In a study by the National Business Incubation Association, four out of five new businesses that start in an incubator program succeed within five years. Without an incubation program, three out of five new business start-ups fail within the same amount of time. Since 1992, the Technology Center Incubator at Innovation Park has been the epicenter of the region’s most formalized small business incubation program… a “garage” to dozens of start-up companies.

The incubator provides vital assistance in areas like accounting practices, office procedures, and human resource planning and management so the companies can focus on their strengths and grow.

De Novo DNA just moved to its new lab space in the incubator and is already feeling at home.

“Yes, our first servers were in our basement,” founder Howard Salis says. "Early on, Ben Franklin’s TechCelerator course on entrepreneurship helped us to develop our business strategy. Now, we have access to a cutting-edge incubator lab space with great utilities and close proximity to Penn State's main campus."

Helping biotech researchers engineer organisms  

De Novo DNA's first product is a sophisticated software platform that designs organisms with desired functionalities. So far, De Novo DNA's platform has more than 8,000 registered users who have designed over 500,000 DNA sequences for their own biotech applications.

Salis offers this example: a researcher might say, "Hey, I need cells that make these 12 proteins to manufacture a drug candidate. And those proteins need to be produced at some specific ratio, for example, to make a large amount of the drug."

De Novo DNA's algorithms will design a completely new DNA sequence that reprograms a simple bacterial cell to carry out exactly that function.

“We are recognized leaders in the emerging field of Synthetic Biology for our ability to quantitatively predict how DNA sequences control cellular functions, validated across thousands of experiments,” Salis says.

The start-up’s clients come from the medical, industrial, and agricultural biotech sectors, including both Fortune 500 and start-up companies, as well as a thriving community of academic researchers who use the software. Salis describes De Novo DNA as the Intel of the synthetic biology field, focused on the design & manufacturing of large genetic systems to empower the next-generation biotech revolution.

Born out of a Penn State research collaboration

The company was founded in 2012 by Salis, a professor of Biological Engineering & Chemical Engineering at Penn State in collaboration with the Penn State Research Foundation. Starting off, the purpose of the company was to simply make it easy for researchers to utilize the software developed in the Salis research lab, leveraging advanced web & SaaS (software as a service) technologies. Since then, the service has grown considerably. Thousands of recurrent users apply their rapidly growing toolbox of automated workflows to greatly accelerate their research. Several users have reached commercial success with help from De Novo DNA.

Next up: DARPA and advanced genome engineering

Power couple Howard Salis (Founder/CEO, Synthetic Biology) and Anna Chan-Salis (Senior Scientist, Molecular Biology) work seamlessly to deliver a user-friendly design platform for engineering organisms. Together, they recently received a SBIR Phase II contract from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to develop and commercialize advanced genome engineering techniques. They relaunched a new version of the design platform, utilizing the latest in web technologies to deliver an awesome user experience.

Synthetic biology is an emerging field, full of nascent applications with untapped potential. De Novo DNA intends to stay at the forefront of the market, solving the most important design challenges as they engineer ever larger and more complex genetic systems.