In this interview Sean Ward, co‑founder and CEO of Synthace, outlines the company’s mission to commercialise synthetic biology by building cellular factories that produce high‑value protein products such as industrial enzymes and, increasingly, fine and specialty chemicals. He describes Synthace’s end‑to‑end engineering stack that leverages the ability to read and write DNA, enabling rapid organism design (e.g., an 8‑week gene‑transfer pipeline) and optimisation. Ward highlights four disruptive technologies developed through academic collaborations: (1) a promoter‑ORF rewiring platform that randomly fuses promoters to open reading frames to discover new phenotypes; (2) Ribotype, a riboswitch‑based analogue knob that tunes translation levels without constructing many variants; (3) “biopumps”, novel transmembrane proteins that import hydrophobic substrates such as vegetable oils, allowing short synthetic pathways for difficult feedstocks; and (4) a computational enzyme‑discovery workflow that mines global sequencing databases, adapts genes in silico, and exploits bulk DNA synthesis cost advantages. He discusses the regulatory environment, noting that contained bioprocesses for chemicals are commercially viable now, whereas open‑environment or therapeutic applications face long, uncertain approval cycles. Ward also shares his personal entrepreneurial journey, from a 1999 music‑identification startup to bioinformatics and the 2011 spin‑out from UCL, and emphasizes the strategic focus on chemicals as the largest global market with immediate renewable impact. The conversation ends with a brief Q&A on product timelines and regulatory challenges.
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So, as Philip mentioned, we're an applied synthetic biology spin-out from UCL and kind of the tip of the spear for commercializing a lot of the stuff you're hearing in theory and turning it into practice. At present, we're applying synthetic biology to produce high-value protein products such as industrial enzymes, and we're rapidly moving into applying it for the production of fine and specialty chemicals. We've been lucky enough, given our timing in the market, to have developed from active university collaborations and our own in-house innovation the complete stack of technologies required for the rapid engineering and optimization of these microorganisms. So of course people have been discussing what synthetic biology is. Our perspective tends to be a very broad one as well. Which is fundamentally, we're sitting atop the ability to both read and write DNA. And it's the use of this in interesting and novel ways which is enabling us to engineer things with both a speed and with a complexity that up to now was unattainable. So, give you a little bit of a background of myself though. I founded my first technology company when I was younger than probably most of you in the room. 19, back in 1999. It was a completely different sector, primarily computer science. And there I built music identification technology, which was used by, at the time, Napster, the largest peer-to-peer network in the world, to track pretty much every piece of music in the world. It was large-scale data analysis, you know, frankly, before the concept of big data took traction. Ultimately though, music industry never adapted to due to a huge disruption that took place, and I moved on into bioinformatics with the help of UCL back in 2005. While working there, I met the co-founders of Synthase, who included Dr. Gersher, who was a synthetic biology postdoc in John Ward's lab, and also Chris Grant, who recently finished his PhD in biochemical engineering. So we spun out officially from UCL back in January of 2011, and Since then, we've been lucky enough to get a tremendous amount of support from both angel investors, U.S. Small Business directly investing, and have failed our first products, which are industrial enzymes for biometallysis, which are now in the marketplace. Fundamentally, using synthetic biology principles, we've built an entire engineering pipeline toolkit which allows us to rapidly build organisms and more importantly, rapidly optimize process them. This means both looking at your standard process factors, but also looking at how you might say parameterize DNA. How do you understand that, what's the right level of expression to use for this particular protein? What are the cofactors that you need, etc.? We've got this down to a process where we can transfer a gene from another host, such as mammalian, into our current production strains in 8 weeks and yield substantial improvements in how much of these actual visible products you can make even though in essence this DNA is a, you know, a text file that we can print on. So we've also been lucky enough to, with our industry collabor— well, our academic collaborations, pull together a number of truly unique and disruptive technologies. For instance, working with Imperial, Travis Baier there, we have a technology for the rapid rewiring of how a cell operates relies on a very simple hack, taking what's called a promoter and fusing it randomly to what's called an open reading frame. But what it does in that sort of systems biology graph that you saw earlier is draw new lines between how the parts of a cell operate. And by rapidly screening this, you find that you can have random— well, huge steps in specific space. As an example, a cell might have 30% more membrane, which makes it great for making transmembrane proteins. Or in other cases, it's things like having more chaperones, so it's able to pull proteins more effectively. And this has rapid implications in how you can change and screen an organism. So another technology that we've collaborated on is something called Ribotype at the University of Manchester. And this is taking advantage of riboswitches, which is how a