Microba Life Sciences, a precision microbiome science company, and Ginkgo Bioworks , the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, announced a partnership to identify single-strain, live bacteria product (LBP) candidates against autoimmune diseases. The collaboration aims to build on Microba’s precision approach to LBP development with an in-depth evaluation of the company’s strains using Ginkgo's high throughput, automated screening capabilities.

As clinical trials using live biotherapeutics – biological products that contain live microorganisms applicable to the prevention, treatment, or cure of a disease – have delivered promising results, there is growing consensus that live biotherapeutics may represent a major class of therapeutics in the coming years.

Through this partnership, Ginkgo will provide high-throughput screening for Microba’s proprietary library of human microbiome-isolated strains, with the goal of improving treatment for autoimmune diseases such as lupus, psoriatic arthritis and certain autoimmune liver diseases. Microba plans to leverage Ginkgo’s high-throughput anaerobic culturing, multi-omics data collection and analysis, functional bioassay screening, and media and fermentation optimization capabilities to generate data sets that may help characterize potential therapeutic and non-therapeutic uses of the strains. The initial partnership combining Microba’s biobank and Ginkgo’s anaerobic development capabilities is expected to run approximately two years.