Arcaea is a biotechnology startup that specializes in producing beauty products via genetically engineered microorganisms. Their first product is a deodorant that is designed to promote a healthy underarm microbiome. Arcaea’s skin microbiome division provides more sustainable alternatives to chemical deodorants, an example of how microbiol biotechnology can provide environmentally-conscious solutions.

Is there an unmet need for bio-hardware in the industry that we can fulfill?

We designed APUS with the intention that it can be applied to a wide biotechnology market, ranging anywhere from the pharmaceutical to beauty industry.

However, to really understand how different companies can use our product, we needed to better identify their needs when working with synthetic bacterial pathways. We attended Boston University’s Microbiome Day in July and identified one potential client: Arcaea. This beauty-biotechnology startup based in Boston seemed like an ideal company to learn how they work with synthetic bacteria to develop beauty products. We contacted Jaide Jenson, the Head of Biotechnology at Arcaea. She put us in touch with Feranmi Aboderin, Min-Ting Lee, and Brandon LaBumbard, Arcaea scientists on the skin microbiome team, to discuss their project and how APUS may be of use to them

Meeting with Arcaea

Our meeting with Arcaea gave us insight into how the beauty industry works with engineered bacteria to produce more environmentally sustainable products. This concept of challenging the chemical industry by designing more sustainable products is one of the reasons we built APUS.

Arcaea’s skin microbiome technology is a great example of this kind of sustainability, because their deodorant is designed to promote “good” bacterial growth and help build a better skin microbiome, reducing odors. In our meeting they told us they study and test both individual bacteria and communities to see how certain ingredients influence their growth.

The team was interested in APUS, saying that if it can produce a certain output or measure results other than fluorescence, our platform can be of use to companies like Arcaea. They felt the motherboard and its ability to run multiple experiments at one with different media could be useful to them; they could measure different concentrations of ingredients all at once.

We also asked Arcaea about their partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks to help characterize their ingredients. They mentioned they’d prefer to conduct more experiments in-house, and APUS would serve them better as a product instead of a service like Ginkgo.

Main Takeaways

• Having multiple types of measurement, not just fluorescence, would be more useful for clients
• APUS would be more useful as a product, not a service
• As we move toward more complex pathways, we should consider implementing oxygen level control
• APUS’ main initiative of saving time, labor, and money is crucial to startups

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Ginkgo Bioworks is a leading biotechnology company who provides many services related to microbial engineering. Other companies can request a specific synthetic strain or output, and Ginkgo can create a pathway to produce the desired product.

How can we scale up APUS to compete in the biotechnology industry?

Prior to our meeting with Ginkgo Bioworks, we had already attended the iGEM/Ginkgo Bioworks Mentorship Meetup on July 19th, where we learned that Ginkgo’s primary research focus lies in designing single strain bacterial pathways. As we focused on supporting multi-strain pathways, we wondered why Ginkgo only designed single strain synthetic pathways. We were also curious as to how they conduct business as a service.

These questions led us to contact Luis Ortiz, a Senior Test Engineer at Ginkgo, who agreed to meet with us to discuss APUS and his experience working in the Selection and Strain Improvement team.

Meeting with Ginkgo Bioworks

Luis began by addressing how he helps companies develop strains. Clients often come with a synthetic pathway or template of what they are looking for - whether that be a plasmid, strain or protein -  and usually request a certain amount of product. Ginkgo has developed tools and protocols to help optimize synthetic pathways and produce that desired amount of product.

We asked if Ginkgo has had difficulty with designing and optimizing single-strain synthetic pathways. Luis has not had trouble placing the weight of an energetically-heavy pathway on a single strain, noting how they’ve streamlined microbial work. Other issues we inquired about, such as dead zones in fermentation tanks, were not a problem Luis encountered at Ginkgo.

One of the advantages of doing everything in-house as Ginkgo does was that they can charge for services and produce the hardware themselves to support the requests that other companies come to them with. This is because Ginkgo Bioworks is designed to produce large quantities of product. Our meeting with Luis was really helpful, since he advised that we have a plan to upscale APUS to a level similar to Ginkgo, and provided us with suggestions on how we can do so.

Main Takeaways

Our talk with Luis made us realize that partners in the industry weren’t considering multistrain synthetic pathways, and Ginkgo was only prioritizing upscaling single strain synthetic pathways. While this was at first difficult to hear, we realized we should pivot to academic laboratories, because that is where multistrain pathways are gaining traction.

• We should prioritize delivering APUS hardware to research institutions whose findings will influence the biotechnology industry
• Aspects of our design is still crucial for APUS’s future industry success, including its plug-and-play feature and the motherboard’s customizability
• APUS still has a purpose in the biotechnology industry by allowing for faster, automated characterizations of single strain synthetic pathways

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