The Week That Genome Engineering Was Born

In a 25-year-career, it’s funny how certain days or weeks stand out. For me, this is one of those unforgettable weeks.

Almost a year ago, I joined Inscripta, a rapidly growing spinout from the University of Colorado - Boulder. That simple statement fails to capture how momentous the move was. My family and I were living in Germany when the opportunity arose; with young kids, transplanting ourselves halfway around the world was a major decision. I had compelling discussions with Kevin Ness, Inscripta’s CEO, about the company’s impressive financial backers, the leadership team’s track record, and more. But what it really came down to was this: Inscripta offered me the chance to create a market that didn’t exist. Moving into completely untouched territory? That’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This week, the Inscripta team officially launched our first commercial tool, the Onyx? benchtop platform for scalable Digital Genome Engineering. A week ago, scientists could perform gene editing but they couldn’t scale up to genome-level engineering. Today, genome engineering — from massively parallel individual edits to genome-wide combinatorial edits — is a reality. This transformation is exactly why my family and I packed up and moved to Boulder.

From my view, the power and promise of this technology put unusual intensity on product design. I knew from the start that our platform would have to look bold, striking, and futuristic. It would have to look like nothing else in your laboratory because it would do something that nothing else in your laboratory could do. Building another beige-and-blue box wasn’t enough.

But it was about more than just the look of the product. Most life science instruments have a big window so you can see what’s going on inside. But in the Onyx platform, the process happens inside living cells. With so little to see, why not use the box for something more interesting? Our product is made completely of black glass, incorporating a 27” high-definition touch-screen monitor that also serves as the instrument door. There’s a fully functional Windows 10 device built in so customers can aggregate content and we can push content out to them, making it a knowledge and data hub as well. We also installed a high-resolution digital camera to the gantry inside the box, so when customers need to look at something internally, they’ll get a crisp, detailed view.

This commitment to designing a product so fundamentally different from anything else in the lab will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me. I’ve spent my career as a contrarian, always challenging the status quo. To me, the worst reason to do something a certain way is because it’s always been done that way before.

Based on the reaction so far to the Onyx platform, I feel confident that we’ve achieved our goals for a unique product design. Of course, the real differentiator is what happens inside. Push a button, and 27 hours later, the platform produces living cells with a genetic code that has never existed before. New life. Now that’s pretty amazing.