Synthesising DNA for Bio Science research and development is costly in terms of time and resources. It’s also a fast-growing, big business. The global Gene Synthesis market will reach over $21 billion by 2026, growing more than 27% year-over-year, according to Zion Market Research.
DNA Script is set to disrupt the market with the introduction of the world’s first DNA printer. “Our vision is that we wanted to bring a solution for accelerating the bio-revolution. We think very strongly that the next industrial revolution will be driven by life science and biology and we wanted to add to that and to enable that,” says DNA Script Co-Founder and CEO Thomas Ybert.
Founded in 2014, The Paris-based, 100-person company has spent the last seven years and over $112 million in venture funding merging traditional printer technology with biology.
Ybert describes how he came up with the idea after spending two years in Silicon Valley on an assignment with French energy company Total. “They hired me as a metabolic engineer scientist. And after spending one year with them in Paris, we began a big collaboration with a company from the Bay Area called Amyris that was the number one company in bio-fuel development at that time,” says Ybert.
His job was to engineer yeast that would serve to create high performance jet fuel, rather than ethanol. “To do that we needed to rewrite a line of genetic code inside the genome of the yeast. But it's very complex. You have lots of different genetic paths to move on. And this is really tedious, because I could design fast and I could test fast, but in the meantime, the build path was taking weeks, months. So, I dreamed about a genome printer,” says Ybert inspired by the fast pace of tech innovation in computers he was seeing all around him in Silicon Valley. Why not combine the two?
At first Ybert and his co-founders were thinking about a project where they could build a molecule that would solve the challenges of changing the plastic industry, for example. Or a similar project like the work he was doing in biofuels. But he soon realised that everyone working in the field needed a better tool.
“And this is where we say, 'Okay, we could be successful by instead of trying to be gold diggers, be shovel dealers.’ From an entrepreneurship standpoint and from just a technological and product standpoint, it would be even more appealing to us to build the tool that could make those teams successful. So that's how we come up with the idea,” says Ybert.
Ybert also started envisioning making DNA in a very different way that he felt was closer to how DNA is made naturally into living organism cells. “The best way is using enzymes which are nature’s nano machines. And those enzymes have been trained or evolved during billions of years, and that's literally billions of steps to be super-efficient at building DNA. And so we wanted to build our DNA printer based on those technological principles, which then led to the need for developing or inventing this new enzymatic DNA synthesis technology,” says Ybert.
They had to merge the sciences of electrical engineering and bioengineering. Although the electrical engineering side relies on existing technologies, rather than making something truly disruptive. “The disruption is really happening on the biochemical side where we are the first one, basically, to be able to train or adapt the enzyme to build the de novo molecule for building DNA. And that's really a world premier where we are leading the field on those lines,” says Ybert.
That means that with the DNA Script printer, scientists can develop molecules or DNA strands on demand or what Ybert refers to as the SYNTAX system that takes less than 15 minutes to set up according to Ybert. “It's a bit like using a regular office printer,” says Ybert.
Once customers have the printer and the DNA kits from DNA Script, they choose the DNA sequence they want, upload it into the system and then press run. A few hours later, depending on the length of the sequence, a DNA strand is ready to use for experimentation.
When can the world’s scientists have access to DNA on demand printing and potentially greatly accelerating new Life Science breakthroughs?
Ybert says they plan to bring the printer to market in the coming months (no specific launch data has been set as of this writing) after feedback from Alpha and Beta testers. He and his team will incorporate the feedback into the next iteration of the printer to begin commercialisation.
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May 17, 2021 at 07:00PM
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DNA Script Set To Bring World’s First DNA Printer To Market - Forbes
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