A newly accessible cell-free DNA programme could “empower” therapeutics to market, the CEO of Ribbon Bio has said.

Jodi Barrientos, CEO of the synthetic biology company, was speaking at the ‘Engineering Biology: DNA and Beyond’ conference in Vienna, Austria, which took place on the 5 and 6 March.

At the conference, Barrientos announced the launch of Ribbon’s MiroSynth Molecular Mining Solution, a ‘kit’ delivering cell-free DNA programming to other companies.

“We’ve seen a shift in the market, so we wanted to take the competency of [Ribbon’s] tech, which is using an intelligent algorithm, to decide the building blocks, as well as the order and the biochemistry associated with it, to be able to pull together cell-free technology,” Barrientos told DDW.

“I like to segment the DNA market as a whole into three buckets. The first bucket is the oligosynthesis group – we don’t play there, we don’t synthesise. We’re in the next bucket, which is the assembly bucket. We take little building blocks and we build out long and complex DNA.

“Then you have the up-scalers who take one molecule and make a whole bunch of it. We don’t play there either, we partner, and that’s the core ethos of Ribbon. We don’t need to tech in those spaces because phenomenal tech already exists – we just need to partner well and empower groups to use them better.”

MiroSynth can ‘make sequences others cannot’

The latest tool to be available to market builds on Ribbon’s MiroSynth Cell-Free DNA programme, which launched last September.

The MiroSynth technology can produce pristine DNA strands of up to 12,000 bp in length and Ribbon says the system can accelerate mRNA production, bypass cloning and produce DNA constructs without bacterial propagation.

One example of how Ribbon’s MiroSynth Cell-Free programme is using oligos provided by Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT), a biotechnology company part of the Danaher Corporation.

IDT claims its gBlocks HiFi Gene Fragments, with a median error rate of 1:12,000, advance workflow optimisation by improving infidelity.

IDT’s oligos are then built upon with the MiroSynth technology, using Nuclera’s eProtein Discovery system to engineer proteins. Ribbon says protein expression yields from the MiroSynth programme are comparable to plasmid-derived DNA, enabling high-throughput cell-free protein engineering.

Daniel Sachs, Director of Automation Development at Ribbon Bio, said Ribbon’s technology is proving unique in the DNA synthesis space.

“[Firstly] our technology can make many more sequences others cannot make due to the complexity, and [secondly] we deliver excellent quality,” he told DDW.

“You can see that our DNA can be used straight out of the box in a system like Nuclera’s eProtein Discovery, [without] any additional amplification or purification steps [required].”

New technology could ‘change how we do cell-free DNA’

The DNA innovation led by Ribbon, soon packaged in its Molecular Mining Solution kit, has the potential to be used for preclinical development of gene therapies and mRNA vaccines, including personalised medicines.

“When you distil Ribbon’s tech down, we are a software company that does biology,” Barrientos told DDW.

“The new method by which we’re deploying the MiroSynth technology is [going] to democratise it to every lab that’s doing cloning. The intent is that if [labs] were cloning before, [they] don’t need to continue doing that.

“We have a big automated production system that we’ve really scaled to be a centre of service for customers who want to order DNA. But there are a lot of other customers who don’t.

“The idea is that you get a QR code that gives you access to our algorithm, you order your pools from your favourite vendor, we give you the proprietary enzymes and the protocol by which you can manufacture your own cell-free molecule.

“We think this is going to change how we do cell-free DNA. We’re in this for partnering, for driving science forward, for making the impossible possible.”

The early-access programme for Ribbon’s Molecular Mining Solution is set for launch this July.