Evonetix receives funding from Innovate UK for gene synthesis project

Evonetix, a Cambridge-based company, has been awarded substantial funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, to support the development of a novel enzymatic approach to DNA synthesis.

The £1.3 million gene synthesis project, which is being co-funded by Innovate UK, will be undertaken in collaboration with Durham University. Dr Raquel Sanches-Kuiper, director of biology at Evonetix, will be the research director overseeing development of engineered enzymes that can efficiently incorporate modified nucleotides. Additionally, Dr David Hodgson’s group at Durham University will develop the modified nucleotides for enzymatic synthesis in Evonetix’s silicon array.

“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,” stated Dr Tim Brears, CEO at Evonetix. “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.”

“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,” explained Dr Raquel Sanches-Kuiper, director of biology at Evonetix. “It will achieve this by being more environmentally friendly and by further streamlining the industrialisation of high-fidelity DNA synthesis.”

The work performed by Evonetix is aimed at producing DNA at a scale to facilitate many applications in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology. Its silicon array combined with its synergistic thermal control chemistry and process of error detection throughout assembly, allows parallelism in de novo DNA synthesis, enabling high-throughput on-chip assembly of high-fidelity gene-length DNA at scale.