Ginkgo Bioworks teams up with Acies Bio to speed industrial protein production

Ginkgo Bioworks has partnered with Slovenian biotechnology company Acies Bio to provide customers with access to engineered Aspergillus niger strains alongside strain development, bioprocess scale-up, and manufacturing services through a single collaboration.

• Ginkgo Bioworks partnered with Acies Bio to offer engineered Aspergillus niger strains alongside strain development, process optimization, scale-up, and manufacturing.
• The collaboration combined Ginkgo's fungal chassis strains with Acies Bio's SmartRoute platform to create an integrated development pathway for protein production.
• The companies said the partnership aimed to help customers accelerate industrial protein production without developing in-house fungal engineering capabilities.

The agreement brings together Ginkgo's engineered fungal chassis strains with Acies Bio's SmartRoute platform, which covers protein expression, upstream and downstream process development, performance validation, and manufacturing at its facility in Slovenia, which has fermentation capacity of up to 30 cubic meters.

The companies said the partnership is designed to simplify the route from laboratory strain development to commercial-scale production by providing customers with a single provider rather than requiring them to source microbial strains, process development, and manufacturing separately.

At the center of the collaboration is Ginkgo's engineered Aspergillus niger, a food-safe fungus widely used in industrial biotechnology to produce proteins and enzymes for applications including food ingredients, dietary supplements, animal nutrition, detergents, and other industrial products.

According to Ginkgo, its chassis strain has been engineered to improve large-scale cultivation while reducing the production of unwanted natural byproducts. The company said these characteristics can help improve production efficiency, lower manufacturing costs, and deliver more consistent products.

The strains were developed using Ginkgo's automated microbial engineering platform, which enables researchers to test large numbers of genetic variants simultaneously to identify combinations of traits suited to industrial manufacturing.

Acies Bio will integrate the strains into customer-specific production programs through its SmartRoute platform. The company said it can introduce and optimize target protein expression, develop fermentation and downstream processing methods, validate production performance, and scale manufacturing using its in-house facilities.

Jill Bradshaw, General Manager of Ginkgo's Microbial Solutions business unit, said: "Our Aspergillus niger platform strains were built to take friction out of industrial protein production - low viscosity, low protease activity, and inactivated mycotoxin pathways from the start.

"By pairing these chassis strains with Acies Bio's development and manufacturing expertise, we can put a proven starting point in the hands of customers who want to move quickly from concept to scaled production."

Štefan Fujs, Director of Acies Bio, added: "Ginkgo's chassis strains are an excellent foundation, and our team with 20 years of experience in industrial strain and process development knows how to turn a strong starting strain into a robust, scalable bioprocess.

"This collaboration lets us offer customers a complete path, from strain access through process development and manufacturing, without needing to build fungal engineering capabilities in-house."

Under the agreement, Ginkgo's Aspergillus niger chassis strains will be licensed to Acies Bio customers as part of integrated development, scale-up, and manufacturing programs.

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