Ginkgo Bioworks Announces New Beauty and Personal Care Industry Collaboration with Sumitomo Chemical
Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA), the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, today announced the launch of a new cell programming project as part of a larger collaboration with Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd (TSE:4005), a leading chemical company in Japan.
Sumitomo Chemical will use Ginkgo’s extensive codebase and expertise in organism engineering to produce molecules in a sustainable manner for use in products across a wide range of industries.
This latest project’s target molecule is intended to supplement or replace one that is currently obtained from animal sources in the personal care and cosmetic industries.
Ginkgo and Sumitomo Chemical hope to create products that will benefit consumers by supplying an animal-free and more sustainable ingredient by engineering a strain that will produce the targeted ingredient through fermentation.
This is a new project that will be added to the companies’ existing collaboration, which began in 2021 and will focus on bio-based production of selected molecules for Sumitomo Chemical’s broad portfolio, which includes offerings ranging from personal care and cosmetics to agriculture and pharma, as well as chemicals, industrial products, and more.
“The cosmetics industry is demanding more sustainable and cost-competitive beauty and personal care products, as are many others we serve, and we see tremendous potential in synthetic biology’s ability to make this possible at a commercial scale,” said Hiroshi Ueda, Executive Vice President of Sumitomo Chemical.
“We’re encouraged by the progress of our ongoing first project with Ginkgo, and we believe it’s clear from how well our teams collaborate that we will also be able to find success within additional product areas as well. Through this project, we aim to build our own capability on fermentation production with, active involvement of our new organization SynBio Hub.”
“Not only is this project a natural fit for Ginkgo’s platform, but it provides the perfect opportunity to leverage and showcase our growing codebase,” said Patrick Boyle, Head of Codebase for Ginkgo.
“Ginkgo has prior experience developing a precursor molecule to the one Sumitomo Chemical is currently targeting.
The data and experience Ginkgo has on this precursor molecule has significantly accelerated our current program with Sumitomo Chemical, possibly saving Sumitomo Chemical multiple years off its development timeline.”
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