to do that sequencing.

And if you're not getting that right, then you're not keeping pace with the virus.

And so like the urgency that you feel in a moment of like a pandemic crisis too, you're like, I can't wait another week for this tech transfer to work because those are lives, right? And so like just being really like feeling that even more visceral and then having this opportunity to go to government again, go back to ARPA-H and to think about other blockers that you could remove.

And we have a lot of people in our network that are building tools, creating their own AI models specifically for science, for lab automation.

I'm thinking of Nick Edwards from Potato AI and his collaboration with Ginkgo Bioworks.

And we will be having Jason Kelly on the podcast in a couple of weeks.

So stay tuned for that.

I'm no syn bio expert, but I wanna hone in on what you said the IP is.

Is it the protein that you're making, or is it the act of distributing the protein using microbes? Like, 'cause I mean, like, there, Ginkgo Bioworks does that- They may not have this exact protein, and probably not this use case at all, but, like, where in here is your IP?

Yeah, so we can't protect the protein at all because it's natural.

Yes.

And these companies are commonly known as Cloud Labs.

So to name the three, it's Emera Cloud Labs, another one called Stradios, and then one company that doesn't call itself a Cloud Lab, but technically operates similarly to one, which is Ginkgo Bioworks.

And these companies have invested into large-scale automation and tried to streamline this process as much as possible.

But all of them were founded in the pre-ChatGPT kind of era.