Boehringer Ingelheim will use Ginkgo Bioworks’ natural product discovery platform to advance the development of novel therapeutics.

The specific drug target has not been specified but Ginkgo said the partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim will aim to tackle some of the most complex and “undruggable” targets.

Under the terms of the agreement, Ginkgo will receive an upfront research and development (R&D) payment from Boehringer Ingelheim. Additionally, Ginkgo has the potential to gain up to $406 million in R&D, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments, as well as royalties on sales.

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“Many microbes produce molecules with features that make them useful to treat human disease, including antibiotics, anti-fungals and oncology drugs,” a Ginkgo spokesperson told this publication.

“By sequencing the genomes of microbes we can predict the propensity of certain microbes to produce these useful molecules and can try to pinpoint those that will have certain therapeutic activities. We can then use synthetic biology approaches to coax production of the associated molecules and test them for use as human medicines in collaboration with our colleagues at Boehringer Ingelheim.”

The work will take place at both Ginkgo’s headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, and atone of Boehringer Ingelheim’s research sites.

“Ginkgo will leverage its biological engineering foundry, which automates and scales the process of organism engineering, allowing engineers to prototype thousands of biological designs,” we were told.

“This equips companies like Boehringer Ingelheim with access to robust technology to complement and accelerate their drug discovery and development efforts. In addition, Ginkgo will leverage its talented team of scientists who are experts at mining the deep metagenomic databases Ginkgo has to work on this project.”

The $300 million acquisition of Zymergen in July 2022 has enabled Gingko to build a broad and deep metagenomics global database, the firm says. Moreover, as of 2022, the company’s Codebase has increased to over two billion protein sequences.

During this partnership, Ginkgo will support Boehringer Ingelheim to mine this database. The firm claims the database has more than three terabases of sequence data from various microbes, which uses machine tools to advance the discovery of therapeutics.