Huue partners with Ginkgo Bioworks to accelerate production of bio-based indigo

Huue, a California-based biotech startup pioneering sustainable bio-based dyes for the fashion industry, has announced a partnership with Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks, which is creating the leading horizontal platform for cell programming.

Ginkgo, which recently announced a business combination with Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp., helps clients in a variety of sectors build new and better products utilizing biology. Huue will use Ginkgo’s platform to optimize microbe strains in order to speed up the manufacturing of its environmentally friendly indigo dye.

Indigo is the dye that gives denim its distinctive blue but producing the dye that fuels a billion pairs of jeans manufactured each year emits over 1.4 million metric tonnes of CO2 and uses hazardous chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, and sodamide in the process.

Huue uses its own biosynthetic dye-making method to create indigo that is equally as effective as traditional indigo but without the environmental impact or hazardous chemicals. Huue plans to expedite the manufacturing of its dyes for its initial partners in 2021 and 2022 by utilizing Ginkgo’s microbial engineering platform and strain optimization capabilities.

Ginkgo Bioworks CEO, Jason Kelly, said that they’re delighted to welcome Huue onto their platform to enable them to apply sustainable practices to traditionally hazardous industrial processes. They believe synthetic biology has tremendous potential to assist nearly any industry to rethink how they approach product creation and they are honored to be able to help Huue develop their apps.

Michelle Zhu, Huue’s CEO and co-founder said that they’re delighted to partner with a sustainability-minded firm like Ginkgo Bioworks to offer the world’s first sustainable and scalable indigo to the denim industry. The earth can no longer wait for sustainable solutions, and collaborations like this one are helping them speed up the manufacturing of bio-based dyes for the industries that need them most.

Ginkgo’s cell programming platform is used by organizations, government agencies, and businesses from a variety of sectors to develop more efficient and ecologically responsible ways to manufacture goods such as food components, perfumes, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and more. Ginkgo aids the creation of creative, bio-based solutions to the world’s most serious environmental issues by allowing the design of organisms that can create useful biological products.

Huue is backed by world-class investors and institutions such as IndieBio, Fashion for Good, and Melinda Gates’ and Microsoft’s Female Founders Competition, which is based on UC Berkeley-invented bioengineering research.