New synthetic biology power player, Constructive Bio, has emerged from stealth in Cambridge fuelled by $15 million seed cash and gold dust IP.

The company is set to re-engineer biology and create completely new classes of enzymes, pharmaceuticals and biomaterials.

Its proposition is predicated on commercialising the ground-breaking synthetic biology research of Professor Jason Chin, who will be chief scientific officer.

The company, which is taking lab space at Chesterford Research Park, holds an exclusive licence to IP developed by the Chin Lab at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

Constructive Bio is backed by leading DeepTech investors – Ahren, Amadeus Capital Partners, OMX Ventures and General Inception. Amadeus co-founder Dr Hermann Hauser told Business Weekly years before the Covid pandemic that the hot money in new tech plays should go on class-leading synthetic biology.

The Chin Lab has pioneered the development and application of methods for reprogramming the genetic code of living organisms, rewriting the near-universal genetic code of natural life to create organisms that use new genetic codes.

The new organisms deliver remarkable properties: they are resistant to a wide variety of viruses, they can be programmed to make new unnatural, or synthetic, polymers, and even perform entirely new functions.

The company is based on two core proprietary platform technologies:-

• •Large scale DNA assembly – to construct large chunks of DNA at unprecedented scale eg. whole bacterial genomes can be built from scratch
• Genome reprogramming – to systematically recode whole genomes to engineer unnatural products for commercial applications.

Together the technologies will be used to synthesise polymers with non-natural amino acids for commercial applications across a range of industries including novel therapeutics and antibiotics, enhanced agriculture, manufacturing and materials. 

There are considerable bonuses: The strains’ phage resistance can be used to increase bio-manufacturing yields. And novel polymers can be designed with the ability to breakdown and recycle the monomers to support a circular sustainable economy, offering approaches to transform industries such as the c.$750 billion global polymers market and help overcome global challenges like climate change to benefit the planet and mankind.

Dr Ola Wlodek, former chief operating officer at Reflection Therapeutics and expert in natural product biosynthesis and unnatural peptide cyclisation, has been appointed as the company’s CEO.

Professor Jason Chin said: “Over the last 20 years we have created a cellular factory that we can reliably and predictably program to create new polymers. 

“The range of applications for this technology is vast – using our approach we have already been able to program cells to make new molecules including from an important class of drugs and to program cells to make completely synthetic polymers containing the chemical linkages found in biodegradable plastics.

“Now is the right time to commercialise this technology. I am pleased that we have attracted significant support and seed funding to establish Constructive Bio and capture this opportunity.

“By taking inspiration from nature and reimagining what life can become we have the opportunity to build the sustainable industries of the future.”