Inscripta launches the world’s first benchtop platform for digital genome engineering

Inscripta, Inc., have announced the launch of the Onyx™ Digital Genome Engineering platform, the world’s first fully automated benchtop instrument for genome-scale engineering. The CRISPR-mediated, massively parallel platform — which includes software, consumables, instrument, and assays — enables researchers to engineer microbial libraries containing the full breadth and scope of possible edit types, in their own labs. This new genome engineering platform will offer immediate and significant benefits that will support bio-industrial materials development and manufacturing, genome discovery, healthcare, and sustainability.

Prior to commercial release, Inscripta has been collaborating with global key opinion leaders in academia and industry through an early access program. A selection of the scientists involved in the program highlighted the various advantages the Inscripta platform provides for their particular applications.

James J. Collins, PhD, Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, said: “Inscripta’s platform has afforded us the opportunity to explore the genetic dependencies of antibiotic function in unprecedented detail. The knowledge garnered through this technology has significant potential to lead to the development of novel therapeutics against our most difficult antibiotic-resistant pathogens.”

Markus Herrgard, PhD, Director of Data Science and Automation at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at Technical University of Denmark, added: “The Inscripta platform is a perfect match to the ambitious goals for the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability to enable the transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to a bio-based economy. The platform allows us to rapidly and cost-effectively engineer large numbers of genetic changes into microbial cell factories. This will significantly accelerate our progress in creating new cell factories for sustainable production of chemicals.”

Another early access user, Chris Savile, PhD, Vice President of Commercial Operations at Willow Biosciences, commented: “Inscripta’s technology enables us to generate and screen large libraries of precisely edited strains on a scale never seen before. Our heterologous pathway and strain engineering efforts benefit greatly from the reduced cycle times and increased learnings offered by the platform. These unparalleled capabilities will be used to accelerate our microbial R&D programs and shorten time to market.”

“At Inscripta, we believe that biology has unlimited potential to positively change the world. We are inspired by the ambitious experiments our early access collaborators have run with our platform and are proud to see the impact our technology is already having on the synthetic biology field,” said Dr. Ness. “CRISPR-based gene editing technology has the potential to transform our ability to precisely engineer genomes, but it has not yet fully delivered on this promise due to significant limitations. The Onyx platform overcomes these limitations and will give all scientists the power to design, engineer, evaluate, and track results of powerful genome engineering experiments in their own lab. We believe that this technology will transform the capabilities of genome writing and enable researchers to focus their efforts on testing multiple biological hypotheses in parallel without having to outsource their experiments or spend precious time and resources on the laborious task of optimizing complex gene editing methods.”

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