Synthetic Genomics, the San Diego startup developing biofuels, industrial chemicals, sustainable animal feed, and other genetically engineered products, says it has acquired worldwide rights to key synthetic genomic technologies from Germany’s Febit Holding. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed.
“We need to make hundreds to thousands of genomes a day, not one every six weeks or six months,” Synthetic Genomics co-founder and CEO J. Craig Venter told me by phone yesterday evening. Febit’s intellectual property “is key to the road to doing that.”
Synthetic Genomics said it acquired rights to three families of patents and patent applications related to key synthetic genomic technologies, along with related know-how, equipment, and other technical support. The technology has the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of synthesizing DNA, one of the core technical problems faced by synthetic biologists.
In fact, Venter said the Febit scientists who had developed the technologies wanted the rights to go to Synthetic Genomics. “They thought their IP would go best with what we’re trying to accomplish,” he said.
In a statement from the company yesterday, Venter says, “The ability to construct accurate and inexpensive DNA, together with our current proprietary DNA assembly and genome transplantation methodologies, enable enhanced capacity to synthesize DNA and reprogram cells at a larger scale than what is currently achievable.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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