Perhaps reflecting its lofty valuation, Soaring Eagle Acquisition shares haven’t budged since the May SPAC deal.
Its projected 2021 revenue, however, is very modest, about $100 million. Based on the SPAC transaction, it has the highest market value of the three-about $18 billion. With an all-star investor lineup including Gates’ Cascade Investment, Ginkgo has generated the most buzz. Its CEO, John Melo, sees a potential $2 billion in sales and $600 million of Ebitda in 2025. Amyris, whose shares trade around $13.50, is valued at $4 billion and looks like the best bet. It projects $400 million in 2021 sales and break-even results based on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda. This manufacturing technique uses little energy, but is unproven on a major scale.Īmyris is the furthest along, based on revenue and products. Synthetic-biology manufacturing often involves large fermentation tanks filled with genetically re-engineered microorganisms like yeast that are filtered out of the finished product. “Amyris is delivering on the promise of synthetic biology.” Doerr is chairman of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. “I believe synthetic biology will continue to be a big part of making our planet healthier and our future more sustainable,” Doerr tells Barron’s.
“What’s really exciting is that it’s not limited by industry verticals-agricultural, flavor and fragrances, pharmaceuticals, food.”Īmyris’ controlling shareholder is one of the country’s most successful venture capitalists, John Doerr, who was an early investor in “Ginkgo is looking to build a platform to make biology and cells as easy to program as computers,” says Kirsty Gibson, a portfolio manager at Baillie Gifford, which is buying stock in Ginkgo as part of the SPAC deal. (MRNA) in its development of the Covid-19 vaccine. With impressive DNA coding capabilities, Ginkgo views itself as the industry’s Amazon Web Services, working with companies in consumer, pharmaceutical, and agricultural areas to design microorganisms and cells from mammals to make desired products or drugs. Programming DNA, of course, is harder than programming computers, but progress is coming quickly.
“Rather than have yeast make beer, you hijack it to make the scent of a flower.” “Think of synthetic biology as hijacking the natural biology of the cell and reprogramming it to produce something of interest,” says Doug Schenkel, a Cowen analyst who has Outperform ratings on Amyris and Zymergen. Instead of zeros and ones, the four DNA base pairs - adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine- guide cells. The “magic of biology,” Ginkgo CEO Jason Kelly has noted, is that cells run on something akin to a computer’s digital code. Synthetic biology, which blends biotechnology and industrial chemistry, isn’t an easy concept to grasp. The combined market value of the three is $25 billion. Investors may want to take a basket approach to the stocks. It will be renamed Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings. (SRNG), a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Ginkgo is due to go public in the current quarter through a merger with The small scale of the industry at present hasn’t dimmed investor interest in the three main plays on synthetic biology: Amyris, which makes an estimated 70% of the world’s squalane using engineered yeast cells and sugar cane, says its efforts have saved as many as three million sharks a year. Synthetic biology has so far produced mostly niche products like squalane, a moisturizer formerly sourced from shark liver vitamin E a sugar substitute and vanillin. Yet for all the bold claims and hopes for an industry once known as industrial biotech, revenue overall currently totals less than $1 billion. Here’s Why Roche Stock Could Be an Alzheimer’s Winner.Another Setback for Biogen’s Controversial Alzheimer’s Drug.This Beaten-Up Pharmaceutical Stock Could Soar 65%.