Ginkgo Bioworks   and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. have partnered to leverage Ginkgo’s natural product discovery capabilities to accelerate the discovery and development of novel therapeutic molecules to address diseases with high unmet patient needs that are out of reach of conventional drug discovery.

The two companies will collaborate to mine Ginkgo’s metagenomic sequence database, which provides access to a vast reservoir of structurally novel bioactive molecules, potentially enabling the rapid identification of lead molecules as starting points for the potential discovery of novel treatments.

Hundreds of millions of people are living with diseases that to date cannot be cured or are inadequately treated. Breaking through this inertia requires, in many cases, the use of new techniques to act on molecular targets which are exceedingly difficult to address with traditional approaches. More than half of all targets predicted to be involved in human disease are as of yet considered “undruggable” for this reason.

Ginkgo will receive upfront research fees and is eligible to receive success-based research and development, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments for a specified number of projects up to an aggregate total of $406 million. Ginkgo is also entitled to potential further downstream value in the form of royalties on sales.

“Ginkgo is well-positioned to help partners like Boehringer Ingelheim complement their drug discovery efforts particularly when it comes to natural product discovery,” said, Jason Kelly, CEO, and co-founder at Ginkgo Bioworks. “We are thrilled to work with Boehringer Ingelheim leveraging our Foundry and Codebase to unlock new possibilities in biopharma innovation.”

In a statement, Ginkgo said that it has built one of the broadest and deepest metagenomics databases worldwide, aided by its recent acquisition of Zymergen. The database comprises over three terabases of sequence data and over two billion proprietary protein sequences from a variety of microbes, creating a unique foundation for the discovery of novel therapeutic molecules.