Tantu and Ginkgo Bioworks Announce Partnership to Engineer a Living Biotherapeutic for Gastrointestinal Healing

Tantu will leverage Ginkgo’s foundries to accelerate strain construction as a key step toward human clinical trials

Excerpt from the Press Release:

BOSTON, Sept. 7, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Tantu, a company engineering living biotherapeutic products to treat gastrointestinal diseases, and Ginkgo Bioworks (“Ginkgo”), which is building the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, today announced a partnership to accelerate the research and development of Tantu’s therapeutic genes. 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.

Tantu is working to create an orally administered, living biotherapeutic that will produce and apply anti-inflammatory therapeutic proteins directly into diseased sites in the gut, resulting in improved gut barrier function and faster mucosal healing in patients where systemic anti-inflammatory therapies are not enough. Ginkgo plans to apply its automated foundry to accelerate the traditionally slow steps of candidate strain construction and genomic integration and validation with the aim of accelerating Tantu’s first program and potentially helping them reach clinical proof of concept in patients faster.

“Each year, 62 million Americans are diagnosed with a digestive disorder and current treatments don’t sufficiently promote gastrointestinal healing, meaning many patients need to undergo invasive surgeries to improve their quality of life,” said Neel Joshi, co-founder of Tantu. “A therapeutic to aid intestinal mucosal healing could transform patient care for a significant patient population.”

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