Evonetix and Analog Devices Collaborate to Develop Third-Generation DNA Synthesis Platform

Latest update time：2020-09-21

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EVONETIX LTD ("Evonetix"), a synthetic biology company developing a scalable, high-fidelity and fast desktop gene synthesis platform, recently announced a collaboration with ADI, a global leader in high-performance analog technology. The two parties will jointly develop Evonetix's proprietary microelectromechanical system (MEMS)-based silicon chips to promote commercialization and accelerate the development of Evonetix's first product, a DNA desktop writer.

Evonetix's innovative silicon chip controls the synthesis of DNA in a highly parallel manner at thousands of independently controlled reaction sites or "pixels" on the chip surface. The two companies began collaborating in January 2019, and as Evonetix and Analog Garage, the innovation lab of Analog Devices, deepened their collaboration, the two parties reached a further cooperation agreement to jointly develop integrated solutions including MEMS platforms, which is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed to realize miniaturized control electronics and flow cells. Analog Devices will assist in the commercialization of the technology and help produce desktop DNA writer devices.

Currently, the application of synthetic biology in fields as diverse as pharmaceuticals and drug discovery, industrial biotechnology, specialty chemicals, renewable energy, agriculture and materials science is hampered by the inability to create new, high-fidelity DNA at scale. Evonetix’s DNA synthesis technology will be sold to laboratories as a “plug-and-play” desktop instrument and will synthesize DNA at unprecedented accuracy, scale and speed, enabling scientists to use biology on a scale not currently possible and have a huge impact on global health.

“Our mission is to develop a highly parallel desktop platform that enables precision and scale in DNA synthesis, and our collaboration with Analog Devices is an important step forward,” said Dr. Matthew Hayes, Chief Technology Officer at Evonetix. “The expertise of the Analog Garage R&D team has been invaluable in helping us design our complex control ASIC, and we look forward to further collaboration to bring this platform to commercial scale.”

Pat O'Doherty, senior vice president of Digital Healthcare at Analog Devices, added, "Evonetix has been at the forefront of redefining biology and developing a broad range of solutions to synthesize long strands of DNA with unprecedented precision and scale. Through this collaboration, Analog Devices has the opportunity to enter the growing synthetic biology market. The collaboration aims to increase the speed and reduce the cost of genome assembly to enable innovative strategies that can be used to produce affordable medicines to treat a wide range of diseases worldwide."

About Synthetic Biology

With the explosion of DNA sequence information available to humanity over the past decade, an unprecedented opportunity now exists to engineer metabolic pathways and organisms, improve industrial processes, create new processes and engineer genomes with new or improved characteristics. This is synthetic biology. It is expected to grow rapidly over the next few years and be worth $40 billion by the mid-2020s. Synthetic biology will have a huge impact on many industries and will be fundamental to helping us manage the Earth's resources.

However, only disruptive technologies will be able to achieve the major improvements in DNA synthesis needed to realize these opportunities. Evonetix believes that by delivering high-fidelity DNA at scale, without the need for post-synthesis error correction, we can capture this multi-billion dollar synthetic biology opportunity.

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