With sup­ply chain short­ages at the fore­front of near­ly every busi­ness in the world right now, whether it be chick­en wings or CAR-T cell ther­a­py, syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy up­start An­theia is look­ing to aid in the fight. It just an­nounced a deal with a gi­ant in the field to help it along.

An­theia will join forces with Gink­go Bioworks to beef up its pipeline of ac­tive phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­gre­di­ents and key start­ing ma­te­ri­als, lever­ag­ing Gink­go’s high-through­put en­zyme de­sign and screen­ing in­fra­struc­ture to scale up at high­er speed.

Cur­rent­ly, the sup­ply chain for plant-based med­i­cines de­pends on the long process of sourc­ing spe­cial­ty plants. An­theia is fo­cused on a plant-al­ter­na­tive man­u­fac­tur­ing process that us­es yeast through what it calls whole-cell en­gi­neer­ing. The en­gi­neer­ing plat­form would in the­o­ry re­place the need for com­plex plant-de­rived com­pounds, and use the en­gi­neered yeast cells as a mi­ni-fac­to­ry that would churn out mol­e­cules at a com­mer­cial scale.

For drugs that re­ly on plant-based ac­tive in­gre­di­ents, such as the chemother­a­py vin­blas­tine, there are fragili­ties that come with such a re­liance. Geopo­lit­i­cal con­flict, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters and cli­mate change can of­ten play a role in avail­able sup­ply. A re­cent ex­am­ple of that, An­theia co-founder and CEO Christi­na Smolke said, is the wild­fires in Aus­tralia in 2019 and 2020 that wiped out an en­tire pro­duc­tion source. As cli­mate change con­tin­ues and weath­er pat­terns change, events like these can on­ly hap­pen more of­ten.

“When you look at the con­ven­tion­al ap­proach­es we use for man­u­fac­tur­ing drugs as well as drug dis­cov­ery, those ap­proach­es in gen­er­al lim­it what mol­e­cules we’re able to syn­the­size as well as how ef­fi­cient­ly, at what scale, and where we can do that in man­u­fac­tur­ing,” Smolke said in an in­ter­view with End­points News Wednes­day. “In­no­va­tion in phar­ma has suf­fered, and that has led to the lim­i­ta­tions in both the de­vel­op­ment of new drugs, as well as the pro­duc­tion of many es­sen­tial med­i­cines which as of to­day re­ly on a frag­ile sup­ply chain. And what we’ve seen over the last year and a half, two years with the Covid pan­dem­ic is that it’s shown us that when the med­ical sup­ply chains break down, there are very re­al hu­man costs.”

Gink­go, whose am­bi­tion is to be the “Mi­crosoft of syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy,” has caught the at­ten­tion of in­vestors, val­ued at $15 bil­lion as it went pub­lic in May via a SPAC merg­er. The com­pa­ny show­cased its man­u­fac­tur­ing prowess through per­fume and syn­thet­ic meat be­fore plung­ing deep in­to oth­er sec­tors, all while build­ing up a com­pre­hen­sive set of tools to re­pro­gram cells with in­dus­tri­al ef­fi­cien­cy.

That hefty plat­form, An­theia says, will be of great help as it brings its en­gi­neered mi­crobes to com­mer­cial scale. Gink­go’s tech­nol­o­gy and bi­o­log­i­cal code­base can help in the cru­cial step of strain op­ti­miza­tion, en­sur­ing that the pro­duc­tion of any giv­en com­pound is as ef­fi­cient as pos­si­ble.

In June, An­theia raised a $73 mil­lion Se­ries B round to ad­vance its pipeline. And ef­fi­cient­ly scal­ing has been top of mind as a big chal­lenge.

So far, the fo­cus has been on the R&D side of things, de­vel­op­ing the yeast strains, fer­men­ta­tion process and the down­stream pu­rifi­ca­tion process.

“One im­por­tant fact is to just re­al­ly un­der­stand what your lim­i­ta­tions are go­ing to be at scale, and build a ro­bust scaled-down mod­el so that you’re eval­u­at­ing your strains and you’re de­vel­op­ing that un­der re­al­is­tic con­di­tions that are go­ing to be able to scale that to hun­dreds of thou­sands of liters,” CSO Christy Hawkins said. “And al­so look­ing at the ro­bust­ness of the strain in your process, and how de­vi­a­tions can cause you to have is­sues at scale.”

Ear­li­er this week, Gink­go al­so an­nounced an mR­NA break­through with part­ner Alde­vron. The com­pa­ny says it has found a way to boost the man­u­fac­tur­ing yield of the vac­cinia cap­ping en­zyme, al­so known as VCE, which Alde­veron’s pres­i­dent Tom Foti said is a dif­fi­cult en­zyme to pro­duce.

“We be­lieve this yield break­through will ac­cel­er­ate mR­NA ther­a­peu­tic and vac­cine de­vel­op­ment for man­u­fac­tur­ing teams around the world,” he said in a press re­lease.

VCE, Gink­go CEO Ja­son Kel­ly said, is seen as a key in­gre­di­ent for scal­ing mR­NA pro­duc­tion. Alde­vron has ex­clu­sive rights to the man­u­fac­tur­ing process, which it says is 10-times more ef­fi­cient that its pre­vi­ous process.

89bio said its drug was better than placebo at lessening fibrosis without worsening nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, in two of three dose groups.

The San Francisco biotech said it thinks the Phase IIb data pave the way for a potential Phase III, following in the footsteps of another biotech in its drug class, Akero Therapeutics. To fund a late-stage study, CEO Rohan Palekar told Endpoints News 89bio “would need to raise additional capital,” with the company having about $188 million at the end of last year.