DNA synthesis is used by biopharmaceutical researchers and developers to create new diagnostics, therapeutics and other biomanufactured materials. San Francisco-area startup Ansa Biotechnologies is developing a new technology platform that aims to provide synthetic DNA for those uses and more—and one the company says will move faster and work more cleanly and accurately than existing methods do.
Four years after its launch, Ansa has reeled in an oversubscribed series A funding round to roll out the platform.
The $68 million financing hugely bumps up the company’s lifetime fundraising total—now stretching past $80 million—and will be used to speed up the development of its technology, build fast-moving DNA synthesizers and ultimately launch the synthesis service. To get there, Ansa plans to expand both its physical R&D and manufacturing footprint and its research, engineering, bioinformatics and operations teams.
Northpond Ventures led the round. A combination of new and existing investors also joined in, including RA Capital, Blue Water Life Science Advisors, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Fiscus Ventures, PEAK6 Strategic Capital, Carbon Silicon Ventures, Codon Capital, Mubadala Capital, Humboldt Fund, Fifty Years and Horizons Ventures.
“Currently, the ability to write long and complex DNA is a critical bottleneck in the broader life sciences industry. We believe Ansa’s fully enzymatic process of DNA synthesis will usher in a new era in which the delivery of high-quality and more accurate DNA sequences in a timely manner to end users will become the new industry standard,” said Lily Li, Ph.D., a principal at Northpond.
Ansa’s patented approach to DNA synthesis was developed by co-founders Daniel Lin-Arlow, Ph.D., and Sebastian Palluk, Ph.D., and described in a 2018 issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology. It uses enzymes to facilitate a more natural process of building DNA sequences, in contrast to other methods, which may use harsh chemicals that can weaken the newly created molecules.
Their method also differs from other enzymatic approaches, which typically build sequences by adding modified nucleotides one at a time. Instead, Ansa binds nucleotides to a DNA polymerase before adding them to the sequence, which the company says allows for faster, more cost-effective synthesis.
“Enzymatic DNA synthesis is rapidly becoming a commercial reality, and I believe we have the most advanced technology in terms of speed, length, and accuracy,” Lin-Arlow, also the company’s CEO, said in a statement.
Also taking the enzymatic route to DNA synthesis are fellow startups like Twist Bioscience—which unveiled its own low-cost, damage-free enzymatic method in January of this year—and DNA Script, which is aiming to make its own enzyme-based approach ubiquitous with the introduction of desktop DNA printers.