Impact
Scientific excellence with commercial acumen
The global bioeconomy is growing rapidly, as businesses realise the potential of biodesign and biomanufacturing. From novel materials to new medicines, data storage and living sensors, synthetic biology offers exciting new opportunities to sense, organise and process matter efficiently and cleanly – if you have the capability to turn theory into practice.
Using state-of-the-art facilities and techniques, our synthetic biology team fuses expertise in biology, chemistry and engineering to convert research-driven discovery into breakthrough products and services.
Specialisms
Start-up support
We provide synthetic biology start-ups with the broader knowledge and capabilities they need to get exciting and innovative biodesigned products to market. We assist them in scaling-up novel processes, ensuring robust quality control, consistent product delivery and competitive cost.
Speed and predictability
Using our skills in biological manipulation, automation, measurement and process control, we help mature organisations already engaged in synthetic biology to build consistent and predictable processes for the rapid and cost-effective development of new products and services.
Bio strategy
Many organisations face the challenge of understanding the potential synthetic biology holds for their business and how to then integrate it. With deep industry knowledge and expertise in these specific technologies and trends, we identify business opportunities and develop robust strategies to realise this potential.
GMP manufacture
We understand GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) compliant processes and equipment. We are familiar with the intense quality focus GMP brings, from supply chain management to final product QC and release. Our ISO13485 compliant processes ensure seamless collaboration with clients in the pharmaceutical and diagnostic sectors.
Experience
Background in biodesign
Our synthetic biology capability has grown organically from our long history in healthcare and life-sciences.
Recognising a new era of rational biodesign for products and processes is emerging, we created our synthetic biology division in 2015.
Antha expertise
Antha is a programming language for biology that describes and executes complex protocols, driving massive productivity gains during biodesign.
Working in partnership with Synthace, we offer an end-to-end service to help clients launch Antha in their labs, delivering significant workflow efficiency benefits.
Accelerating development
Biodesign is not fully predictive today and still requires extensive phenotypic characterisation and testing.
We designed an ultra-high throughput agar array-based system to measure ratiometric fluorescent signals from a library of transformed organisms and automatically identify the best-performing individual strain.
Interested in joining us?
Tech, tools & facilities
Synthetic biology labs
Located in our Cambridge head office, our microbiology lab enables us to genetically modify micro-organisms and characterize them. Our facilities are containment level 2 rated for handling pathogenic strains and our in-house libraries allow rapid modular DNA construct design and assembly. We are particularly interested in building organisms that are biological sensors for healthcare and industrial biotech applications.
SGI BioXP 3200
This system is the world’s first benchtop automated genomic workstation that rapidly synthesizes high-quality, double-stranded DNA fragments and clones into any vector in an overnight run. Its numerous applications include protein production, antibody library generation and cell engineering.