With a continued focus on scaling its synthetic biology capabilities and offerings, global genomics leader Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT) established a synthetic biology customer solutions program, leveraging decades of manufacturing expertise to fuel research and development innovation. Powered by a dedicated team of scientists and synthetic biology experts, the program is designed to enable partnerships and agile collaboration with companies seeking custom-tailored solutions that extend beyond IDT’s catalog of synthetic biology offerings comprised of gene and gene fragments, and different vectors and plate formats for high-throughput workflows.

The custom solutions program aims to build new, bespoke tools and solutions that serve as a springboard for customer innovation, enabling them to design, build, test and iterate more quickly—without the rigidity of high-throughput manufacturing requirements. The intent of this collaborative approach leads to fewer bottlenecks in scale, testing and development, and results in faster project turnaround times.

“With the fast-paced nature of synthetic biology innovation, we know that off-the-shelf products can limit complex research,” said Sandy Ottensmann, VP/GM of Gene Writing and Editing at IDT. “With our custom solutions program, researchers can lean on the strength of IDT’s scientific expertise and tailor-made synthetic biology capabilities as a catalyst for their innovation. This program was designed specifically for specialized customer endeavors, to enable them to truly discover what’s possible.”

During its pilot phase, IDT’s custom solutions program has reviewed more than 35 opportunities, and has enabled customer workflows on more than half of these projects. In addition to an innovative team dedicated to overseeing custom solutions program proposals, IDT also has dedicated laboratory and manufacturing space to drive customer innovation. This purpose-built space is situated in IDT’s U.S. flagship synthetic biology manufacturing facility, a 25,000-square-foot-site in Coralville, IA, which opened May 2024.

The custom solutions program can take on projects of any size, from large-scale initiatives to single-need requests, such as:

• Non-standard gene fragments with higher yields or labels
• Complex genes
• Non-standard length genes over 5 kb
• Non-standard cloned genes with specialized cell lines and subcloning
• Multi-site cloning           

To learn more about IDT’s custom solutions program, or to propose a new project, visit www.idtdna.com/CustomSynbio.