ITI invests £2.5M in synthetic biology

Investment

The publicly funded Scottish technology development body ITI Life Sciences, announced the launch of its latest international research and development programme in synthetic biology, where it has committed £2.5 million to develop technology to enable the efficient assembly of small DNA segments into larger and more complex fragments such as biosynthetic pathways.

Current methods for DNA assembly are inefficient and involve resource-intensive biological processes. The prototype resulting from the 18-month Genome Segment Assembly (GSA) programme will enable the high-throughput assembly of DNA segments in an automated and reliable way. It is hoped this will benefit Scottish companies and universities developing synthetic biology applications across the range of market sectors.

ITI Life Sciences has commissioned two R&D groups to support the international programme, the microfluidics engineering group at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and Ginkgo BioWorks, a synthetic biology company spun out of MIT research and based in Boston, Massachusetts.

ITI’s brief is to fund R&D that will promote the development of high technology companies and markets in Scotland. Eleanor Mitchell, Managing Director of ITI Life Sciences, said, “There is a clear market need for new technologies enabling an automated process for large scale DNA assembly. This programme provides a tremendous opportunity for Scotland to gain competitive advantage and capitalise on a relatively immature and innovative market, and we know through our research to date that existing small Scottish companies with the right capabilities are willing to expand into this as a potentially very lucrative industry.”