A Look at Ginkgo Bioworks, The Leonardo Da Vinci of a Synthetic Biology Renaissance
Disclaimer: This article is my individual interpretation and not investment or financial advice. I am a common stock shareholder in Ginkgo Bioworks.
Leonardo Da Vinci, born 1452, is an individual that needs no introduction. The ‘Renaissance Man’, Leonardo’s genius spanned disciplines in a manner that inspires individuals and groups to this very day, as Ginkgo Bioworks’s business model exemplifies. Ginkgo’s horizontally integrated platform uses both generalization and specialization techniques, which together synergize to ultimately reach and serve a customer base that spans a wide range of disciplines. Leonardo, only a man, serves as the template for this business model. His interests spanned from anatomy to painting, from sculpting to engineering, touching seemingly every topic possible at the time. And even though his range of knowledge was so wide, the depth — his ability to specialize — wasn’t compromised. In fact, his generalization only improved his specialization — take the interplay between a deep understanding of anatomy and sculpting the human body. In this way, Leonardo’s genius outshone those of his peers during the Renaissance, and he became a defining figure of the time, just as Ginkgo may be looked upon in retrospect as a defining company of the potential synthetic biology renaissance.
At its core, the business model of Ginkgo is one of iteration, improvement, and expansion. Ginkgo Bioworks is a leader in synthetic biology, a field which revolves around engineering and reprogramming organisms and/or systems to ‘work (and ultimately produce) for us’, to put it simply. Ginkgo’s business consists of two major subdivisions — Foundry and Codebase. Foundry is where the synbio happens — where Ginkgo’s proprietary technology engineers bacterial cells, such as yeast, to synthetically produce molecules (such as proteins) for their various customers. For instance, in 2021 Ginkgo partnered with Aldevron and discovered an optimized production process for vaccinia capping enzyme (VCE), a protein integral to mRNA vaccines.
Foundry synthetically produces molecules; Codebase optimizes this process. The potential of Codebase is where we start to see flashes of Leonardo’s trademark interdisciplinary way of thinking, and how his creativity and scientific thinking synergized. Codebase is software that takes inputs from Foundry, stores them in a library of ‘renewable genetic parts’, and with this continuously optimizes Ginkgo’s process of producing synthetic molecules. The synergy lies in the relationship between these two separate yet interconnected processes — Foundry produces molecules, feeding Codebase data. Codebase in turn improves the efficiency of Foundry (essentially finding quicker/cheaper organism pathways to produce a given molecule) and Foundry becomes smarter and faster, in turn producing more data for Codebase, which repeats this process all over again.
The genius of Leonardo lay not only in his intelligence, but also in his way of thinking, which allowed for a synergistic interplay between topics, not too dissimilar from the relationship between Codebase and Foundry. Leonardo refused to be confined to a single topic yet was simultaneously able to specialize in certain fields — he was both a specialist and a generalist. Instead of becoming solely a specialist and following the traditional career of a painter, a sculptor, an architect, a scientist, or an engineer, he chose them all. Herein lies what makes Leonardo such a renowned historical figure — his interests and studies synergized just as the separate yet related subdivisions of Ginkgo do. His study of anatomy and physiology improved his sculpting and painting. His deep understanding of water dynamics and management enabled him to make insightful analogies with the then-understudied human cardiovascular system. His skill in drawing and composing meant that his engineering plans, architectural layouts, and theatrical productions all could be translated, understood, and (perhaps most importantly for us) preserved more effectively — as we have seen in the present, with people being able to successfully build certain inventions of Leonardo’s that were centuries too early.
Leonardo’s studies in the arts and literature improved his understanding of science and engineering, and vice versa, but the synergistic positive feedback loop that is seen between Ginkgo’s platforms might be difficult to spot here. Stepping back, however, we see that these skills and topics are only minnows in a larger flow of ideas — the synergism of Leonardo’s life lies within the interplay between the analytical and creative perspectives of Leonardo’s studies. The imagination and creativity imparted by his work in the arts transferred over to his engineering and scientific studies to create inventions and ideas centuries ahead of their time. In turn, Leonardo’s ability to innovate led him to take novel, bold paths in his artistic career. Take his technique of sfumato, the application of many, many thin layers of oil paint to create a portrait that wasn’t just accurate, but truly realistic. No one else thought of Leonardo’s inventions and innovations — in the sciences and arts — because no one else had Leonardo’s unique perspective of simultaneous generalization and specialization.
On a macro scale, the time Leonardo spent during his childhood and First Florentine Period specializing in the arts led him to, and really allowed him to, effectively generalize and expand into these other unrelated fields. Or should I say unexpected fields — Leonardo clearly showed us that topics of study are unrelated only if we think they are. If we go back to Ginkgo’s business model, we see a similar extrapolation from specialization to generalization. Ginkgo’s specialized Foundry platform drives Ginkgo’s generalization twofold — through a diverse customer base and by enabling Codebase. Codebase can be seen as a specialization, but what Codebase is really doing is taking a wide look at the production process of Foundry, and abstracting away the hours, days, and weeks of time that would otherwise be spent by humans combing through petri dishes to find more efficient pathways. It has a general purpose of improving Foundry — deepening its specialization, in a way.
