Expired Annual Dinner for Senior Executives (Boston)

Directed to senior executives, especially those in the Boston and Northeast area, our regional dinners present a great opportunity to connect with and stay in touch with other companies and top executives in an informal environment outside of ALDA’s semi-annual meetings. The dinners also present an opportunity to introduce members of your executive team who may not regularly attend our senior executive meetings to the ALDA network.

We are please to have Barry Canton, one of the five co-founders of Ginkgo Bioworks, a highly successful and leading synthetic biology company, as our guest speaker. Based in Boston, Ginkgo Bioworks employs approximately 200 people and is valued at more than $1 billion. Ginkgo was founded by four students, including Barry, pursuing graduate degrees at MIT, and a then-professor Tom Knight, who inspired them to research the idea of “programming” biology.

Using its platform to program the DNA of living cells allows the company to produce a range of products, including in chemicals and agriculture. For example, Ginkgo is working to replace nitrogen-based fertilizers by engineering microbes for crops. In the chemical industry, the company can replace chemical synthesis with engineered cells that make the desired chemical through fermentation. Designing enzymes for food and beverage production is another growth area for the company.

In his presentation, Mr. Canton will provide a general update on Ginkgo and the synthetic biology field more broadly, and touch on what products and technologies from our industry would allow Ginkgo to advance faster.