Ansa Biotechnologies, Inc. reposted this
Some folks were surprised when I left academia back in 2018 to co-found a company focused on DNA synthesis. "Gene synthesis and cloning technologies? Aren't those just boring tools, a means to an end?" Well, 6.5 years later, I can tell you it's been anything but boring - and the excitement is only growing. Let me take you back: In my early grad school days, before gblocks and Gibson assembly, building custom plasmids could be a months-long odyssey. Even as the field evolved with companies like Twist leveraging million-oligo printers and machine learning, fundamental challenges persisted - delayed orders, sequence restrictions, and endless cloning. Then came the turning point: reading my future co-founders Dan and Sebastian's Nature Biotechnology paper on enzymatic oligo synthesis. With my background in high-throughput polymerase engineering, I saw the potential. The hypothesis was simple yet powerful: enzymes could outperform chemistry in DNA synthesis. And considering that DNA synthesis underpins virtually every advancement in pharma and biotech, even a 5% improvement in research efficiency could be transformative. Today, we've turned that vision into reality at Ansa. We're producing the world's highest quality and longest oligos, enabling our customers to access complex DNA sequences that were previously out of reach. But what truly excites me? This is just the beginning. We're rapidly innovating to make DNA synthesis so reliable that researchers will never have to see it as a bottleneck again. Sometimes the most exciting innovations come from reimagining the fundamentals. Who knew "boring" could be so revolutionary? Check us out @ ansabio.com