Outside of the walls of Ginkgo, the customers that have onboarded to the Foundry and Codebase platforms are from industries ranging from government defense to consumer technology, from biotech to agriculture, and so on. This generalization is a key facet of Ginkgo’s business model — a diverse revenue stream that can withstand macro industry pressures just as a network’s redundancy ensures that it won’t go down when a single node fails. This facet of generalization is in sharp contrast with the focus on specialization that the vast majority of the pharma and biotech field possesses.
The current business model in the biotech and pharma industry is a vertically integrated one — companies focus on getting a drug or multiple drugs through a pipeline. Preclinical studies, clinical trials, commercialization, all happen in-house or in conjunction with a collaborator. Essentially, these companies specialize around their vertically integrated drug pipeline. Pharma companies have a bit more innovation in their business model — they leverage acquisition of these smaller biotech companies to build their pipeline, outsourcing the early work of this process in a way. While this might be more efficient than building everything from the ground up, M&A has historically never been a high margin business model. As a result, while the innovation occurring in the healthcare field is impressive, the growth of the industry (arguably — this is certainly subjective) does not accurately reflect this. Enter Ginkgo — a horizontally integrated biotech company, choosing both specialization and generalization just as Leonardo did.
In biotech and pharma, if vertical integration is building a pipeline for a drug, then horizontal integration is supporting certain points of a large number of these pipelines. For Ginkgo, this is only a portion of their horizontally integrated model — they supply synthetic materials not only for the biotech and pharma industry, but for a wide range of industries. Unlike vertically integrated companies, Ginkgo is focused on their platform, not their product. A vertically integrated synbio company would be one that discovers a molecule, designs and engineers an organism to produce said molecule, and finally manufactures that molecule for eventual commercialization. Instead, Ginkgo chooses to focus on one thing — engineering organisms that can produce a given molecule with their Foundry/Codebase platform — and outsource the rest of the process. The manufacturing, commercializing, and managing is abstracted away for Ginkgo, while they retain value via royalties from or equity in their client companies.
The beauty of Ginkgo’s horizontally integrated model is that it allows them to choose both specialization and generalization just as Leonardo did. Ginkgo specializes (and generalizes via Codebase, as we discussed above) in-house, and outsources generalization to its diverse customer base. Ginkgo’s deal model ensures that this customer base, which includes many biotech startups that were ‘incubated’ in Ginkgo’s facilities, grows (or sinks) alongside the company. By taking equity stakes as compensation in many of their clients, Ginkgo bets on their biotechnology; by onboarding to the Foundry platform, Ginkgo’s customers are entrusting the company with the production of components integral to their end product. Ginkgo realizes the synergistic positive feedback loop that could result from this interdependent relationship, a realization that is reflected in their commitment to their customers. A perfect example is Ginkgo’s cell development kits (or CDKs) — a way for companies to access Foundry without large deals, perfect for small biotech (and non-biotech) startups in need of quick and cheap R&D.
The way in which Ginkgo intertwines itself with the synthetic biology and biotech field is reminiscent of Leonardo’s prominence in the Renaissance. Leonardo, oft called the “Renaissance Man”, had many mentees, just as Ginkgo has many spinoffs and startup clients. These mentees became so renowned, in fact, that the term “Leonardeschi” was coined as a reference to them. The Renaissance wouldn’t be the Renaissance we know today without Leonardo, not only because of his sculptures and paintings, but also because of the later works that he influenced. As he helped the Renaissance to flourish, the Renaissance helped him to flourish through greater financial support and additional perspectives. Ginkgo wouldn’t be the company it is today without the underlying biotech and synbio community structure; Leonardo wouldn’t be the thinker he became without the inquisitive and interdisciplinary environment of his time.
This parallel begs the question: as Leonardo and the Renaissance rose together, has Ginkgo started a fire within synthetic biology that will grow until it blossoms into a biological renaissance? Can Ginkgo Bioworks emulate the ‘Renaissance Man’ and lead synthetic biology in transforming not only the biotech and pharma fields, but various industries spanning all types of disciplines? If there’s a company in synthetic biology that can do this, it’s Ginkgo Bioworks, with their horizontally integrated business model that incorporates synergistic aspects of both generalization and specialization via Foundry, Codebase, and an engaged and diverse customer base. Thanks to these aspects, Ginkgo is a standout in a field of standouts, just as Leonardo was. We’ve established the merits of Ginkgo that are reminiscent of Leonardo’s, but we’ve also established that just as the successes of Leonardo and the Renaissance were interdependent, the success of Ginkgo depends not only on themselves but on the field that it is intertwined with. The question then boils down to one of the merits of synthetic biology in creating a biological revolution. In a field so volatile and dependent on synergism and positive feedback loops, concrete predications are impossible, but if the past successes of Genentech and CRISPR have taught us anything, biology is growing, and fast. Gingko Bioworks is poised to be the next step in this chain of exponential growth, and very well might catapult the field of biology into a new renaissance.
