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Willow Biosciences Incorporates Inscripta’s Onyx® Platform to Expand its Strain Engineering Capabilities

This week Willow Bioscience, a leading biotech company that produces sustainable, bio-based ingredients, announced they have adopted Inscripta’s Onyx platform into their workflows. Willow Bioscience is a Canadian company, headquartered in Calgary, with offices in Mountain View, California, and was founded in 1981.

Willow is a leader in bio-based development of ingredients for consumer care, food & beverage, and pharmaceuticals. They were an early adopter as part of Inscripta’s early access program and after evaluating several proof-of-concept libraries, made the decision to onboard the Onyx platform into their strain engineering platform, significantly increasing their capabilities and throughput. Examples of libraries generated during the initial collaboration include targeted amino acid saturation mutagenesis and genome-wide libraries containing thousands of single edits.

Why did they make this decision? The bottom line – speed and precision. These factors are keys to success when pushing the forefront of synthetic biology and bringing products to market via sustainable yeast fermentation. Willow’s goal of higher purity products, available quickly and at a lower cost, is only made possible by technologies like high-throughput CRISPR genome engineering.

“Technology advancements such as next-generation sequencing have enabled researchers to read genetic information at incredible speed and depth. Inscripta’s technology now enables researchers to write genetic information with the same speed and with unparalleled precision, a combination that promises endless possibilities. Willow is thrilled to seamlessly integrate Inscripta’s automated, high-throughput gene editing platform to shorten our development cycles and empower our scientists to effectively harness the tremendous potential of the entire genome” said Dr. Trish Choudhary, Vice President of Research & Development at Willow Biosciences.

“The future of the synthetic biology economy is dependent on both large and small companies innovating under increasing pressure to deliver better products, faster, and often with less resources. Willow is a great example of how a lean, yet highly innovative organization can rapidly integrate and utilize the Onyx platform,” said Dr. Nandini Krishnamurthy, Vice President of Microbial Business Unit at Inscripta. “We are looking forward to working with the team at Willow to further increase their strain performance while shortening development timelines.”

Read the full press release here.