Today, Monday 30th June, 2014, Isogenica, Cambridge UK and Imperial College London secure funding from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the UK's innovation agency, for a £347,000 project to optimise a gene library assembly technology for potential use in synthetic biology.
This support from the TSB follows the successful development by Isogenica of its Colibra™ technology for the commercial synthesis of ratio controlled gene libraries using a patent protected methodology discovered by Dr Anna Hine of Aston University which was also supported by TSB funding.
Isogenica will now work with Dr. Geoff Baldwin at Imperial College London to take advantage of their 'BASIC' DNA assembly technology. This will allow both parties to efficiently optimise the assembly of genes from smaller DNA fragments and generate combinatorial libraries of genetic mutations for application in the field of synthetic biology.
"Isogenica is currently commercialising the Colibra™ technology for ratio controlled protein and antibody libraries based on a partly automated process. We are now interested in further optimising the technology for high throughput, automated manufacture of whole gene libraries and we believe that this could represent a powerful and valuable tool for commercialisation in the synthetic biology arena" said Kevin Mathews, CEO of Isogenica.