+phil paik (molecular assemblies)

+Phil: ... we're not done yet in terms of continuing to push product specifications around purity and length. Still a lot of room for us to optimize. Instead of talking about 99.9%, we need to go to 99.99%. If you want to find out more information, we do have a booth manned mainly by Ben Johnson. We're still taking orders and interest from those who want to be part of our Key Customer Program. Find out more at the booth.

+Phil: I also want to acknowledge the entire Molecular Assemblies team. We have a talented group of talent working tirelessly to make automated enzymatic DNA synthesis a reality, and our investors for their continued support.

+Q: Great data. Thank you for showing the data. Incredible work. Simple question. What yield are you guys offering?

+Phil: It's important that we separate the notion of yield... now we really focus on purity. Just to separate these two concepts; in terms of mass output we start with a 200 picomol starting scale.

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+Q: Are you making the nucleotides yourself or sourcing them?

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+Phil: We are currently sourcing them from an external vendor.

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+Q: ... you optimize the reactions... the time of the reactions are optimized by... protein engineering. What time reaction?

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+Phil: The important thing for customers is turnaround and delivery time. The focus and the promise of enzymatic synthesis was to cut not just the synthesis cycle time, but also the total post synthesis processing time. We want to deliver a 200mer sequence in less than 1 week. That's our target.

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+Steve: For our application, for these n-1 products, for genome engineering we need these precision oligos and these n-1 products are in the homology arm and we can use that even if it's just dirty for n-1 right. We see challenges in indel lock regions and making it inactive.

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+Q: So if you become a contractor and synthesize for everything, why not put a robot in a box and send it out to customers? You said turnaround time is everything. Benchtop solves that. You also solve legal issues for sending things out or signing dozens of MTAs when you onboard anyone and nobody wants to share IP.

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+Phil: In terms of selling a box and provide reagents? It's a good question. We had this conversation early on in our company. Do we sell an instrument or do we provide services? Given where the current landscape is in terms of type of customers that want long oligos, I think they don't really want to mess with managing an instrument. Their ideal scenario is that they can put in an order and get a tube of DNA that they can pout directly into their experiments. With an instrument, there are more challenges: quality control. Now it is not just a set of reagents but it's all the validation processes around creating an instrument. We wanted to tightly control that. So we decided to go with a service model.

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+Steve: We also source oligos from IDT. I don't want to be synthesizing oligos myself as an end user.

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+Phil: There is room for both models. We think the industry is broad enough and wide enough to support both models. Maybe one day things will get to the point where every customer will have an instrument in their lab. Right now that's not where the industry and demand is right now.

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+Q: We like in-sourcing and do everything in house. We have built our own biofoundry. I like your enzyme based on your data. If we had that enzyme in-house, I think there's a market for it.

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+Phil: Okay.

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+Q: What do you think is the most major technical challenge to get a more quantitative cycle efficiency? Going from 99.9% to 100%? You're still working on that last bit, what's the most challenging aspect of that?

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+Phil: Things become astronomically tougher as you get closer to 100%. I think we still have headroom to push that cycle efficiency higher. Really it comes down to finer tuned optimization of our biochemistry. That's something that we feel is we can continue to do that. I can't reveal too much on what those parameters are. It's something that we believe we have headroom on.

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+Max: That estimate you gave on the potential upcoming turnaround time, is that for a certain length in kilobases or is that for 200mers?

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+Phil: The target for <1 week is for a 200mer. The synthesis time is proportional, or somewhat proportional to the length. I think it's important to note that we're synthesizing directly and providing single strand oligo. You used the term kilobase...

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+Max: Elegen says 7 days for 7 kb.

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+Phil: For the gene side of things, it would go through assembly process or something. It wouldn't be going from 200mers and then multiplying that by 100x a week. No, it would be a different process for that.

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+Max: Okay, cool.

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+Steve: ... at a gene editing company, we built constructs. Error correction-- we would take smaller oligos that were correct, rather than junky mutated oligos, and release those and do-- the error correction step of re-sequencing and so forth.