Adrian Woolfson, MD, PhD, says biology is becoming a general design and manufacturing platform poised to unlock a multi-trillion-dollar bioeconomy. Key to this transition will be the ability to write new DNA sequences with engineerable outcomes across manufacturing, medicine, agriculture, materials, water purification and more. “Cells become platforms that you deploy, not organisms that you merely observe,” he told GEN Edge. A longstanding biotech executive, Woolfson formerly served as president and founder of genome writing company, Replay, after years of experience across Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, and Sangamo Therapeutics. Woolfson’s latest synthetic biology enterprise, Genyro, which he leads as CEO, is on a mission to make biology programmable using AI-driven genome design. The San Diego-based biotech has recently licensed a DNA assembly technology, called Sidewinder, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to construct complex DNA sequences from scratch. Frances Arnold, PhD, Nobel laureate, professor of chemical engineering, bioengineering and biochemistry, and a member of Genyro’s scientific advisory board, describes Sidewinder as an innovative solution to an important problem, assembling DNA fragments into genes, and even genomes, for new function. “In this exciting era of composing new biology, Sidewinder helps us make the translation from AI prediction into reality, from notes into sound so to speak,” she told GEN Edge. The platform, which was recently published in Nature, enables generation of long sequences at a low one in 1,000,000 misconnection rate, a 10,000-fold improvement over current standards. This high accuracy bypasses the time consuming and laborious clonal screenings traditionally needed to address high error rates, enabling DNA writing at newfound scale and significantly lower cost. Woolfson asserts that a key focus at Genyro is to ensure that these technologies are used safely, responsibly, ethically, and in a manner that benefits society. …
