We developed the best DNA synthesis technology in the world. Now it’s time to put it into the hands of scientists.

I first taught myself to code on my TI-82 graphing calculator in middle school math class during times when I probably should have been paying more attention to the teacher. After creating a few games and a bunch of tools for solving homework problems, I moved onto the computer where the environment was much more powerful and expressive. I wrote code for fun all throughout high school, and I thought that programming would become my career. But when I started undergrad at MIT in 2002, I decided that I wanted to apply my programming skills to a field where I could have an impact beyond the digital world. Eventually, that led me to start a company aimed at transforming the field of biology.

I found my calling 21 years ago in my freshman intro to biology class. Our lecturer Eric Lander painted a picture of biology that, for the first time in my life, seemed logical and systematic, and he made a plea at the end of the semester for “you smart computer kids” to come help biologists make sense of the torrent of data being generated by new genomics tools like genome sequencing and microarrays. I was moved by his call and found my way into the lab of one of his postdocs, Vamsi Mootha, where I volunteered to write software to help scientists make discoveries about gene expression and function. I continued to work with Vamsi throughout my undergrad years as he became a professor at the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical School. Under his instruction, I learned how to think like a scientist and how to build better and more useful tools for scientists. Building tools to accelerate discovery became my passion.

When I decided to go to grad school after more than four years in industry, I was drawn to the field of synthetic biology because it offered what seemed like the most powerful programming environment imaginable — biology literally rearranges atoms, and you can “program” biology using DNA. The programming metaphor has its limitations, as I learned quickly once I stepped into the wet lab, but I was hooked. 

I joined Jay Keasling’s lab at UC Berkeley and dreamed of building tools to help scientists engineer microbes to produce valuable chemicals. However, it quickly became obvious to me that the foundational tool of synthetic biology — DNA synthesis — wasn’t fast or reliable enough to let scientists realize the promise of synthetic biology. It took me and my labmates weeks to get the sequences we needed from the leading vendors, and many sequences we wanted were rejected or canceled due to manufacturing failures. 

Compared to how quickly you could test out ideas on the computer, this pace was glacial, and I couldn’t stand it. I decided that the way I could have the greatest impact in the world was by developing a better method for synthesizing DNA, and Jay graciously allowed me to pivot my PhD research into DNA synthesis methods.

Three and a half years in, my benchmate introduced me to my future research partner and Ansa co-founder, Sebastian Palluk. Sebastian was also working on a new DNA synthesis method at TU Darmstadt in Germany, and we really hit it off over Skype, so he took a big leap of faith and came to work with me in the Keasling lab. Incredibly, only a month after he joined me, we had the “lightning strikes” epiphany behind the novel DNA synthesis method that got us our PhDs and led to the founding of Ansa. We’ve now been working side-by-side for more than eight years and he deserves as much credit for everything we’ve built together as I do.

Ansa is now almost six years old and has grown into an R&D powerhouse poised to reshape biology. I could have barely imagined this when I was in grad school, or even when Sebastian, Jared Ellefson, and I co-founded Ansa and moved into a tiny incubator space in West Berkeley. We’ve raised more than $85 million, built an outstanding team, and developed the best DNA synthesis technology in the world by far. We now have an incredible opportunity to make a positive impact on global health and sustainability — we already make products that our early access program customers are excited about, and now it’s time to get those products out into the broader world and develop our next set of even more compelling products.

I’ve served as the company’s CEO since its founding, and it’s been an honor to build this company from an idea in grad school to where it is today. I’ve said since day one that I would stay CEO as long as I thought I was the best person to lead the company, and no longer — at which point I’d eagerly take a different role in the company. Last year, I realized that Ansa had reached an inflection point where we would really benefit from leadership with deep commercial expertise at scaling. While I have a strong track record of jumping into unfamiliar areas and becoming fluent, I decided that the best thing for the company would be to bring in a commercial-minded CEO for the next chapter of the company’s journey.

That’s why I am so excited that Jason T. Gammack has joined Ansa as our new CEO. Jason has been passionate about DNA synthesis for 25 years and he’s got strong life science tools commercialization experience from both startups and large companies, as well as a background as a scientist. He’s incredibly sharp and shares our vision for how to build an enduring and high-impact  life science tools company. I believe the company is in great hands with him at the helm.

My new role is chief scientific officer, which will allow me to work closely with our partners to understand their biggest, thorniest scientific challenges that we can address with our technology platform. I’ll also work closely with Sebastian and our R&D team to advise on development of new capabilities that match the applications the market needs most. My new role is actually quite a bit like what I was doing in the early days of Ansa and is what I really love to do, so I’m super excited to dive in.

I started this company with the vision that one day we’d make it as easy to program cells as it is to program a computer. We’re not there yet, but we’ve pushed our DNA writing technology further than I ever imagined. We now have tremendous potential to make a huge impact on life science research by getting our products out into the world. I couldn’t be more excited for our next chapter.

If you’ve had a gene synthesis order rejected or canceled because the sequences you needed were too complex, I hope you give Ansa a try. Check out our early access program, which has been going strong for more than six months now serving applications as diverse as ag tech, biomaterials, and of course cell and gene therapy. I hope we can help accelerate your research!