Renee Wegrzyn:
I do see very much that Ginkgo is in some ways, almost like an ARPA of the private sector. And what I mean by that is, when I was at DARPA, we were building
breakthrough technologies for national security. And so really Ginkgo is using its platform to create the next breakthroughs for the bio economy. And its not prescribed to a single application at the end of the day, its food security, it
could be K through eight testing, but its really based on this platform. And we were successful in bringing K through eight testing and in helping respond on the vaccine side of things, not because were a pandemic preparedness company,
its because were a platform company that is able to pivot and respond to what that challenge is. And so a year of powerful biology, here it was the pandemic, but its the powerful response of what our platform gave, where we could
respond. And were going to use that in the future for our customers, bring us your challenge, maybe its the supply chain issue is the next thing we deal with. Maybe theres an outbreak in agriculture that actually brings an economic
to our shores. Were going to be ready to respond, because we built a platform to do that.
Matt McKnight:
So you were incredibly important in building our K through 12 testing program. And I think connecting a couple of these pieces would be really helpful for us
to understand. So at this point, our lab network that weve partnered with to qualify to run testing across the country has enough capacity to test every student, teacher and in America, right? And that gives them this data layer to be
comfortable in knowing, like any other piece of data, whats going on with COVID-19 in their communities. Can you just share a little bit about what you did differently to bring biology to these
communities that had never really engaged with something like test every kid every week?
Renee Wegrzyn:
Yeah. In the Baltimore city schools example, I think is a really great one in the way that Ginkgo approached the challenge. So rather than go to Baltimore city
and say, Hey, we have the solution, this is what you should do. We came to them, told them what we think were capable of, but really wanted to listen to them and understand, what do you need actually, and what is going to be
workable in your communities? And so this wasnt a single conversation, this was many, many conversations over many days and weeks to understand, how can we be on the same level? And does this work for your students? Does this work for your
parents? Because the parents have to give consent, of course, for their students to be in the testing program. And we knew if we got that right in Baltimore city and invested the time that that would allow us to then bring that to other cities is
much easier and a faster way. And that really did prove to be the case that we were able to scale to now thousands of schools across the United States.
Matt McKnight:
So what could you imagine with your kind of
DARPA hat on, crises create opportunities to change how we do things to better prepare ourselves for the future, every major crisis in human history, things have come out of it, right? That are unique and different. So were testing kids across
America in schools. What do you see that turning into if we get it really right as a country or as a world, what could that do to prepare ourselves in the future? And Andy, Im going to ask you the same thing in a second.
Renee Wegrzyn:
I might give you two answers, because I think
theres two differences, theres a scientific way and theres a cultural way that you can answer that. And so, the first is, kids are really excited about having this technology, our creative team has really made an effort,
theres even comic books that the kids have now, so they can learn about the testing. And so going back to the lab network, what Im really excited about on the technological side is not what those labs are doing now, its what those
labs were doing before COVID, right? Weve partnered with labs that were doing environmental monitoring, theyre looking at wastewater, they were sampling from the environment. There are labs that were doing cancer diagnostics, labs that
were doing a hundred tests a week to a hundred thousand tests a week. So, theres so much potential in that network, now that we are working with those partners and how can we really leverage that going forward to continue to understand our
biological environment now connected through this digital layer that we built to really be ready for whats next.