Ginkgo Bioworks, Arbor Biotechnologies announce collaboration

Arbor Biotechnologies announced a collaboration with Ginkgo Bioworks to leverage Ginkgo’s comprehensive Codebase and automated Foundry to jointly optimize Arbor’s novel precision editors. Arbor utilizes its computational metagenomic discovery engine and protein engineering expertise to identify and optimize genetic editors with the potential to treat a broad range of genetic diseases. The company’s portfolio of novel gene editors has significant therapeutic potential due to, among other things, their unique protospacer adjacent motifs, which may enable access to nearly all sites in the genome, their varied cut types, which can potentially correct a wider range of diseases, their smaller editing technology, which allows the use of additional delivery technologies, and their high specificity, which can enable improved safety profiles. Ginkgo’s expertise in high throughput exploration of genetic design spaces complements Arbor’s in-house capabilities, and the collaboration is expected to accelerate Arbor’s precision editor optimization campaign through massively parallel library design, automated mammalian cell experimentation and iterative AI-guided protein engineering.