Ginkgo Bioworks, the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, entered into a definitive agreement to acquire FGen AG, a Swiss company specializing in strain development and optimization.

WHO: FGen is a Swiss start-up company founded 2011 in Basel, Switzerland, as a spinoff from the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering of the ETH Zurich. As a contract research organization the company collaborates with partners from biotech, life sciences, agribusiness, and pharma in order to develop microbes, cells, chemicals, and proteins for various applications. 

Ginkgo is building a platform to enable customers to program cells as easily as we can program computers. The company's platform is enabling biotechnology applications across diverse markets, from food and agriculture to industrial chemicals to pharmaceuticals and beauty. 

WHY: Ginkgo believes that FGen's technology will significantly enhance Ginkgo's cell screening capabilities and enable Ginkgo to explore wider expanses of genetic opportunity space, increasing the likelihood of finding enzymes, pathways, and strains or cell lines that perform to diverse product specifications.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS: "Ginkgo is committed to investing in creating the premier cell programming platform by integrating best-in-class tools from around the world and deploying them broadly across our programs," said Barry Canton, Ginkgo's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. "We have worked with the FGen team for several years and believe their technology and world-class scientists will allow us to further improve our ability to explore an exponentially wider design space and deliver more value for our customers."

"Our team has spent the last decade building one of the most advanced screening platforms in the world in the hopes of enabling breakthrough discoveries and products across industries," said Andreas Meyer, Chief Executive Officer of FGen. "We are excited to be welcomed onto the Ginkgo platform where we can deploy this technology much more broadly and better support customers and their world-changing work."

DETAILS: 

• Under the terms of the transaction, FGen will receive upfront payment and additional contingent consideration related to, among other things, the successful integration and deployment of the FGen technology across Ginkgo programs.
• Post-closing, Ginkgo expects that the integration of FGen's platform can greatly increase the capacity of Ginkgo's Design-Build-Test-Learn strain development engine, a foundation of Ginkgo's technology stack. 
• By adding FGen's uHT screening platform to its existing HT screening systems, Ginkgo seeks to be able to routinely analyze the performance of millions of genetic prototypes in pooled format, upgrading the quality of candidate hits that feed into downstream workflows for strain characterization and validation. 
• FGen's platform is extremely flexible across organisms, pathways, and target products. The platform can be deployed to screen for both intracellular and secreted target products as well as both small molecules and proteins. It can also accommodate diverse organisms including bacteria, yeast, filamentous species, and mammalian cells.
• Last November, Arcaea, a new start-up at the intersection of biotech and beauty, launched after a two-year incubation period within biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks with $78 million in Series A funding.