Major Partnership in Beauty and Personal Care

Ginkgo Bioworks Announces Latest Collaboration with Sumitomo Chemical for Beauty and Personal Care Sector Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA), a leading horizontal platform for cell programming, announced the launch of a new cell programming project as part of a broader collaboration with Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd (TSE:4005), one of Japan's leading chemicals companies. Through this partnership, Sumitomo Chemical will leverage Ginkgo's comprehensive codebase and expertise in organism engineering to sustainably produce molecules used in products across a wide range of industries. The target molecule of this latest project is planned for use in the personal care and cosmetics industries and is expected to augment or replace a molecule currently derived from animal sources. [caption id="attachment_143165" align="aligncenter"] Source: Ginkgo Bioworks[/caption] Ginkgo and Sumitomo Chemical aim to design a strain that will produce the target compound through fermentation, creating products that provide significant benefits to consumers by delivering animal-free and more sustainable ingredients. This is a new project in addition to the existing collaboration that began in 2021 and focuses on the production of selected bio-based molecules for Sumitomo Chemical's broad portfolio, which includes offerings ranging from personal care and cosmetics to agriculture and pharmaceuticals, chemicals, industrial products and beyond. Hiroshi Ueda, Senior Managing Director of Sumitomo Chemical, said: "The cosmetics industry, like many others we serve, is demanding more sustainable and cost-competitive beauty and personal care products, and we see tremendous potential in synthetic biology's ability to make this possible at commercial scale." "The progress of our initial project with Ginkgo encourages us, and we believe that with how well our teams collaborate, we can find success in additional product areas as well. Through this project, with the active participation of our newly established organization Syn Bio Hub, we are building our own capacity in fermentation production." Patrick Boyle, Head of Ginkgo Codebase, said: "This project is not only a natural fit for the Ginkgo platform, but it also provides an excellent opportunity to leverage and showcase our growing codebase." "Ginkgo has prior experience developing a pioneering molecule that Sumitomo Chemical is currently targeting. The data and experience that Ginkgo possesses on this pioneering molecule significantly accelerated our existing program with Sumitomo Chemical and has likely saved Sumitomo Chemical several years from their development timeline."   Source