Science

The factory of the future: forget steel, forge DNA instead…

In a basement in South Kensington, London a very different sort of factory has just opened its doors. A team of collaborative robots whirr, not assembling cars or steel, but the building blocks of life itself - DNA. This is the Foundry, a £2m centre which opens today in Imperial College London. It plans to industrialise the process of preparing DNA for use in synthetic biology. That DNA will be turned into biological ‘devices’ - mini production centres for antibiotics, vaccines and even fuels.

What we’re doing is now much more detailed. We’re beginning to really design and engineer biological systems. Which is, I think, a natural evolution, but it is a transformation as well. Professor Paul Freemont, at Imperial College

The automated lab can run thousands of experiments simultaneously, saving biotechnology researchers from wasting hours with pipettes and Petri dishes. The Government has identified synthetic biology as one of eight 'great technologies’ where the UK can excel. "We want to have a very standardised, almost open-source model where people can access the data from the Foundry as part of the process of synthetic biology,“ said Professor Paul Freemont, head of molecular biosciences at Imperial College. Synthetic biology has been booming since the decoding of the human genome in 2000 - especially over the last three years, thanks to a new technique for gene editing called CRISPR.