Synthetic biology has changed, but the way DNA is made largely hasn’t. From mRNA therapeutics and gene editing to protein engineering and advanced vaccines, today’s most important applications demand DNA that is more accurate, more complex, and easier to use, without bacterial constraints. Yet much of the industry still depends on cloning workflows that introduce delays, contamination risk, and unnecessary limits on what can be built and how quickly teams can move. In this talk, we’ll explore why DNA remains one of the field’s most persistent bottlenecks, and why the future of DNA manufacturing will need to move beyond cloning. We’ll look at how cell-free approaches are removing bacterial constraints, and how the field is opening up through both cell-free DNA as a service and more accessible, kit-based assembly models that bring DNA manufacturing closer to the user. Together, these models have the potential to make advanced DNA easier to access, easier to integrate, and better aligned with the pace of modern biological development

Description: Scala Biodesign and Ribbon Bio will present a joint workflow that helps teams move more efficiently from protein design to experimental testing in a fully cell-free workflow. In this talk, Jodi Barrientos, CEO of Ribbon Bio and Ravit Netzer, Scala Biodesign Co-founder and CEO, will share a case study involving a DNA endonuclease that was difficult to express and purify in conventional cell-based workflows, resulting in low expression and insufficient yield for further biochemical characterization.  Using ScalaOS, a focused set of engineered variants was generated to address the developability challenge. Ribbon Bio then enabled rapid conversion of those variants into high-accuracy linear DNA using MiroSynth™Cell-Free DNA without cellular constraints, helping remove a key bottleneck between design and experimental evaluation. With only 23 variants, the combined approach led to up to nine-fold higher purification yield and recovery of highly pure protein on the Nuclera eProtein Discovery instrument. More broadly, the talk will show how Scala and Ribbon complement each other in a practical customer workflow: Scala helps narrow the search to a manageable set of promising designs, while Ribbon makes it possible to build those designs quickly and reliably for downstream testing. 

For decades, DNA synthesis has been the limiting reagent in synthetic biology — reliable for short sequences, but increasingly error-prone and costly as designs scale. That ceiling is now cracking. New enzymatic synthesis platforms, error-correction chemistries, and assembly pipelines are extending what’s possible, opening the door to rapid construction of full pathways, microbial genomes, and even mammalian chromosomes. This session will explore how innovators are breaking past barriers, what technical and economic breakthroughs are needed next, and how longer, cheaper, and faster synthesis could fundamentally change how we design biology at scale.