The World's First Fully Automated Benchtop Digital Genome Engineering Platform Is Here

As synthetic biology continues to grow, advanced benchtop systems are becoming available to make research and product development easier. Now, Inscripta, a digital genome engineering company, has announced the first commercial shipment of its Onyx platform. The platform is the world's first fully automated benchtop instrument for genome-scale engineering. Inscripta also announced its Series E funding of $150 million. 

"We see a lot of areas where we think our technology can have a real impact," says Sri Kosaraju, president and CEO of Inscripta. "We are excited to explore them as we are growing." 

Full-Scale Genome Engineering

Inscripta's Onyx benchtop system includes the instruments, software, consumables, and assays needed for full-scale genome engineering. The Crispr-mediated platform enables experimentation within cells, so thousands of edits can be made in one run of the instrument. 

Typical Crispr-based gene editing experiments use a 96 well plate, which limits one run on a plate to 96 edits. Instead, the Onyx platform gives scientists tens of thousands of opportunities to make edits. "One of the main advantages of using Onyx is its unprecedented scale. You can do up to 10,000 edits per library for E. coli and up to 6,000 for yeast," says Kosaraju.

The first advantage of Onyx is its enormous editing capabilities. The second advantage is the ability to edit across the whole genome. One of the key differentiators for the platform is its genome-scale engineering capabilities that work through a simple push-button process. The third advantage of using Onyx is the ability to do many different kinds of edits, such as additions, substitutions, deletions, insertions, terminators, and knock-outs. 

"We have seen the real-life value of our platform. People have told us they used to have several PhDs working on editing over months and even years. Now, our Onyx platform lets them do more with just a push of a button in a matter of weeks. It is more efficient," says Kosaraju.

New Platform Looks to Accelerate Discovery The Onyx platform is already being used to study organisms such as E. coli and yeast. But there is an opportunity to learn much more. The two main areas of discovery are genomes and products. 

"For genome discovery, we are trying to learn more about the uncharacterized parts of a genome. Almost a third of E. coli is still uncharacterized, so there is a lot to learn," says Kosaraju. "You can study antimicrobial resistance and apply this in an area that needs help, such as designing new antibiotics." 

Product development is another large area with enormous potential. Onyx can help with engineering, creating, and developing new products for industries. People are already using the Crispr platform for research efforts to create products with a focus on sustainability and lowering the impact of climate change. 

A McKinsey Global Institute report found that 60% of the products manufactured in our economy could be biologically derived. Synthetic biology can be used to create better, planet-friendly materials with a lower impact on our environment. 

"Industrial companies already have labs that are playing with Crispr. Our platform enables them to get there faster and have easier access to technology that ordinarily would be hard to build an infrastructure for the right way. We are enabling more people to experiment," says Kosaraju.

The full potential of the Onyx platform is still being discovered. Kosaraju points out that there are many opportunities for new experiments and the chance for researchers to use their creativity. By using an efficient platform like Onyx, scientists have more options and time for experimenting. 

Looking Ahead, Maybe to the Next Pandemic

We are already seeing benchtop platforms being marketed for many areas of synthetic biology, such as DNA synthesis and now whole genome-scale engineering. In the future, we may see benchtop platforms being deployed in disaster areas as a part of a suite of products used to tackle the next pandemic. They could be used to run experiments on mRNA vaccines or other therapeutics in an area of need. 

Considering how globally interconnected we are, it's likely the next pandemic won't take another 100 years to arrive. We may need this type of technology sooner than we can imagine. 

Thank you to Lana Bandoim for additional research and reporting in this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the companies that I write about including Inscripta are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest. Some of the people and companies I write about are sponsors of SynBioBeta including Inscripta.

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