Evonetix relocates to Coldhams Business Park

Synthetic biology specialist – and winner of the Cambridge Independent’s ‘Innovation’ category in the 2019 Science and Technology Awards – Evonetix has moved to Coldhams Business Park.

Previously based at Chesterford Research Park, Evonetix now occupies 15,000 square feet at the park, comprising 8,000 square feet of fully fitted and equipped high-tech laboratory space and 7,000 square feet of office space – all under one roof.

This enables the company’s teams of physicists, electronics and software engineers, chemists, biologists and molecular biologists to work more closely together in a multi-disciplinary approach to deliver the Evonetix mission. Headcount currently stands at 40, including 26 PhD biologists, physicists, chemists and engineers.

Dr Tim Brears, Evonetix's CEO, said: “Synthetic biology has the potential to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, but we require innovation in gene synthesis to accelerate progress.

“Our new office and lab space will enable integration of our teams of specialists to support the development and delivery of our highly parallel desktop platform, which will be available to every researcher to accelerate their ability to use biology on a scale not currently possible.”

The company is developing a desktop DNA synthesis platform that will generate high fidelity DNA at scale for the rapid prototyping of biological designs. Whole metabolic pathways will be stored on a chip using its technology - and eventually its DNA storage method will replace conventional methods of storing data, from servers to hard drives to memory sticks.

“Based upon a novel silicon array and unique synergistic thermal control chemistry, the technology is capable of synthesising oligonucleotides in parallel at several thousand independently temperature controlled virtual wells, also known as reaction sites,” the firm says. “Errors in synthesis are easily detected and removed using a thermal purification process. This approach permits massive parallelism in de novo DNA synthesis and enables high-throughput on-chip assembly of high-fidelity gene-length DNA at scale.”

The company has raised £9million in Series A funding.