![]() ![]() But twenty-five years ago, this was a pipe dream, realized only because big thinkers asked the right "what-if" questions at the right time. Today, we take it for granted that we can look up any gene in thousands of different species. īut as the Human Genome Project took off, these academic facilities saw an opportunity to come together and advance biology in ways that hadn’t been done before. They focused on the mundane sequencing needed to run a lab - a student’s plasmid or enzyme mutant, for example. To cut costs, universities set up their own DNA facilities and offered Sanger sequencing services to academics. In the mid-1990s, it often cost more than a thousand dollars to sequence one gene. And now, Asimov Labs will help us move even faster. It may sound outlandish, but our ability to design large and complex circuits using computer-based models has improved massively in the last decade. Our goal is to engineer increasingly complex behaviors until, ultimately, we can design entire genomes. Design tools and models help, but there is still a lot of trial and error that we are trying to minimize. We’re currently able to design systems with 10-100 discrete genetic functions in mammalian cells but not with zero implementation risk. It means working backwards from, say, synthetic photosynthesis or the eradication of a cancerous cell in the body to a DNA sequence that encodes all the biochemistry to make it happen. We think of genetic design as applying biophysical insight to compose and layer genetically-encoded functions to achieve a cellular behavior. We want to reduce the implementation risk in engineering a biological system - a bacterium, mammalian cell, or anything else - to zero. ![]() Our goal with Asimov Labs is not to use robots to screen thousands of strains, but rather to solve genetic design. īy retiring the Foundry name and shifting over to Asimov Labs, we are reimagining how high-throughput experiments can drive biological progress. The Foundry was designed to take on wildly different challenges under tight time constraints, like making ten different molecules in 90 days without knowing them ahead of time. Over the next decade, its team designed and engineered pathways and living cells to make over 1,200 different molecules and materials, as well as hundreds of genetic devices, such as circuits and sensors. ![]()
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