Inscripta Announces the First Commercial Shipment of Its Onyx™ Digital Genome Engineering Platform and Closes $150 Million in New Financing

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Dr. James Johnson, head of GeneMill at the University of Liverpool, plans to perform a wide range of digital genome discovery and forward-engineering research projects with the first-ever Inscripta Onyx platform to be deployed in Europe. (Credit: GeneMill)

Among the first organizations to receive the Onyx platform is GeneMill, a state-of-the-art synthetic biology foundry at the University of Liverpool. “Inscripta’s Onyx is an extraordinarily powerful platform that will enable high-throughput genome editing and analysis. It will revolutionize our abilities in synthetic biology,” said Professor Douglas Kell, Principal Investigator of the project funded under the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council’s ALERT 19 competition.

Dr. James Johnson, lead co-applicant and head of the Liverpool GeneMill, added, “We look forward to continuing our close collaboration with the Inscripta team, working together to explore a wide range of genome discovery and forward-engineering research projects with our customers and collaborators from around the world.”

In a 2020 report, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that 60% of physical inputs used in manufacturing today could one day be produced through biological means. Plastics, fuels, medicines, and more could be made via sustainable, planet-friendly biological pipelines such as yeast fermentation. Already, yeast is being used to produce sweeteners, industrial chemicals, and medicinal components.

“This is an exciting milestone for Inscripta, and it follows our mission to enable researchers to realize the full potential of the bioeconomy. GeneMill, and our other early customers, will be instrumental partners in shaping the broad impact of the Onyx platform’s unprecedented scale, performance and accessibility,” said Sri Kosaraju, President and CEO of Inscripta. “In addition to our excitement about the Onyx platform, we see further future potential with our innovation, which is captured by our IP portfolio of nearly 100 issued U.S. patents. To this end, we are fortunate to have the support of some of the world’s most notable investors who share our enthusiasm for the long-term opportunity to build transformative technology and an impactful organization.”

In addition to Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., the Series E funding includes participation from new investors D1 Capital Partners and Durable Capital Partners LP, as well as existing investors Foresite Capital, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), and JS Capital LLC.

About the Onyx Platform

The Onyx platform is the world’s first benchtop system for scalable digital genome engineering and consists of a benchtop instrument, consumables, software and assays. With a fully automated CRISPR-based workflow, the Onyx platform enables massively parallel, trackable editing of single cells at an unprecedented scale. Customers like Sestina Bio are successfully experiencing how the Onyx platform is significantly improving the four steps of synthetic biology to accelerate forward engineering and genome discovery:

• Design genome-scale libraries with a few clicks using the InscriptaDesigner software
• Generate millions of precisely edited cells with push-button simplicity on the Onyx instrument using customized Onyx Genome Engineering Kits
• Test and characterize thousands of edits in the Onyx Cell Library with our Genotyping Assays followed by pooled or isolated phenotyping
• Learn the impact of individual edits using the same Genotyping Assays and our InscriptaResolver software

The Onyx platform is enabling customers to routinely iterate through genome engineering cycles with fewer resources, faster than was ever possible before. For more information about the Onyx platform, visit www.inscripta.com/products.

About Inscripta

Inscripta is a life science technology company whose mission is to empower researchers to realize the full potential of the bioeconomy. The company is headquartered in Boulder, Colo., with offices in San Diego and Pleasanton, Calif., and Copenhagen, Denmark. For more information, visit www.inscripta.com.

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