Jason Kelly, Ginkgo Bioworks CEO (Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Af­ter Ko­dak de­ba­cle, US lends $1.1B to a syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy com­pa­ny and their big Covid-19, mR­NA plans

In mid-Au­gust, as Ko­dak’s $765 mil­lion gov­ern­ment-backed push in­to drug man­u­fac­tur­ing slow­ly fell apart in na­tion­al head­lines, Gink­go Bioworks CEO Ja­son Kel­ly got a mes­sage from his com­pa­ny’s gov­ern­ment li­ai­son: HHS want­ed to know if they, too, might want a loan.

The gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to lend Ko­dak three quar­ters of a bil­lion dol­lars raised eye­brows be­cause Ko­dak had nev­er made drugs be­fore. But Gink­go, while not a man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny, had spent the last decade re­fin­ing new ways to pro­duce ma­te­ri­als in­side cells and build­ing au­to­mat­ed fa­cil­i­ties across Boston.

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