Keep pulling the thread on Jason Kelly.
Jason Kelly predicts that AI will fundamentally change how science is conducted and will disrupt major science-based industries like biopharma.
Over the past two years, Ginkgo Bioworks has strategically shifted its focus from AI-driven biological design to making the physical lab testing of biological designs cheaper and faster.
In a collaboration with OpenAI, a reasoning model controlling Ginkgo Bioworks' robotic lab improved the efficiency of cell-free protein synthesis by 40% over the state-of-the-art benchmark set by a Stanford University lab.
Jason Kelly claims that less than 5% of R&D spending in biopharma and by the NIH is on reagents, with the vast majority allocated to overhead costs like personnel and lab space.
Jason Kelly believes AI-driven robotic labs can increase the data output per dollar of research spending by 10x by shifting cost structures so that 90% of a project's budget goes to reagents.
Ginkgo Bioworks is adopting a system where scientists submit natural language protocols, which an AI model like OpenAI's Codex translates into executable code for lab robots.
Ginkgo Bioworks sold 97 robotic lab units to the U.S. Department of Energy for its Project Genesis initiative.
The U.S. government's Project Genesis, managed by the Department of Energy, aims to double the pace of scientific discovery in the next few years.
The share of new biotech drugs acquired by major pharmaceutical companies that originated in China has surged from less than 5% three years ago to over 40% in the most recent quarter.
Jason Kelly claims a Phase 1 clinical trial can be completed in China in approximately six months, compared to two and a half years in the United States.
The cost to develop a new drug has increased year-over-year for the past 25 years.
Ginkgo Bioworks operated without raising any venture capital from its founding in 2008 until 2014.