A month and a half af­ter a short sell at­tack near­ly brought Gink­go Bioworks’ new­ly pub­lic shares to its knees, the com­pa­ny on Mon­day took its largest step to date to­ward clear­ing its name. But it al­so re­vealed it’s cur­rent­ly the tar­get of a De­part­ment of Jus­tice probe.

Gink­go re­ceived an “in­for­mal in­quiry” from the DOJ con­nect­ed to the short sell re­port, re­leased last month by hedge fund Scor­pi­on Cap­i­tal, the com­pa­ny said dur­ing Mon­day’s third quar­ter earn­ings call. CEO Ja­son Kel­ly told an­a­lysts Gink­go is “co­op­er­at­ing” with reg­u­la­tors, sug­gest­ing the in­ves­ti­ga­tion re­mains on­go­ing.

“Short­ly af­ter the short sell­er re­port comes in, we re­ceived a pre­lim­i­nary in­quiry from the DOJ, in­for­mal,” Kel­ly said dur­ing the call, adding lat­er: “There’s not too much more I’d add at this point on it.”

The dis­clo­sure came in the same breath as Kel­ly say­ing its self-ap­point­ed in­de­pen­dent au­dit found all ac­cu­sa­tions of wrong­do­ing in the re­port to be “un­found­ed.” In a fol­low-up email ask­ing for com­ment, a Gingko spokesper­son re­ferred End­points News to Kel­ly’s re­marks and the earn­ings press re­lease.

Through spokesper­son Danielle Blevins, the De­part­ment of Jus­tice de­clined to com­ment.

“As a gen­er­al mat­ter, the De­part­ment does not con­firm, de­ny, or oth­er­wise com­ment on the ex­is­tence or non-ex­is­tence of in­ves­ti­ga­tions. We de­cline to com­ment fur­ther,” Blevins wrote to End­points in an email.

Though the probe is os­ten­si­bly con­nect­ed to the re­port, it’s not yet clear what in­for­ma­tion reg­u­la­tors sought from Gink­go or how broad the scope of the in­quiry is.

Back in Oc­to­ber, Scor­pi­on put out its re­port al­leg­ing Gingko was “a Franken­stein mash-up of the worst frauds of the last 20 years.” The hedge fund claimed there was a pat­tern of fraud at Gink­go, with the com­pa­ny fak­ing cus­tomer in­ter­est and over­hyp­ing a plat­form that’s seen a his­to­ry of fail­ure with­out any mean­ing­ful IP.

The re­port could not be con­firmed and short sell­ers — and the re­ports they put out — have a cer­tain rep­u­ta­tion about them. At the time, long­time stock com­men­ta­tor Cit­ron Re­search pushed back on the most se­ri­ous claims against Gink­go, say­ing the com­pa­ny us­es “roundtrip trans­ac­tions” to boost rev­enue re­ports but stopped short of call­ing it a “scam.”

But it’s sim­i­lar to what oc­curred af­ter Scor­pi­on re­leased a sep­a­rate re­port on Berke­ley Lights, send­ing that syn­bio play­er’s stock tank­ing as well. And Zymer­gen, the com­pa­ny Scor­pi­on re­ferred to as Gink­go’s “Siamese Twin,” blew up in spec­tac­u­lar fash­ion ear­li­er this year just months af­ter a mas­sive $500 mil­lion IPO.

Gink­go, too, is fac­ing the re­al­i­ties of be­ing a new­ly pub­lic com­pa­ny, hav­ing tak­en the SPAC route and re­verse merg­ing with Arie Bellde­grun’s blank-check com­pa­ny to raise a record $2.5 bil­lion. The deal set Gink­go’s mar­ket val­ue at $15 bil­lion, though the stock — trad­ing on Genen­tech’s old $DNA tick­er — hasn’t moved all that much since the merg­er closed in Sep­tem­ber.

Gink­go shares were down about 2.5% in ear­ly Mon­day trad­ing and are up about 27.5% since the SPAC process wrapped up.

This ar­ti­cle has been up­dat­ed to in­clude Gingko and the De­part­ment of Jus­tice’s re­spons­es to End­points’ re­quests for com­ment.

Bristol Myers Squibb recently joined 11 of its peer pharma companies in limiting how many contract pharmacies can access certain drugs discounted by a federal program known as 340B.

Bristol Myers is just the latest in a series of high-profile pharma companies moving in their own direction as the Biden administration’s Health Resources and Services Administration struggles to rein in the drug discount program for the neediest Americans.

Amgen wanted to know how people with asthma really felt about daily life with the disease. So it bought a promoted tweet on Twitter noting the not-so-simple realities of life with asthma and ended the post with a #DearAsthma hashtag, a megaphone emoji and a re-tweet button.

That was just over one week ago and the responses haven’t stopped. More than 7,000 posts so far on Twitter replied to #DearAsthma to detail struggles of daily life, expressing humor, frustration and sometimes anger. More than a few f-bombs have been typed or gif-ed in reply to communicate just how much many people “hate” the disease.

The summer before Cellino CEO and co-founder Nabiha Saklayen started at Harvard, she lost her grandmother following complications to diabetes. Before then, she hadn’t taken a biology class since ninth or tenth grade — the mark of a classic physicist — but it was then she decided she wanted the rest to sit at the intersection of the two for the rest of her career

Combine that with being across the way from the University’s stem cell institute in Cambridge, and you get the birth of Cellino, an autonomous cell therapy manufacturing company that just announced the closing of its Series A.