Small town in the city, the Cochin hospital, is not that of his patients. For the past ten years, its compound houses the start-up of the most promising biotechnologies. The winner of the promotion 2017, DNA Script, has put his bags in the nursery in November. In this building design, which was inaugurated just one year, it has offices and a laboratory in which its researchers completed the installation of their equipment.
In front of the bench, they manipulate vials and pipettes to create small fragments of DNA. “Here, we put on beads, one after the other,” laughs Sylvain Gariel, the co-founder of the company, in reference to the four “letters” A, T, C, G (nucleotides in the jargon) that make up our code of biological.
Created in 2014, the biotech hopes to conquer the market of the synthetic DNA with a mode of manufacturing that mimics nature, without the use of chemistry. “We use enzymes, water, and nucleotides. It is faster, more reliable and more economical, ” says Thomas Ybert, co-founder of DNA’s Script. The company will propose, as early as 2018, strand “tailor-made” to a research team, who will test.
The market is estimated at about 1,5 billion euros
It develops a parallel “printer” DNA ” that will allow its customers to make them themselves according to their needs. “Now, they must wait up to five weeks, with a risk of error that is not negligible. My thesis director at Sanofi commanded each gene three times at different vendors, to be certain of having a good version, ” says the young entrepreneur.
To begin, the DNA, the Script is lifted in June, 11 million euros from a number of investors including Illumina Ventures, the fund created by the world leader in genetic sequencing. It is not the only one. In 2016, more than $ 1 billion has been invested in the start-up…
