SynbiCITE, 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.

You can see the Foundry in action in this report from Sky News: http://news.sky.com/story/1673357/uk-lab-makes-dna-for-synthetic-biology