Ena Cratsenburg | Chief Business Office
Ginkgo Bioworks
Ena Chan Cratsenburg is Chief Business Officer of Ginkgo Bioworks, where she leads the commercialization of the company's autonomous laboratory solutions - robotics that replace manual bench work. Her work sits at the intersection of synthetic biology and lab automation, bringing these platform capabilities to market for the broader R&D community. Since joining Ginkgo in 2016, she has led corporate development, enterprise sales, and strategic commercial partnerships, scaling collaborations that bring bio-based products to market across the pharmaceutical, agriculture, industrial biotechnology, and consumer sectors. Previously, Ms. Cratsenburg held executive and senior leadership roles at Intrexon, Evolva, and Amyris, leading commercialization and partnerships across diverse sectors. She began her career in business development and management at Pixar Animation Studios and BP p.l.c. She holds an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Appearances:
Day 1: 28th October @ 11:40
How Autonomous Labs Will Replace the Lab Bench
For fifty years the lab bench has been the fundamental unit of scientific work, and it is the single biggest limit on how fast, how cheaply, and how much science actually gets done. This talk argues it's time to put down the pipettes. It lays out what a truly autonomous lab looks like. Not another workcell locked to a single automation island, but a digital, connected, self-driving lab built around any device from any vendor, reconfigurable in minutes rather than days, running hundreds of changing protocols a day with no human hands at the bench.
The lab of the future is not a fantasy, it is already operating. Ginkgo is running an autonomous lab with 105+ robots today, processing thousands of plates a week across dozens of protocols for 30+ scientists, every single day. This talk grounds the vision in real-world implementation, including a collaboration with OpenAI that improved cell-free protein synthesis reaction costs by 40% over the scientific state of the art. The shift away from manual lab work is already underway and accelerating fast. The labs that move now will scale discovery at a pace the bench could never allow, and those that wait will find themselves racing to catch a future that has already left them behind.
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