Cambium Biomaterials (“Cambium”), the company creating high-performance biomaterials, today announced a partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc. (“Ginkgo”), which is building the leading horizontal platform for cell programming. Ginkgo, which recently announced a business combination with Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: SRNG), serves customers across industries seeking to develop new and better products using biology. The partnership will leverage Ginkgo’s Codebase and high-throughput facility to accelerate Cambium’s discovery, development, manufacturing and commercialization of biomaterials that deliver superior performance and sustainability across a range of industries.
Cambium designs new functional biomaterials and composites for use in diverse and extreme environments. Cambium will work with Ginkgo to explore a diverse set of bio-based molecules and develop a library of bio-building blocks to support the manufacture of innovative biomaterial end products, with the initial focus on materials that provide enhanced heat, flame, laser and sensor protection. By enabling the design of organisms that can produce valuable biological products, Ginkgo helps accelerate the development of innovative, bio-based solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. This partnership deepens Ginkgo’s involvement in the biomaterials space following the launch of recent cell programs with other leading biomaterials companies.
“Cambium is redefining biomaterials by creating high-performance products that deliver step changes in performance and sustainability to industries as diverse as aerospace and renewable energy,” said Simon Waddington, CEO and co-founder at Cambium. “We are excited to work with Ginkgo to not only expand the universe of these materials but also explore how to make them biologically. We expect this partnership to grow our pipeline and accelerate our commercialization timeline.”
“Ginkgo helps companies across industries use synthetic biology to produce better, more sustainable products,” said Jason Kelly, CEO at Ginkgo Bioworks. “Product developers across the spectrum are looking for sustainable alternatives to petrochemical-based materials to achieve unmet performance needs. Biomaterials are proving to be even higher-performing than petrochemical-based alternatives, and we are excited to support startups like Cambium as they grow and bring next-gen biomaterials to market.”
About Ginkgo Bioworks
Ginkgo is building a platform to enable customers to program cells as easily as we can program computers. The company’s platform is enabling biotechnology applications across diverse markets, from food and agriculture to industrial chemicals to pharmaceuticals. Ginkgo has also actively supported a number of COVID-19 response efforts, including K-12 pooled testing, vaccine manufacturing optimization and therapeutics discovery. In May 2021, Ginkgo announced a business combination with Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: SRNG), which, if completed, will result in Ginkgo, through a parent entity, Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc., becoming a public company. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021, subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals, and other customary closing conditions. For more information, visit www.ginkgobioworks.com.
About Cambium:
Cambium is a San Francisco Bay Area-based company leading the discovery, development and rapid uptake of end-use products enabled with high-performance biomaterials. By leveraging its deep domain expertise, and the convergence of synthetic biology, materials science, computation and automation, Cambium is advancing applications based on new high-performance biomaterials that solve important real-world problems in demanding applications that can’t be solved by currently available materials — across the spectrum from aerospace to EVs to defense. For more information go to cambiomat.com.
