The IOS Of Synthetic Biology Is Here. And Thanks To This Incubator, The Apps Are Rolling In.

A perfumery might seem an unlikely place for the synthetic biology revolution to accelerate in earnest, but that’s where Jason Kakoyiannis started to dream it.

Kakoyiannis is the Managing Partner of Ferment, a Ginkgo Bioworks-powered company creation studio. He believes platforms like Ginkgo’s allow startups to make a beeline to market.

I caught up with him ahead of the SynBioBeta 2023 conference in May, which will feature talks from several of the companies in Ferment’s portfolio.

“We’re in an age where biology can be thought of as a manufacturing technology with nanoscale precision, but with scalability on the level of continents,” says Kakoyiannis, as he points to an image of South America’s sprawling Amazon rainforest.

Synthetic biology capitalizes on nature’s amazing ability to make things. Lots of things. From medicines to building materials.

It involves tweaking the DNA of cells, the Amazon-scale nanofactories pioneered by biology, to make products that can be brewed up like beer. It’s scaling rapidly thanks to companies like Twist Bioscience and Ginkgo.

“We translate the capabilities being built up by platform-type companies such as Ginkgo, who are getting better and better at working with DNA, to find end products that are consciously market oriented,” Kakoyiannis explains. “Then we build companies that will productize them.

“It’s like building on the cloud.”

A lightning strike for synthetic biology

Starting out as an artist, Kakoyiannis spent several years as a curator in New York before law school beckoned. After practicing mergers and acquisitions law he then tried his hand at business, finding a passion in the fragrance and flavor industry.

The penny dropped when he was working with Gingko, who along with Bayer formed Joyn Bio to meet a growing demand for biological fertilizers.

“That was a lightning strike moment,” he says. “Other industries and companies, advantaged by synthetic biology and resources in a way to move quickly, could become category defining and category disruptive.”

Taking inspiration from company creation studios in biotech and software, such as Third Rock and Idealab, Ferment joins the likes of Indie Bio as an accelerator for synthetic biology startups.

Kakoyiannis focuses on market fit, while partners Brian Brazeau and Jess Leber tackle scalability and technology.

Catalyzing products with market value

Allonnia is one such Ferment startup. The company creates value from waste and pollutants by identifying and improving microbes that can clean them up.

“We want to make sure what we’re doing has value,” says CEO Nicole Richards. “Where can biology have a transformational impact?”

Just two years after I reported on Allonnia’s launch in 2020, they released their first product to clean up 1-4 dioxane in tap water. Two more will follow this year, a biosensor that targets the all-pervasive ‘forever chemical’ PFAS, and a microbe that harvests heavy metals from mining waste.

“Ferment has helped structure what a strategy could look like in this area, and then created the connections,” says Richards, who aims to launch ten products by 2030. “We’ve been able to launch products and have a very positive and meaningful impact. There’s nothing like our PFAS sensor out there.”

The power of the platform

Ayana Bio is another company in Ferment’s ecosystem that creates high value through high nutrition ingredients such as cacao, saffron and ginseng, using plant cell fermentation.

In a matter of weeks, Ayana Bio brews up plant cells that produce much greater amounts of health benefiting compounds than are found naturally. The product slots perfectly into a plant powder market that’s worth billions.

“We find a way to make the cells,” explains CEO of Ayana, Frank Jaksch. “Ginkgo helps with the metabolomics, the proteomics, the genomics, the transcriptomics, so we can identify which plant cells are optimally going in the right direction for what we want.”

BiomEdit, an Elanco spin-out developed with Ferment that will leverage Ginkgo’s expertise on strain optimization, is also set to release its first products. Microbes engineered to boost livestock health and reduce the reliance on antibiotics.

“I think in Ferment we found people who share the same mindset about the role of biology,” says Aaron Schacht, CEO of BiomEdit. “Innovating the role of Gingko technology to make the outcomes of biology more accessible from a product standpoint.”

It’s this power of the platform that Kakoyiannis believes opens up huge potential for synthetic biology companies.

“There’s already this capacity and economy of scale for doing a lot of the sophisticated cell engineering work. A young company can tap into that, focus resources on the productization and product development,” he explains.

“You might argue that the first waves of biomanufacturing companies were mostly doing what’s called technology push, then looking for a market after the fact. It’s a classic paradigm for building technology businesses. But it can often mean that market fit comes later, or doesn’t come at all.

“We’re looking to solve not just problems, but hair on fire problems for customers.”

Thank you to Peter Bickerton for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about, including Ferment, Ginkgo, Twist, Allonnia, Ayana and BiomEdit, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.