BioFab
GEN9
Modern pharmaceutical, chemical, and fuel companies increasingly depend on synthetic biology to produce DNA tailor-made to suit their production needs. Making synthetic genes to program microorganisms used to require a lot of time, in addition to expensive robots and other equipment, but Gen9 has developed BioFab, a new system that can quickly and cheaply produce tens of thousands of double-stranded DNA fragments of between 500 and 1,000 base pairs in length. The company’s system for “biological fabrication” couples inexpensively made small DNA fragments with patented or patent-pending chemical processes that accurately assemble them into larger DNA strands, which the platform can do in bulk. Though pricing varies with the amount of synthetic DNA and the modifications a customer needs, the cost can be less than 10 cents per base pair, which is as little as 1/5 of what some competitors charge, according to Gen9 President and CEO Kevin Munnelly. “The ability to synthesize large numbers of genes in parallel at low cost could transform the field of computational protein design,” says molecular engineer David Baker of the University of Washington, who is a customer and a member of the Gen9 advisory board.
The company, which launched this summer, currently has about 20 customers—half from industry, half from academia. Gen9’s high-throughput manufacturing process allows the company to reduce both the cost and the production time of synthetic DNA. By 2013, Gen9 hopes to singlehandedly surpass the world’s current capacity to manufacture synthetic DNA.
WILEY: Brings the cost and speed of DNA synthesis down to the point where entire vectors can be designed and assembled from scratch. A critical component needed to make synthetic biology a reality.
WILEY: Brings the cost and speed of DNA synthesis down to the point where entire vectors can be designed and assembled from scratch. A critical component needed to make synthetic biology a reality.
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