Sangamo Biosciences Inc (SGMO)

[jondoeuk]

Brink Therapeutics is yet another. The French company uses directed evolution. To speed things up, Brink also uses a technique called in vitro compartmentalisation, a way of running billions of enzyme reactions in parallel inside microscopic droplets. It's a miniaturised system that accelerates how quickly recombinases can be tested and optimised. By repeating these cycles, Brink can evolve recombinases that target specific genomic sites with high precision. The resulting data, on which enzymes work, and why, is being compiled into a proprietary library that will also feed into AI-driven design tools. This opens the door to eventually designing enzymes computationally before testing them in the lab, speeding up discovery even further.

The combination of in vitro directed evolution, metagenomic discovery and genAI platforms allows them to rapidly screen and capture activity data for billions of synthetic and natural recombinase sequences against diverse DNA target sequences, while continually learning from the results . The immediate goal is to validate five recombinases this year, demonstrating their ability to make precise and safe DNA edits in human cells. The company is also building a library of data that will underpin its AI-assisted enzyme design.