The SynBioBeta Meeting Is Growing Up, and So Is DNA Synthesis

This year was my fifth time attending the SynBioBeta conference, and I was amazed by how quickly this meeting has grown. It started as a scrappy group of people who shared a fascination with synthetic biology, with company and technology presentations typically focused on how cool the science was rather than practical matters, such as building a sustainable and investable business. Today, SynBioBeta has become an international symposium where scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, and other stakeholders gather to discuss this critical field's latest innovations and future directions. Corporate presentations this year focused just as much on the business plan as on the science, and more companies were vying for attention in a significantly larger exhibit hall. As a champion of synthetic biology, I couldn't be more pleased to see this conference mature into the venue this field needs to help guide its growth.

This year's event was also a big deal to me, as I had the privilege of giving the first commercial introduction of my company, Ansa Biotechnologies. Our founders have spoken a bit about our DNA synthesis technology in the past, but this was the first time we publicly presented our product roadmap, differentiation, and value proposition. It's a massive step for Ansa to come out of the shadows and move toward becoming the trusted partner for complex DNA synthesis.

I said this at SynBioBeta and wanted to share it here: what Ansa is doing is entirely different from what any other synthesis vendor does. Our unique approach will fundamentally change the way people order DNA. Think of the disappointments you face in ordering DNA today — the order rejections, the incomplete or failed orders, shopping your sequences around to multiple vendors, the codon optimization, and other tricks you must use to get sequences accepted by current vendors — and imagine a world where those outcomes are the rare exceptions rather than the norm. That's what we aim to deliver thanks to a synthesis technology that can produce long stretches of even highly complex DNA.

When I told attendees that Ansa's pipeline builds 600-mers without requiring an assembly step, a few people stopped me after the talk to express their doubt that such a feat was technically possible. I was thrilled to have those conversations. This healthy skepticism illustrates the room for improvement if we can overcome the limitations of 40+-year-old chemical synthesis techniques that are still widely used today.

Before switching to the genome writing side of the life science industry, I spent most of my career on the genome reading side. It wasn't all that long ago that leading scientists thought it would never be possible to sequence a genome in a single day on one instrument, and yet here we are. The first enabling factor was an engineering leap of reversible terminators that paved the way for massively parallel sequencing. It powered not just the technological innovation but also the precipitously falling costs of sequencing that have made it possible to read millions of genomes so far.

We are on the cusp of a similar inflection point for genome writing. DNA synthesis that delivers longer pieces with excellent purity and fewer sequence limitations will be essential to improving what's possible in synthetic biology, or any area that depends on synthesized DNA. To build a genome, you want to use the largest blocks for the highest-quality result. At Ansa, that is what we aim to deliver. We aspire to be a one-stop shop for high-value gene fragments that can't be easily, or ever, produced with legacy techniques. Early-access customers have tested our approach for nearly a year, and right now, we are working toward a commercial launch that will let more researchers see how a different take on DNA synthesis can help drive their science forward.

We have all experienced frustrations with getting the DNA we need for experiments, and we've been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. My team profoundly understands the problem — it's why Ansa was founded — and we are committed to improving things.

If you'd like to learn more about our early access program, please visit ansabio.com/early-access or contact me.