15,000 sq. ft of laboratory and office space at Coldham’s Business Park will enable continued growth and development of the Company’s integrated desktop platform for DNA synthesisCAMBRIDGE, UK, 30 October 2019 – EVONETIX LTD (‘Evonetix’), the synthetic biology company developing a desktop platform for scalable, high-fidelity and rapid gene synthesis, today announced it has moved to Coldham’s Business Park, Cambridge, UK. The new facility will enable the continued growth of the Company as it continues in its mission to develop a desktop DNA synthesis platform based on its proprietary silicon chip.Evonetix, previously based at Chesterford Research Park, now occupies 15,000 square feet at Coldham’s Business Park, comprising 8,000 square feet of fully fitted and equipped state-of-the art 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 multidisciplinary approach to deliver the Evonetix mission. Headcount currently stands at 40, including 26 PhD biologists, physicists, chemists and engineers, and the Company is currently looking to recruit further staff, including biophysicists, electronics and protein engineers.The Company’s silicon chip is made by MEMS processing and controls the synthesis of DNA at many thousands of independently controlled reaction sites or ‘pixels’ on the chip surface in a highly parallel fashion. This is compatible with both chemical and enzymatic DNA synthesis. Following synthesis, strands are assembled on-chip into double-stranded DNA in a process that identifies and removes errors, enabling accuracy, scale and speed that is several orders of magnitude better than conventional approaches.Dr Tim Brears, Evonetix 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.”For more information about Evonetix, please visit: https://www.evonetix.com/ or to learn more about the Company’s technology: https://www.evonetix.com/our-platform/About Evonetix LtdEvonetix is reimagining biology by developing a radically different approach to gene synthesis – a highly parallel desktop platform to synthesise DNA at unprecedented accuracy and scale. The company’s platform will place DNA synthesis in the hands of every researcher and change how DNA is accessed, made and used. This new paradigm in gene synthesis will facilitate and enable the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology.The proprietary Evonetix approach utilises a silicon chip, made by MEMS processing, that integrates physics with biology, and controls the synthesis of DNA at many thousands of independently controlled reaction sites or ‘pixels’ on the chip surface in a highly parallel fashion. The approach is compatible with both chemical and enzymatic DNA synthesis. Following synthesis, strands are assembled on-chip into double-stranded DNA in a process that identifies and removes errors, providing accuracy that is several orders of magnitude better than the conventional approach.The Evonetix DNA writer will be a desktop device, available to every researcher, and providing scalable, accurate DNA synthesis to enable biological systems to be engineered with unprecedented accuracy and scale – this is third-generation DNA synthesis.For further information see https://www.evonetix.com/About synthetic biologyWith the huge increase in DNA sequence information available to mankind over the past ten years, there now exists an unprecedented opportunity to engineer metabolic pathways and organisms, improve industrial processes, create new processes and engineer genomes with new or improved traits. This opportunity, known as synthetic biology, will have a massive impact across many industries and will be fundamental to helping us manage the Earth’s resources. It is estimated to grow rapidly over the coming years, reaching $40 billion in value in the mid-2020s.However, only a highly disruptive technology is likely to achieve the significant improvements in DNA synthesis required to enable and facilitate these opportunities. Evonetix believes that providing an integrated desktop platform will enable researchers to engineer biological systems with high accuracy and scale, and allow the rapid prototyping of new genes and pathways to harness biology and address challenges as diverse as petroleum dependency, the nutritional requirements of a growing population, the need for novel healthcare treatments and data storage.