New York City, September 23rd, 2019 – The strategic partnership between SpaceTime Ventures and BGI Group was announced today at the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Summit in New York City to unleash a new Inclusive Bio-Economy in the Tropics.

To-date, biologists have only decoded 0.28% of complex life on the planet. Taking advantage of a million fold decrease in the costs of DNA sequencing since the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, BGI Group and SpaceTime Ventures together with a leading group of scientists launched the Earth BioGenome Project to fully sequence 100% of the complex life on the planet (the eukaryotes) over the next 10 years for less than what it had costed our own genome.

This will provide a new foundation for biological discovery and innovation at an unprecedented scale. A new inclusive bio-economy focused on prosperity for all can help solve the majority of society’s problems in energy, water, food, materials and healthcare in a rapidly changing climate. In addition, this new bio-economy has the potential to reverse a rapid de-industrialization process in developing economies that are rich in biological assets – and in so doing, provide the basis for a new bio-inspired economic development model that can be in harmony with nature and with their custodians.
 
However, as a critical pre-condition to write all chapters of the Book of Life we need to able to access the vast biological assets from bio-diverse nations in the tropics. To do this we need to be able to fully implement the access & fair benefit sharing mission of Convention of Biodiversity's Nagoya Protocol by using advanced technologies that are fit for purpose for the two conflictive goals at hand: insuring that on the one hand the Book of Life is open for discovery by scientists and innovators globally, whilst at the same time insuring that fair & equitable commercial benefit sharing on invention is fully traceable and enforceable along the complex genomics information value chain typical of advanced biotechnology. This is the dual mission of the Earth Bank of Codes that was launched in partnership with the World Economic Forum as a sister initiative to the Earth BioGenome Project at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos in 2018.

BGI Group and SpaceTime Ventures are now embarking on a strategic collaboration focused on three complementary building blocks required to catalyse the bio-innovation ecosystems that are needed to unleash an Inclusive Bio-economy in the Tropics:

• Earth Bank of Codes: Collaborate on the technical design, prototype construction and showcasing of the Earth Bank of Codes platform with a focus on testing the next generation digital access and tracking of biodiversity genomic data pipelines to ensure fair & equitable benefit sharing on commercialization, using BGI's 10KP (an affiliated Earth BioGenome project) as the initial test-bed.

• Tropical Plant Genomics R&D centre: Collaborate on the scientific, technical, and public-private partnership business model for a large-scale Tropical Plant Genomics R&D centre and associated sequencing and bioinformatics infrastructure in partnership with leading Tropical Agriculture and Agronomic R&D centres in South America.

• Advanced Genomics Start-up: Collaborate with SpaceTime Ventures’ Pivotal Genomics start-up to develop an advanced two-sided bio-computational platform focused on systems-level change in agriculture and in a number of industries, leveraging Nature’s biological assets in strict compliance with the Nagoya Protocol’s fair and equitable benefit sharing.
 
QUOTES
• “Our partnership with genomics powerhouse BGI Group will pave the way to establish the key interlocking innovation building blocks in the journey to write and make sense of the Book of Life for the benefit of all starting in the Tropics”, said Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio, Chairman of SpaceTime Ventures.

• “Our partnership with SpaceTime Ventures will provide a strong foundation to support the tropical genomics research required to accelerate the translation of genomics to valuable assets of a future bioeconomy through implementing the Earth Bank of Codes” said dr. Xun Xu, CEO of BGI Group.

SpaceTime Ventures is a Sao Paulo based advanced technology group founded in 2014 that dreams up, creates and operates science-based ventures focused on making natural resource and nature’s intelligence actionable for global impact, partnering with global leaders in public-private cooperation, in research & development, in science-based venturing and with leading corporates of the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to achieve scale.