Ginkgo bioworks announces the start of its “Ginkgo Technology Network”, as well as a few acquisitions; Novo inks a molecular glue partnership; and Moderna announces going back to rare diseases.

This Week in TechBio 2024/03/04

• 2023/02/29 Microsoft: Microsoft announces a partnership with 1910 genetics, a company working on AI for large and small molecule discovery
• 2024/02/28 Endpoints News: Moderna announces wanting to get back into the rare diseases game, where it previously had a lot of issues. This is a fun timing as the FDA announced that accelerated approvals will become the norm for gene therapies (Endpoints, 2024/02/27), they may be hoping to get easier trials.
• 2024/02/28 Ginkgo Bioworks: Ginkgo Bioworks announces the creation of their technology network. The press release only mentions that Ginkgo partners with these company and will integrate their technology into the Ginkgo offer, whether they took a stake into the various companies, made them pay to access their clients, or paid them to get access to their expertise, is not mentioned in the release. It seems that Ginkgo wants to become a one-stop-shop for all R&D needs, though integrating the products of the 25 different companies will not be an easy task.
• 2024/02/28 GenomeWeb: Ginkgo Bioworks acquired Reverie Labs, Proof Diagnostics, and Patch Biosciences, with the goal enhancing their genome engineering and AI capabilities. It kinda feels like a pivot for Gingko to go from pure manufacturing to biopharma services, they may have realized that their biofactory lacked a market. This announcement comes at the same time as they expand their technology network.
• 2024/02/26 Fierce Biotech: Novo signs a deal with up to \$1460m in milestone payments with Neomorph, for designing molecular glues.
• 2024/02/26 Fierce Biotech: EnsoData gets FDA approval for its new sleep monitoring tool that uses oxymeters instead of bulkier devices.
• 2024/02/21 Fabric Health: Fabric, an AI company focused on streamlining patient experience for primary providers, raises a \$60m series A.
• 2024/02/21 Fierce Biotech: Avance Clinical signs a deal with Ryght, a company that offers an LLM for writing trials protocols and summarizing research papers.
• 2024/02/12 Fierce Biotech: In a rather interesting turn of events, a recent paper published in Nature used mutations naturally occurring in cancer to design better CAR-T cells. These mutations were identified by assuming that cancer cells are selected for being more “fit”, they then screened a set of 71 mutations and saw that some improved T cell performances.

I probably missed quite a few announcements, don’t hesitate to DM me @gama_search if you see anything missing or needing corrections.