Inscripta Acquires Infinome Biosciences and Sestina Bio

Inscripta, a global leader in genome engineering technology, announced earlier this year the acquisition of two pioneers of synthetic biology, Infinome Biosciences and Sestina Bio. The acquisitions advance Inscripta's strategy to develop and commercialize bio-manufactured products for a broad spectrum of industrial and consumer markets, according to company executives, who say the acquisitions demonstrate Inscripta's confidence in the commercial potential of the bioeconomy and the power of genome engineering to accelerate biomanufacturing innovation.

"Tackling the unprecedented opportunity to improve global health and sustainability through biomanufacturing requires a strong combination of talent, experience, technology, and commercial assets," according to Inscripta CEO Sri Kosaraju. "Infinome and Sestina Bio allow us to advance our strategy and complement our technological innovation and capabilities needed for creating the next generation of biobased manufacturing products and processes."

Prior to the acquisition, Infinome was closely affiliated with Inscripta. Infinome developed the GenoScaler platform, a proprietary strain engineering platform designed to rapidly optimize microbes for biomanufacturing, using Inscripta's genome engineering technology. "With our platform, we are able to create industrially optimized strains faster and at a fraction of the resource and infrastructure costs traditionally required for commercialization of precision fermentation solutions," according to Infinome CEO, CTO, and co-founder Dr. Richard Fox. "Combining Infinome with Inscripta brings together a shared vision of creating lean, scalable, and sustainable solutions for biomanufacturing through technology."

Sestina Bio brings an innovative, data-driven approach for building and identifying strains that make it out of the lab and withstand the rigors of commercial scale-up, executives say. "The proprietary methods we are developing enable us to produce and understand orders of magnitude more biological data than other synbio platforms," according to Sestina Bio CTO Ted Tarasow. "Our approach to minimal strain design combined with Inscripta's unique genome editing capabilities will enable dramatic reductions in the time and cost of bringing products to market," notes Sestina Bio Vice President of Research and Development Andrew Horwitz.

With the addition of Infinome and Sestina Bio, Inscripta is building on its history of technological innovation and has already begun applying its cutting-edge technologies to develop products for a diverse set of large industrial and consumer markets. Inscripta has several partnered and proprietary products in various stages of development. Kalsec Inc., a food and beverage ingredient solutions company, represents one example of an announced partnership to develop and commercialize multiple bio-manufactured products. Separately, Inscripta is engaging in commercial conversations around the previously announced development of a ready-to-scale microbial strain producing bakuchiol, a plant-based antioxidant and natural retinol replacement.

Inscripta is a life science technology company committed to creating a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable world through biomanufacturing. A global leader in genome engineering, the company's innovations are designed to unlock the full potential of the bioeconomy. It is committed to the continued development of critical technologies that enable scientists to bolster and expand domestic biomanufacturing, and spur new, safe, and secure biotech innovations. Inscripta supports customers around the world from Hacienda, where it opened a facility in October 2019, and Burlingame, California.

For more information, please visit www.inscripta.com.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

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