Accelerating drug discovery with a rapid, cost-efficient DNA assembly workflow
It typically takes around 10 years and millions to sometimes billions of dollars for most new drugs to make it to market. That’s why AstraZeneca is taking innovative new approaches to jump-start the early drug discovery process. Associate Principal Scientist, David Öling, and his team set out to optimize DNA construct development, knowing if they cracked the code on accelerating this step, it would affect all downstream processes and speed up early drug discovery.
Created FRAGment recycLER (FRAGLER), an algorithm to perform alignment, codon optimization and fragmentation of amino acid sequences that dramatically improves DNA assembly and plasmid generation
Reduced costs by 50%-90% to complete new synthetic DNA constructs by integrating FRAGLER with an algorithmic search functionality in Benchling
Achieved sequence search at scale, eliminating the need for new synthesis and lowering cost per iterative cycle
