Evonetix appoints Stephanie Brooking as Head of Product Management

Stephanie Brooking to support Evonetix in developing its strategy for market entry

CAMBRIDGE, UK, 14 January 2019 – EVONETIX LTD (‘Evonetix’), the Cambridge-based company pioneering an innovative approach to scalable and high-fidelity gene synthesis, today announced it has appointed Stephanie Brooking as Head of Product Management. Evonetix aims to utilise its innovative silicon chip approach to deliver a high-throughput solution for the synthesis and assembly of DNA molecules with high fidelity. Stephanie will help to define the Company’s strategy for market entry and longer-term product marketing for its novel gene synthesis products.

Stephanie has over 20 years’ commercial experience in the life science industry, having worked in operational, sales and marketing leadership roles to support product development and introduction, commercial launch planning and marketing content strategy. She has helped execute programmes to open new geographies and market opportunities within research, clinical, agricultural, pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. Previously she was the VP of Marketing and Sales at Cambridge Epigenetix, Global Commercial Director at Oxford Nanopore Technologies, and also held senior positions at Illumina, Applied Biosystems, Affymetrix and GE Healthcare (Amersham Pharmacia Biotech). She first began her career working on the Human Genome Project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Dr Tim Brears, Evonetix CEO, said: “Following last year’s fundraising we have been investing in key roles and we are delighted to have Stephanie join our team. She brings a wealth of commercial experience and invaluable expertise in leading product development and marketing strategies, which will be a great asset to Evonetix as we continue to progress with developing our gene synthesis platform.”

Stephanie Brooking, Head of Product Management at Evonetix, said: “Evonetix’s approach permits massive parallelism in de novo DNA synthesis and enables high-throughput on-chip assembly of high-fidelity gene-length DNA at scale. It’s exciting to see the potential Evonetix’s technology offers and I look forward to working with the team to help develop this further.”

For more information about Evonetix’s team, please visit: www.evonetix.com/team

END

Stephanie Brooking

Head of Product Management

Evonetix

For further information, please contact:

Tim Brears

Evonetix Ltd

Tel: 01223 930307

E-mail: tim.brears@evonetix.com

Michelle Ricketts

Zyme Communications

Tel: +44 778 9053885

E-mail: michelle.ricketts@zymecommunications.com

Notes to Editors

About Evonetix Ltd

Evonetix is revolutionising gene synthesis with the aim of producing DNA at scale to enable many applications in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology, across a wide range of industries, from pharmaceuticals to industrial biotech, specialty chemicals, renewables, bioremediation, agriculture and potentially also digital data storage.

The Company’s platform is based upon a novel silicon array and unique synergistic thermal control chemistry, capable of synthesising oligonucleotides in parallel, at each of the 10,000 miniaturised reaction sites. The technology is compatible with both chemical and enzymatic gene synthesis and allows for exquisite control at each site of synthesis. It uses a process of error detection throughout assembly to yield high-fidelity long DNA molecules, including challenging sequences with high-GC content or repeats. Thus, Evonetix’s approach permits massive parallelism in de novo DNA synthesis and enables high-throughput on-chip assembly of high-fidelity gene-length DNA at scale.

Evonetix is based in Cambridge, UK and was founded in 2015 by Cambridge Consultants Ltd and Providence Investment Company Limited. The Company raised £9 million in a series A financing, co-led by DCVC and Draper Esprit, and has been awarded Innovate UK co-funding for a £1.3 million gene synthesis project.

For further information see www.evonetix.com

About synthetic biology

With the huge increase in DNA sequence information available to mankind over the past ten years, there now exists an unprecedented opportunity to, for example, engineer metabolic pathways and organisms, improve industrial processes, create new processes and engineer genomes with new or improved traits. This opportunity, known as synthetic biology, is estimated to grow rapidly over the coming years, reaching $40 billion in value in the mid-2020s. Synthetic biology will have a massive impact across many industries and will be fundamental to helping us manage the Earth’s resources.

However, only a highly disruptive technology is likely to achieve the significant improvements in DNA synthesis required to enable and facilitate these opportunities. Evonetix believes that, by providing high-fidelity DNA at scale, without the need for post-synthesis error correction, it will be well placed to capture a significant part of the growing multibillion-dollar synthetic biology opportunity.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC