‘One in a billion’: Cambridge Consultants takes aim at DNA synthesis

Stepping into the world of DNA synthesis is Cambridge Consultants, a product development and technology consultancy company, based in the United Kingdom. Launching its own subsidiary company, Evonetix, Cambridge hopes to be a leading provider of synthetic biology products.

DNA sequencing, a process to determine the precise order of nucleotides in a DNA molecule, is a practice that has been around for more than 20 years and is widely used. But DNA synthesis, which centers around creating DNA strands, is a budding industry. Evonetix will focus on the production of nearly perfect DNA, aiming for an error rate of less than one in a billion.

Cambridge decided to develop the company after identifying a need to explore engineered biological systems and commercialize DNA synthesis products and systems for the healthcare industry, said Richard Hammond, head of synthetic biology at Cambridge.

“What we’re trying to do with DNA synthesis is basically invent a printer to just print out what you want,” Hammond said in an interview with Clinical Innovation + Technology. “It makes it much cheaper and quicker to create this DNA, which is a critical step to let you actually engineer biological systems.”

DNA synthesis can be applied to gene and cancer therapies and testing and manufacturing medications. It can also be used for personalized medicine—treatment tailored for specific patients and their conditions when they need it.

Hammond would not disclose exact projects Evonetix is currently working on because of intellectual property and confidentiality agreements, but did say that the team is working on developing core technologies.

Nick McCooke, one of Evonetix’s investors, is serving as the company’s CEO. Evonetix has been operating since the beginning of the year and has about 14 people on staff. Hermann Hauser, a venture capitalist and technology entrepreneur, was the primary investor.

Cambridge, which was founded in the early ‘60s, has more than 20 other spin out companies.

“We’ve got a long history of doing spin outs,” Hammond said. “It’s not our main business, but when we spot something interesting, we’re quite happy to get behind it and make a success of it.”

Evonetix is not alone in the gene synthesis realm, though. Its primary competitors include Gen9, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and DNA2.0 in Newark, California. But Hammond says Evonetix will stand apart because it’s using newer and more sophisticated technologies that allow longer and more accurate strands of DNA to be made for less dollars.

Hammond said Evonetix will serve as a way for the company to collaborate with other major players in the industry and clients to ensure biology engineering becomes a foundational part of the healthcare industry.

“Evonetix is part of a bigger story that we’re building here at Cambridge Consultants,” Hammond said. “We’re investing a lot internally in other parts of synthetic biology, building our capabilities and team so that we can actually turn some of these ideas about engineering biology into reality and get them out there into the market to solve some of the very real problems we have—things like gene therapy and cancer drugs. It’s amazing what you can do with these technologies for healthcare, food and the environment.”