It’s a new day for complex DNA

My co-founders Sebastian Palluk and Jared Ellefson have told me that I don’t celebrate wins enough. After a huge accomplishment, I quickly move on to obsessing about the next problem. I’m trying to change, though, and today is a great opportunity for that because Ansa has achieved an important milestone: the commercial launch of our very first synthetic DNA products.

My first reflex is to say, Just you wait— the products coming soon will be so much better. And that’s true. The products that we’ve just launched, Ansa DNA Fragments and Ansa Clonal DNA, are synthetic DNA parts up to 600 bp made directly from single enzymatically synthesized oligonucleotides that are more than 600 bases long. In the coming months we’ll be able to offer customers much longer pieces of DNA that we build from these 600 bp parts.

Fortunately, though, I had the opportunity to speak with a few of our early access customers recently, and their response to what we’re offering right now was incredibly enthusiastic. These are scientists who are making new biomaterials, editing microbiomes, and producing plasmid DNA for use in gene therapies. They’re ambitious, creative, and trying to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Every one of them told me that the DNA we synthesized for them made a huge impact on their ability to push their science forward, and they’re eager to work with us more now that our products are commercially available.

How could something as small as 600 bp make such an impact? It comes down to sequence complexity — or, perhaps more specifically, the inability of legacy DNA synthesis vendors to quickly and reliably build many really important sequences that contain extreme GC content, secondary structures, repeats, or other challenging motifs. The frustrating status quo is that too many desired sequences are rejected by the industry’s go-to vendors, or worse, are accepted and then fail during manufacturing. Scientists have learned to compromise, making do with the sequences they can get, laboriously cobbling together their desired sequences from multiple different types of parts, or shelving projects because of DNA that can’t be synthesized. But they shouldn’t have to.

I co-founded Ansa in 2018 because I wanted to make it so that scientists never again had to worry about how they were going to get the DNA for their experiments. There are a lot of aspects to that ambitious goal, but a central challenge is developing the capability to synthesize any sequence quickly and reliably, including complex DNA. Powered by the novel synthesis technology we developed, our platform has no trouble building complex DNA that most vendors would reject outright.

The customers in our early access program, and those who will now take advantage of our fully-launched service, are scientists eager to access to synthetic DNA that they couldn’t obtain quickly or reliably from other sources, if at all. We often hear that our DNA enables projects that would otherwise be in limbo, unable to move forward without those key sequences.

I’m really pleased that more people will have access to these DNA parts now. But I’m even more excited about what’s coming next: longer synthetic DNA, up to 5 kb. Our R&D team already builds 5 kb assemblies from our 600 bp parts, and we’ll soon offer this service to customers. Moreover, we routinely synthesize 1,000mer oligos directly, and those 1 kb parts will enable us to build even longer constructs using the same fast, reliable, and robust manufacturing process. I can’t wait to get that capability into the hands of our customers.

For now, though, this commercial launch means that scientists who needed fast and reliable access to shorter stretches of complex DNA can for the first time move their projects ahead. And that really is reason to celebrate.

Thank you to everyone on the Ansa team for all your hard work and dedication, and thanks to our early access customers for helping us validate these products and get them ready for launch!