With bacteria ruling your life, Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks has decided to enter the scene in order to create new bacteria that can help to fight it. The start-up is putting in effort to make a vaccine that can protect people from "bad" bacteria that might lead to illnesses such as "antibiotic-resistant infections" and "traveler's diarrhea".
"You take 100,000 people and move them to new country, a significant percentage of that group will get sick with traveler's diarrhea," said Patrick Boyle, head of design at Ginkgo Bioworks. "That happens to be a disease that is a disruption of your gut microbiome by bad bacteria."
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) considers 'traveler's diarrhea' to be a major problem, obstructing soldiers. It can severely hamper soldiers' field operations. The DOD has thus granted Ginko $1.75 million in order to create the vaccine.
Ginkgo's probiotic vaccine is right now at the beginning of development. It is creating vaccinations for a trillion organisms that live in the human gut. The vaccines will help to protect the body against diseases that have not been covered by conventional vaccines, which address the immune system.
The company will be able to judge in a year whether it can start to test on mice.
"A lot of the hard basic biology that we are doing as far as this DARPA work, helps us to find better ways to engineer microbes in general," said Boyle. "All the markets we are in and looking at are markets that are accessed by engineering microbes to do something."
"What we are really interested [in] is making the process of engineering microbes more predictable," he said. "That's why we get excited about these very hard, different types of projects - it allows us to discover some fundamental biology that helps us make that product more predictable."
