Ginkgo Bioworks, which is building the leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity, and Google Cloud announced a five-year strategic cloud and AI partnership, intended to enable Ginkgo to develop and deploy AI tools for biology and biosecurity.
Under the strategic partnership, Ginkgo will work to develop new, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) running on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform across genomics, protein function, and synthetic biology, helping Ginkgo’s customers accelerate innovation and discovery in fields as diverse as drug discovery, agriculture, industrial manufacturing, and biosecurity. Ginkgo intends to make Google Cloud its primary cloud services provider, significantly increasing its next-generation cloud computing resources, positioning Ginkgo and its customers well as the need for cloud computing expands. In addition, Google Cloud will provide funding to help Ginkgo achieve certain milestones over the next three years. The commitment underscores Google Cloud’s support in advancing foundation models in the life sciences sector and selection of Ginkgo as its key partner in the development of this ecosystem.
“We believe that by partnering with Google Cloud, Ginkgo can supercharge our mission to make biology easier to engineer,” said Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. “The most pressing challenges of our generation require biological solutions, and we must figure out how to better leverage our collective capabilities and move faster. With Ginkgo’s automated Foundry to generate large scale biological data, Google Cloud’s computing horsepower, and Google’s AI expertise, I can’t think of a better partner to scale AI solutions in biological engineering.”
Ginkgo operates as a horizontal biological engineering and biosecurity platform, working to accelerate and de-risk scientific R&D projects for customers across industries. As of the most recent quarter, Ginkgo had over 100 active R&D programs on its platform with customers as diverse as Bayer, Biogen, Merck, Novo Nordisk, Sumitomo Chemical, and Syngenta. Ginkgo also has a long history of collaborating with government partners, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) on a number of national security priorities including sustainable manufacturing.
Ginkgo has spent more than a decade developing its Foundry, which leverages extensive proprietary software and automation tools to scale and drive down the cost of research and data generation in the biotechnology sector. Ginkgo’s Codebase includes over 2 billion unique protein sequences as well as a massive collection of diverse experimentally derived functional assay data. These data assets are well suited for training both foundation models and fine-tuned applications. Through this partnership, Ginkgo plans to build a number of interconnected models for both internal use on customer programs and external release on Google Cloud Marketplace. Ginkgo anticipates its first model to be a foundation model for proteins.
SOURCE: PRNewswire