Public Funding for Apalos Ltd

_The market pull_ Synthesis of custom DNA and proteins is vital for biotechnology innovation across a wide range of industries and demand for both is accelerating. Next-generation sequencing has produced a vast library of natural DNA code that can be harnessed and customised for the engineering of new and improved products, from therapeutic proteins to bio-industrial enzymes. But the UK lacks a domestic DNA synthesis service with the capacity to deliver custom products with the complexity, speed and variant-throughput necessary for R&D pipelines to iterate effectively. _Why cell-free?_ We share a critical bottleneck with many of our customers - the loss of time, throughput, resource and purity as a result of traditional bacterial cloning. Cell-free approaches enable automation, process miniaturisation and high-throughput, improving the scale at which DNA/protein variants can be synthesised and screened by orders of magnitude. Cell-free also enables production of molecules toxic to cells or exhibiting new-to-nature biochemistries. _Our innovation_ We will build the eSynthesis platform, exploiting state-of-the-art enzymatic DNA synthesis (EDS) by developing technology for cell-free clonal amplification of assembled parts. We are among the first UK service providers to utilise EDS and we are primed to exploit the superior length and error-rate of EDS oligonucleotides. We aim to reproduce what cells do well, clonal replication of DNA, in an automatable cell-free process that delivers speed, cost and throughput benefits. Our mission is to lead a new paradigm shift in synthetic biology R&D defined by complete control of molecular context. Our areas of innovation will include: (a) novel DNA amplification technology, (b) digitalized single-molecule partitioning of assembled DNA templates to ensure clonal amplification, and (c) an automated, high-throughput and clonal synthesis platform. _Impacts_ Our eSynthesis platform will enable us to: (a) deliver complex/difficult to replicate, highly-purified and application-agnostic custom DNA products quicker and at lower cost than established competitors, and (b) leverage our existing downstream cell-free protein synthesis service to screen libraries of expressed variants at an otherwise unfeasibly high throughput. Our value proposition to customers will be the ability to iterate faster through discovery and product optimisation pipelines.