Inscripta Raises New Capital, Hits a Sales Milestone the Same Day

On April 5th, Inscripta, Inc. announced the closing of their Series E financing round, bringing the total raised by the company to $409.5 million. It also announced the first commercial shipment of its Onyx genome engineering platform the same day.

Led by Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Inscripta raised $150 million in their latest series E financing. The financing round saw participation from existing investors and new investors, D1 Capital Partners and Durable Capital Partners LP.

CRISPR’s Expanding Repertoire

CRISPR-Cas9 is a genetic engineering technique that enables the precise modification of DNA fragments. It was first characterized as a method to delete or cut specific DNA sequences, earning it the nickname “genetic scissors.” Many new companies have emerged to employ this Nobel prize-winning technology for therapeutic applications in the past decade. Scientists today have engineered new enzymes and have expanded CRISPR’s scope to modify plants, bacteria, and other organisms.

However, genetic engineering does not need to stop at one single edit, and one can introduce multiple modifications to the genome. However, this process is time-consuming, and not every laboratory is equipped. Therefore, it is essential to develop better platforms that facilitate various types of edits in multiple genomic locations in an easy, streamlined manner.

Inscripta’s Onyx platform

Inscripta is a gene-editing company led by Sri Kosaraju, the President and CEO, and John Stuelpnagel, co-founder of Illumina, as the chair of the board. Its two main technologies include the Onyx platform and a new class of CRISPR enzymes called MADzyme nucleases.

MAD7 is a MADzyme nuclease that offers several advantages over commonly used CRISPR-Cas9 nucleases. To encourage the prevalent use of CRISPR, Inscripta is now offering the MAD7 enzyme free for research. They charge no up-front licensing fees or onerous “reach through royalties” on products made with this enzyme. For other non-research proposes, they charge a low royalty.

Inscripta’s Onyx platform, which is the first benchtop system for wide genome engineering, is currently priced at $347,000. It includes the hardware and the software necessary to design and generate thousands of trackable edits in cells using CRISPR technology. The hardware can also perform tests to verify the edits and determine the effects of such changes. The technology is currently used only for bacterial and saccharomyces (yeast) cells, but the company aims to expand it into mammalian cells.

The Onyx platform was unveiled last October, and on April 5th, its first commercial shipment was announced. The first platform in Europe was purchased by GeneMill at the University of Oxford.

“This is an exciting milestone for Inscripta, and it follows our mission to enable researchers to realize the full potential of the bioeconomy. GeneMill, and our other early customers, will be instrumental partners in shaping the broad impact of the Onyx platform’s unprecedented scale, performance and accessibility,” said Kosaraju.

“In addition to our excitement about the Onyx platform, we see further future potential with our innovation, which is captured by our IP portfolio of nearly 100 issued U.S. patents. To this end, we are fortunate to have the support of some of the world’s most notable investors who share our enthusiasm for the long-term opportunity to build transformative technology and an impactful organization.”

Editor: Rajaneesh K. Gopinath, Ph.D.

Related Article: A New Multiplex CRISPR Method in Plants Can Generate High-Order Mutants in One Shot

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Daniel Ojeda