Cracking the Code of Life: An Interview with Stef van Grieken, CEO of Cradle, on AI-Driven Protein Engineering

Andrii: Stef, could you share the story behind the partnership between Cradle and Ginkgo Bioworks? What were the key factors or shared visions that led to this collaboration?

Stef: There is a significantly rising demand for more protein-based products to come to market across pharma, chemicals, food and agriculture. Cradle was invited to be one of the founding members of the Ginkgo Technology Network to provide software that allows any R&D team to engineer better proteins using generative AI across enzymes, antibodies, cytokines, vaccines and peptides. 

We are excited to work with Ginkgo, who has some of the best large-scale experimental capabilities that cover a broad range of applications. This partnership is geared towards customers who want to leverage Cradle’s generative ML for protein engineering, but who do not have the capacity to quickly validate designed proteins in a high-throughput wet lab. Taking enzyme engineering as an example, Cradle & Ginkgo can provide on-demand multi-property optimization of enzyme activity, thermal stability, pH tolerance, solvent stability, secretion, and expression in common hosts. 

What we believe is unique about this partnership is that teams of scientists can now work together on optimising a protein from the comfort of their browser. With high throughput & high quality experimental data made available for further ML optimization in just 6 weeks, R&D teams can bring protein-based products to market faster without ever having to step into a lab. Both Cradle and Ginkgo have a mission to enable any team in the industry to bring bio-based products to the market in record time and we feel our capabilities are very complementary, which is why we decided to partner.