Ropes & Gray Advises Ginkgo Bioworks in Acquisition of AgBiome Microbial Platform Assets

In The News
April 11, 2024

Ropes & Gray represented Ginkgo Bioworks, a leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity, in the acquisition of AgBiome’s platform assets in agricultural biologics. The transaction was announced on April 11. Financial terms were not disclosed.

AgBiome’s crop protection products include more than 115,000 fully sequenced and isolated strains, over 500 million unique gene sequences, and relevant functional data and metadata, as well as AgBiome’s development pipeline.

These assets will be integrated into Ginkgo Ag Biologicals Services, established with the acquisition of Bayer agricultural biologicals R&D facility. The combination creates one of the most advanced agricultural biological discovery and development platforms and resource for development of artificial intelligence models for biological R&D.

The Ropes & Gray team was led by mergers & acquisitions partner Matt Byron, mergers & acquisitions associate Jeff Bashara and life sciences licensing partner Amanda Austin and included tax partners Pamela Glazier and Scott Pinarchick and mergers & acquisitions associate Kendall Spencer.