For developers of a brand new technology platform, it doesn’t get much better than this: we are delighted to report that independent judges for The Scientist chose our Onyx™ platform as one of the Top 10 Innovations of 2020! The competition was fierce, and this year the news organization considered an even broader range of categories than usual — making our win that much sweeter.

Kim Kamdar, a managing partner at the healthcare-focused venture fund Domain Associates and a judge for the competition, noted the value of gene editing in her assessment of our technology. “CRISPR is a powerful tool for editing genomes and allowing functional assessments that can elucidate causality and improve our understanding of genome biology,” she wrote. “But those outcomes will not be achieved without overcoming a number of the technical and scalability challenges. This is what the Onyx Digital Genome Engineering Platform enables.”

Here at Inscripta^TM, our goal is to bring the power and potential of CRISPR gene editing to every biology lab — at a scale that would be inconceivable with manual techniques. We’re making it possible not just to introduce edits across a genome, but to use a broad range of edit types and also to perform iterative editing over many cycles for the best possible results.

The Scientist’s write-up included a quote from Nandini Krishnamurthy, our VP of applications development, that nicely sums up our mission: “Biologists don’t have to worry about the technical optimization anymore and can go ahead and focus on any problem in biology now,” she said.

The editorial team also reached out to molecular biologist Shelley Copley at the University of Colorado Boulder for her feedback as an early user of the Onyx platform. “The high-throughput part of it is critical” for understanding how synonymous mutations affect the fitness of E. coli, she reported, noting that she can generate 50,000 desired variants with this tool. “I don’t know of any other technology that can do it,” she added.

We are truly grateful to The Scientist’s staff and judges for this recognition, and we can’t wait to see the discoveries that are enabled as we bring the Onyx platform to more laboratories.