UK's First Commercial Synthetic Biology Foundry Goes Into Production

Wed, 06/04/2016 - 09:00

London, UK, 6th April 2016 / Sciad NewswireSynbiCITE, the UK’s pioneering national Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC) for synthetic biology today announced the opening of the country’s first commercial synthetic biology foundry at Imperial College London. SynbiCITE’s Foundry provides automated end-to-end design, construction and validation of synthetic biologic components combined with a unique open-access and sharing software which allows researchers to speed-up innovation by sharing their biodesign protocols with different labs around the world.

Dr Stephen Chambers, CEO, describes the Foundry’s mission: “To accelerate the translation of synthetic biology R&D into the marketplace. The Foundry has been created and built to operate as a ‘cloud lab’ to support synthetic biologists across the UK and is for everyone in the business of synthetic biology and who can use synthetic biology – the engineering of biology - in their business. These remote users send their biodesigns to the Foundry, which executes the work and delivers the data or prototype to the biodesigner once the work is complete. The Foundry provides a ‘maker space’ for entrepreneurial scientists looking to commercialize their research, ready access to state-of-the-art automation for SMEs, and is a facility for large and small companies to explore the enormous potential of synthetic biology.”

The Foundry will enable automated manufacturing processes that meet industry requirements for using applications of synthetic biology in life sciences and many other industry sectors including fine and special chemicals, energy, agriculture and waste remediation. It will take biodesign towards growing the global bioeconomy.

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For more information contact the SynbiCITE team:

Steve Chambers, CEO
stephen.chambers@synbicite.com
PA Tel +44 (0) 20 7594 9902

Prof Richard Kitney OBE, Prof Paul Freemont, Co-Directors, SynbiCITE

R.Kitney@imperial.ac.uk, PA Tel: +44 (0) 20 7594 6226

P.Freemont@imperial.ac.uk, PA Tel: +44 (0) 20 7594 2763

 

Media Relations, Sciad Communications:

Richard Anderson: richard@sciad.com, Tel +44 (0)7973 950376

Deborah Cockerill: deborah@sciad.com, Tel +44 (0)7930 317729

 

About SynbiCITE

http://www.synbicite.com

SynbiCITE is a pioneering Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC) dedicated to promoting the adoption and use of synthetic biology by industry. The IKC is an internationally recognised lead centre in industrialising synthetic biology research giving the UK a globally renowned national resource of interacting partners from across the UK’s leading academic institutions, industry and business.

SynbiCITE is focused at Imperial College London and is, with our partners, accelerating the commercialisation of world-class science and the emerging technologies encompassed by synthetic biology into new products, tools, processes and services. Our overall aim is to grow UK industry in the sector and improve synthetic biology, using industry to achieve significant economic impact, generate wealth for the companies, generate skilled workers and create jobs. 

For more information follow SynbiCITE on Twitter @SynbiCITE