Innovation Seminar: Dr. Massimo Merighi, Ginkgo Bioworks

Ginkgo Bioworks was founded in 2009 by 4 MIT graduate students and their PI. The company aims to bring industrial efficiency to biology by designing and engineering microorganisms as production factories of useful ingredients for perfumes, foods, cosmetics, enzymes, and more. In the last 10 years, the company has raised more than $400M from investors, including Bill Gates, and has partnered with leading companies worldwide, such as Ajinomoto, Bayer, and Genomatica.

In this Innovation Seminar Series talk, Ginkgo Bioworks Associate Head of Metabolic Engineering, Dr. Massimo Merighi, will discuss the founding of the company and its strategy. He will also cover the history of rational and unbiased approaches to biological engineering and compare it to those being pursued by Ginkgo Bioworks.

Bio:

Dr. Massimo Merighi is associate head of metabolic engineering at Ginkgo Bioworks (Boston, MA, USA). Before joining Ginkgo, he worked at Glycosyn (Woburn, MA, USA) on the metabolic engineering of Escherichia coli to produce human milk oligosaccharides (HMO). An organism he engineered capable of 2' fucosyllactose biosynthesis has reached production scale and commercialization as a food ingredient for baby formula by a major manufacturer. Dr. Merighi trained at Harvard University (Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics) and Ohio State University (Center for Microbial Interface Biology; Department of Plant Pathology), where he obtained his PhD in 2003. His undergraduate studies in Agricultural Engineering  were completed in Italy at the University of Bologna. He holds a number of patents on the metabolic engineering of HMOs and he is the author of 66 papers, reviews, book chapters, and patent applications. He has served as reviewer for the U.S. National Science Foundation, NIFA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the journal Molecular Microbiology. He is currently associate editor for  Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology. 

More Information:

• Ginkgo Bioworks
• "Rewriting Nature's Recipe Book" Future Literacy
• "Why Bill Gates is Betting on a Startup that Prints DNA" CNBC

For more information or to request a meeting with our guest, please contact: innovation@oist.jp

The seminar is co-organized by Innovation Forum Okinawa