Three cents per base pair for industrial use of synthetic DNA. That’s the big breakthrough that Gen9 recently announced, further redefining the economics of the synbio industry. Rather than paying 25 cents per base pair generated by old-fashioned gene synthesis, Gen9 partners will pay about one-eighth that amount. Gen9’s new offering enables scientists to catalyze their research by testing thousands of protein variants, building multiple versions of complex pathways and reducing the overall time to discovery.

That’s just one reason you won’t want to miss the SynBioBeta London 2016 Fireside Chat, Synthetic Biology Futures: New Technologies and New Applications. Among the session’s three panelists will be Gen9 President and CEO, Kevin Munnelly. Joining him for this in-depth, forward-looking examination of tools and trends will be Sean Sutcliffe, CEO of Green Biologics, and Barbara Harvey, Technology Deal Maker at Novozymes.What does Gen9’s breakthrough mean for the industry? Just this, says Munnelly: The ability to explore more design space and create more value. Gen9 is scaling the manufacture of gene synthesis by nearly two orders of magnitude and enabling unparalleled cost savings for DNA constructs up to 10,000 base pairs in length.“The engineering possibilities are tremendous in specialty chemicals, flavors and fragrances, bioremediation, materials and many other end markets,” he says.Munnelly and his Gen9 team are calling this the next generation of their already powerful BioFab DNA synthesis platform, tailor-made for scientists who are using megabase quantities of gene-length synthetic DNA for industrial workflows.Beyond the promise of BioFab DNA, Munnelly also will share his broader perspective on the rapid advance of synbio, which he calls a “game changer” across multiple diverse industries.“More and more companies are using synthetic biology to turn cells into factories that can produce chemicals, enzymes and biomaterials. We’re continually innovating so that researchers can design experiments, test more hypotheses and get to their next breakthrough faster than ever before possible.”The big question, says Munnelly, is whether government agencies that regulate the industry can keep up with the breakneck speed of innovation we’re seeing in the industry. The role of the International Gene Synthesis Consortium (IGSC), a coalition of gene synthesis companies that self-regulates, surely will grow. As an active member of that group, Gen9 already is “screening all submitted sequences against databases of known pathogens and toxins to ensure we are not synthesizing DNA that may contain potentially harmful content,” he notes.Discussing the pace of synbio innovation from another perspective, Green Biologics’ Sean Sutcliffe will discuss his firm’s focus on renewable chemicals utilizing its clostridium fermentation platform. “Significant improvements in enabling technologies (e.g. gene synthesis) mean we can advance our own technologies and strains much faster and with greater success rate,” he says. “This opens up cost improvements and new product opportunities as never before. We’ll be investing in both of these areas, recognizing that the time to market is relatively long.”Don’t miss this exciting discussion at SynBioBeta London 2016 on Thursday, April 7.Fireside Chat: Synthetic Biology Futures will run from 9:40 to 10:05 a.m.