UK Funding for Gene Synthesis Project

Cambridge-based Evonetix has been awarded £1.3 million ($1.75M) to support the development of a novel enzymatic approach to DNA synthesis. Innovate UK will co-fund the £1.3 million project, which will be undertaken in collaboration with Durham University.

The company’s main focus is facilitating production of DNA at scale for applications in synthetic biology, from the development of novel pharmaceuticals, to industrial biotech, renewable fuels and agriculture and as part of the project Evonetix will integrate the new developments into its proprietary, thermally addressable silicon array.

The research into engineered enzymes that are able to efficiently incorporate modified nucleotides will be directed by Dr Raquel Sanches-Kuiper, Director of Biology at Evonetix. The group of Dr David Hodgson, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Durham University, will develop the modified nucleotides for enzymatic synthesis.

Dr Tim Brears, CEO at Evonetix, said: “The funding from Innovate UK will enable us to expand our approach to include enzymatic gene synthesis and will be vital in bringing this project to a successful outcome. The extension of our platform’s capabilities will be of great value as we seek to address the needs of the rapidly growing synthetic biology market, which is estimated to reach $40 billion by the mid-2020s.”

Dr Sanches-Kuiper, said: “We believe the use of enzymatic oligonucleotide synthesis, which operates under milder aqueous conditions compared to phosphoramidite chemistry, will provide a significant commercial advantage and offer a highly valuable tool for de novo gene synthesis with our platform. It will achieve this by being more environmentally friendly and by further streamlining the industrialisation of high-fidelity DNA synthesis.

The team at Durham’s Department of Chemistry has many years of experience in nucleotide chemistry and will complement our expertise in protein engineering, DNA synthesis and assembly.”