Goose Farmer

.@Ginkgo vs. @XtalPi This isn't a zero-sum game. It's about expanding the market. Can't wait to see how companies scale and evolve.

Generating molecules was never the bottleneck. AI is nowhere near close to replacing clinical trials which have always been the right limiting step and drug development.

Congrats to @jkcla (Jason Kelly), Ena Cratsenburg and the @Ginkgo team on selling your first autonomous lab to a top-tier pharma. The lab is headed to Novo Nordisk's new R&D site in Waltham, Massachusetts. Novo isn't just buying services from the lab. It's buying the lab itself. That's a meaningful step for AI-driven biology. Ginkgo now describes two offerings built on one autonomous lab platform: • Autonomous Labs: RAC and Catalyst systems sold to pharma, national labs, universities and the U.S. government • Cloud Lab: experiments run on Nebula, which Ginkgo calls the world's largest autonomous lab, with more than 100 reconfigurable automation carts The demand is showing up in the deals: • 22 ADME customers signed in Q3, 20 of them first-time Ginkgo customers • Takeda, Argenx, Lundbeck and AbbVie founded the Antibody Developability Consortium • An ARPA-H GIVE subcontract worth up to $17.5 million to bring autonomous systems into RNA medicine manufacturing • Ginkgo providing Nebula access to the NSF's $1.5 billion X-Labs initiative Autonomous labs are starting to look like national research infrastructure, not just a lab upgrade. Ginkgo and Novo were both part of SynBioBeta 2026 in San Jose. Will Serber, Cynthia Collins and George Peabody from Ginkgo were on our speaker lineup, and Peter Clark of Novo Nordisk spoke as well. Peter returns next May to speak on AIxBIO at SynBioBeta 2027 in San Jose. Jason and Ena, we'd love to see you there for the conversation.

Big pharma handles clinical trials and distribution. Biotech startups build the apps. @Ginkgo @TwistBioscience @chaidiscovery @benchling provide the tools to build them. That's the ecosystem taking shape. — Take Mithril Medicine, the one-person company acquired by @AnthropicAI. No lab, no CapEx. It rented its experiments from outside CROs, and had a molecule designed and validated early on nothing but an idea. Then it exited to big pharma, the "app store" of this ecosystem. — And if this works, it won't stop at drugs that need clinical trials. Beauty and materials don't need them. Arcaea, a Ginkgo spinout, just launched “mesbeauty” with Jennifer Lawrence, a biodesigned haircare brand, straight to consumers with no app store in between. The early signs of a new biotech market are showing up. prnewswire.com/news-releases… — $DNA $TWST

Why might the frontier labs be interested in biotech?

incredibly important scientific (and national security) mission and two wonderful people we have known for decades a next-gen preclinical CRO in America will become a pattern for other industrial reshoring: competitive because it is robotics/intelligence-first

Kevin Weil on why he left OpenAI to build autonomous labs: the next leap in AI needs experimental data the models don’t have. “The models are data poor in the physical sciences.” In mathematics, you can push forward inside a computer. In chemistry and biology, you need experiments. “The way to solve this problem is to generate data at scale.” “Basically what we’ve done in manufacturing we’re beginning to do as a country with biotech and pharma, except it’s not too late.” “We can bring it back, but what will it take to bring it back? We need automation and robotics.” @kevinweil on Lightspeed’s The Investment Memo

We are bringing agents to the wet-lab bench at Google Research to navigate complex biological landscapes. Learn how we are grounding agents in physical lab robotics to run fast closed-loop molecular design cycles, ultimately discovering single-digit nanomolar protein binders for cancer targets →goo.gle/4B5mMMB

Ginkgo Bioworks $DNA keeps talking about a turnaround but that's not going to happen until they start selling a product or service that their customer want to buy more of. Retail investors had their asses handed to them, but at least the founders made out like bandits - what was it, a $740 million pay package in a single year? People have short memories when it comes to how many hyped SPACs absolutely decimated retail investors who bought the BS. So when companies like $CCXI (which plans to merge with Agility Robotics) start talking about all the orders they have for humanoids, you need to take it with a grain of salt. That $DNA SPAC deck called for about $1 billion of revenue by 2025. Actual 2025 revenue was $170 million. For 2026 they stopped giving revenue guidance.

I hit the tech nerd lottery today! Awesome to join the White House Science summit and be surprised with the awarding of national medals of science and technology ! Also excited to announce today that we are contributing time on @ginkgo’s autonomous cloud lab as founding members of the NSF X-labs consortium! Read about it here : businesswire.com/news/home/2… And from NSF in post below 👇

"AI is going to be the most important technology in the life sciences, certainly of our lifetime, and maybe ever." "I'm almost more concerned about whether we have the physical and lab infrastructure…" @the_marwell tells @JTLonsdale that the bottleneck isn't the models. It's lab space, and the U.S. is falling behind China on lab quality. Nicholas Marwell: I think AI is going to be the most important technology in the life sciences, certainly of our lifetime, and maybe ever. In fact, I'm so confident that I'm almost more concerned about whether we have the physical and lab infrastructure required to take advantage of this than I am about whether AI will be able to be a useful intellectual partner. Three years ago, we probably should have been building a lot more compute, for example. We talk about this too much. Joe Lonsdale: Should someone be creating a lot more lab space for you to use right now? Nicholas Marwell: I think so. And I think there are a couple of axes on which this is important. One is literally how much lab space you have. But there are also a number of metrics around the quality of the labs we have in the US that are clearly lagging behind places like China. I think one of the great societal infrastructure projects people should be thinking about is how to get the supply chain and lab complex in America back up to being a gold standard globally.

My friend got a job at an AI biotech company. I asked what he actually does. He said, "Mostly tells agents what to do." I assumed he meant spreadsheets or something. so last week I went to visit the lab. There were no scientists at the bench. There were robots. One was pipetting. Another was moving plates around. A screen in the corner said: ROUND 47 COMPLETE I asked him who designed the experiment. He said, "the model" I asked who analyzed the results. He said, "the model" I asked who gets to decide what to test next. He said, "also the model" Then he checked his phone. It was a text from the model. "Candidate 12 looks promising, approve to continue?" He tapped yes without reading it. I asked if that was his whole job. He said, "that, and ordering the model's reagents. It says I have good taste" I have not recovered.