section of RNA can fold into a two-dimensional structure, which in and of itself then forms a switch which prevents ribosomes from attaching and essentially producing a protein product. This gives you tunable control over the production of a protein at the translation level. And more importantly, it's like an analog knob. By changing how much of a small molecule you add into the media, you can adjust how much of a protein gets made without having to make potentially hundreds of genetic constructs to investigate the whole range of expression levels that might be appropriate for a system. And another technology we've been working with is what we're calling biopumps in collaboration with UCL. And it's a collection of novel transmembrane proteins which are able to selectively transport hydrophobic substances into cells. In essence, this lets us use interesting substrates such as oils, vegetable oils such as grapeseed for instance, and convert them now with very short synthetic pathways which we are able to rapidly tune using these Rocko-type knobs. The end result is we're applying all of this innovation in synthetic biology to rapidly engineer cellular factories which are able to take feedstock novel feedstocks, which frankly are very difficult to work with otherwise, and with short synthetic pathways catalyzing them into higher-value chemical products. This is something that's only possible with synthetic biology, and more importantly, it's something you can do very rapidly because of the technologies and the approaches synthetic biology enables. That's just kind of a quick overview of world-winning stage of what we're up to. And of course, there's also many other things kind of pending. In essence, you are picking a very good time to be in the room here hearing about synthetic biology. It's fundamentally one of the biggest transitions in what you can do from an engineering standpoint that's taken place in the last century. To be frank, the comparisons to the transistor are very real. Thank you. Any questions?
So you mentioned this, um, these factories. Would you say that's the most exciting product you see rolling out within the next 3 years?
But well, it's the most practical product that you're seeing rolling out in the next 3 years. Okay. Now obviously some of the applications and things like human health are truly tremendous. You already saw that slide of the case of how you can use bacteria to target all sorts of for instance biomarkers, to very specifically deliver compounds of interest to specific parts of an organism. However, the regulatory cycle to actually use that for something like, say, human therapeutic is on the order of a decade. And many other applications that you could do that would involve, for instance, use of an organism that's been genetically modified outside of a contained environment. iGEM this year was a great example of that, discussing how you could do bioremediation of plastics. Those are tremendous applications that are very exciting. However, at the same time, from a regulatory standpoint, they're inaccessible.
So the problem isn't so much that the technology isn't ready to be commercially viable, it's that there's no appropriate regulatory framework embracing it.
It's not being embraced, but also, in the defense of the regulators, there's many unknown risks attached with those those points as well. It's one of those cases where it frankly needs a lot more assessment before it can be properly brought to the market. On the other hand, when you're talking about a bioprocess where you're using a genetically engineered, albeit highly genetically engineered organism inside of a bioreactor to produce a chemical product that you already know the toxic qualities of, you know, it's a much more straightforward operation. You've constrained your problem space, and so you can address it right now. And, you know, as a commercial entity, we have to focus on what can I do that, you know, is applicable in the short term. Because if I'm not doing something that's applicable in the short term, I won't be here for the long term to go for the really interesting stuff. Although I might add, frankly, chemicals are the largest market in the world. They're in use on everything that you see around you. It's not terribly sexy. It's not the same as saving a life, but it has a larger aggregate impact in your day-to-day life, to be able, for instance, tap into the world's chemicals in a renewable form. I just wanted to ask a question about some of your products that you mentioned that are already out. So the enzymes, how is your approach to producing those different from the more traditional aspects? Sure. Could you just tell me a little bit more about that? Fundamentally, it's using heavy computation. Computational modeling, both to find potential candidate enzymes for some of these bioanalysis processes. Secondly, it's the fact that I can take advantage of all of the sequencing data that has been done by everyone worldwide. You know, you've got GenBank to mine from, and that gives you candidates of genes that are coming from other organisms where now in silico I can translate, you might say, these genes from the way they were written for that particular organism, the way to write them for my organism. Whereas, you know, your old processes where you maybe, you know, the gene trap or something and had to have that source organism in your local library, you know, it's a whole different ballgame when it's all digital. And so I can do this rapidly and I can do it with a, you know, let's say a parallelism that wasn't possible before. Simple example, you know, by buying DNA in bulk, I can get it for 20 cents per base pair, whereas you know, it's closer to 35p, I think, for your sort of one-off chains that you would pay out of academic rate. So all sorts of things like that also come into play.
