The companies are working together on next-generation technology in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology. This new technology will improve the quality, speed, and cost of developing synthetic biological solutions such as life-saving vaccines, medicines, treatments, and therapies.

Cambridge, UK  – EVONETIX LTD (‘Evonetix’), the company developing semiconductor scale technology to improve access to gene synthesis, today announces the signing of a joint development agreement and commercial supply agreement with Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), a global semiconductor leader. This agreement signals the continuation of the long-standing combined work of both companies, bringing efforts to the next stage in producing a new technology benchmark that will help meet the global demand for better gene synthesis.

Current gene synthesis approaches can be slow, expensive, and inaccurate, potentially causing a huge bottleneck for innovation. Centralized DNA production services struggle to deliver length, accuracy, and complexity at speed. Evonetix has reimagined gene synthesis and is developing a completely new approach that will release the potential of novel biologic therapies and drive advances in engineering biology faster and further.

Together with ADI, Evonetix is developing a gene foundry on a chip, which will consign the service model to history. Evonetix envisages preparing gene length DNA in three days at the benchtop, accelerating the design-build-test cycle for antibodies, vaccines, and proteins from months to days, and delivering as much as a 10-fold productivity increase in gene delivery.

Today’s agreement underlines the work in taking the development of ADI’s application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), which is designed to thermally control DNA synthesis and assembly to the next level by providing a turn-key semiconductor solution for Evonetix’s Evaleo^® series of DNA synthesis devices.

In the latest agreements between the companies, ADI has committed to investing in the continued development of the Evonetix semiconductor-based gene synthesis family of devices. The companies have also entered into a commercial supply agreement to secure the highly scalable manufacturing capability of ADI for Evonetix and its future customers.

Matthew Hayes, Founder and CTO at Evonetix, said: “This agreement with global semiconductor leader ADI represents a major milestone for Evonetix and is a strong validation of our vision and our technology. This provides us with the capacity and manufacturing capabilities required as we continue our efforts to bring our technology closer to market, putting the power of gene synthesis directly in the hands of researchers.”

Patrick O’Doherty, Senior Vice President of Digital Healthcare at ADI, added: “ADI’s efforts with Evonetix will be central to the manufacturing and commercialization of their benchtop gene synthesis platform. We see the interface between silicon and biology as critical for the future development of therapeutics to help treat disease, and we are delighted to work with Evonetix on this.”

About Evonetix Ltd

Evonetix is reimagining biology by developing a radically different approach to gene synthesis – a highly parallel desktop platform to synthesize DNA at unprecedented accuracy and scale. The technology builds on scalability and density from the semiconductor industry to deliver a step-change in performance for the production of DNA. 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 utilizes a silicon chip 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.

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