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Ginkgo Bioworks Takes $80M Stake in Synlogic as Part of Platform Collaboration

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Ginkgo Bioworks said today that it has made an $80 million equity investment in Synlogic as part of a platform collaboration between the firms.

Under the terms of the deal, Boston-based Ginkgo has purchased 6,340,771 shares of Synlogic common stock as well as pre-funded warrants to purchase up to 2,548,117 shares of Synlogic common stock, both at a price of $9 per share.

The investment is part of a long-term, strategic collaboration to expand and develop Synlogic’s pipeline of synthetic biotic medicines using Ginkgo’s cell programming platform. Synlogic, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will use Ginkgo's cell programming platform for building and testing thousands of microbial strains to accelerate progression of early preclinical leads to drug candidates optimized for further clinical development.

Synlogic has paid $30 million to Ginkgo for synthetic biology services to be provided over an initial period of five years, which can be extended. Synlogic will have exclusive rights to any medicines and related intellectual property that are developed as part of the collaboration.

“Ginkgo has built a world-class infrastructure for programming and optimizing microbial strains at a large scale which will be instrumental in the development of our portfolio of Synthetic Biotic medicines," Synlogic President and CEO Aoife Brennan said in a statement.

The deal builds upon a pilot program the two firms started in late 2017.

"Based on the success of our pilot work with the Synlogic team, we're doubling down on our collaboration to grow this powerful engine for the future of medicine together," said Jason Kelley, cofounder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks.