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Patented technology will enable highly parallel DNA synthesis in a benchtop platform

EVONETIX LTD (‘Evonetix’), the synthetic biology company bringing semiconductor technology to DNA synthesis, announce it has been granted patent EP3551331B1 in Europe for its proprietary thermal control technology for DNA synthesis, as well as the design and manufacture of its silicon chips. This patent extends Evonetix’s IP portfolio and is a key step in the Company’s strategy to develop a benchtop DNA synthesis platform, to change how DNA is accessed, made, and used.

Evonetix’s novel approach to parallel DNA synthesis is underpinned by precise, independent, control of temperature at thousands of individual synthesis sites across the surface of a silicon chip. In contrast to conventional approaches, which use acid deprotection to control the synthesis cycle, Evonetix uses thermal control with semiconductor-based arrays. This offers greater accuracy and selectivity to deprotect sequences at the correct point to add the next nucleotide and remove mismatching sequences.

Thermal control of DNA synthesis enables highly parallel synthesis and gives the ability to work through sequences that are hard to synthesise using conventional techniques and to remove errors during the assembly of gene sequences through temperature mediated error removal.

Matthew Hayes, Chief Technology Officer at Evonetix, commented: “There is currently an unmet need in the synthetic biology industry for long, accurate, DNA sequences, and the ability to remove errors during assembly allows researchers to achieve longer strands of DNA, and run applications such as gene synthesis, CRISPR screening, and protein engineering. Securing this patent to cover our core technology adds further strength to our IP portfolio and underlines Evonetix’s position as leaders in our field. Our technology will give researchers the capabilities of service centres in their own lab, accelerating the advancement of synthetic biology and opening new possibilities in this exciting market.”

About Evonetix Ltd

Evonetix is reimagining biology by developing a radically different approach to gene synthesis – a highly parallel desktop platform to synthesise DNA at unprecedented accuracy and scale. The technology builds on scalability and density from the semiconductor industry to deliver a step-change in performance for the production of DNA. The company’s platform will place DNA synthesis in the hands of every researcher and change how DNA is accessed, made and used. This new paradigm in gene synthesis will facilitate and enable the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology.

The proprietary Evonetix approach utilises a silicon chip, made by MEMS processing, that integrates physics with biology, and controls the synthesis of DNA at many thousands of independently controlled reaction sites or ‘pixels’ on the chip surface in a highly parallel fashion. The approach is compatible with both chemical and enzymatic DNA synthesis. Following synthesis, strands are assembled on-chip into double-stranded DNA in a process that identifies and removes errors, providing accuracy that is several orders of magnitude better than the conventional approach.

The Evonetix DNA writer will be a desktop device, available to every researcher, and providing scalable, accurate DNA synthesis to enable biological systems to be engineered with unprecedented accuracy and scale – this is third-generation DNA synthesis.