Accelerating Drug Discovery with a Rapid, Cost-Efficient DNA Assembly Workflow

Broadcast Date: April 26, 2023
Time: 7:00 am PT, 10:00 am ET, 16:00 CET

Historically, the drug development process can take 10-15 years from the initial discovery phase to regulatory approval. Moreover, the total cost of these endeavors can often run into billions of dollars. As such, biopharma organizations are very attuned to new solutions or workflows that can save time and money. That’s why AstraZeneca is taking innovative new approaches to jump-start the early drug discovery process.

In this GEN webinar, we will hear how our distinguished guest, Dr. David Öling, and his team set out to optimize DNA construct development, fully aware that if they cracked the code on accelerating this step, it would affect all downstream processes and speed up early drug discovery. Dr. Öling will also discuss how his team 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. In addition, this new workflow reduced costs by 50%-90% to complete new synthetic DNA constructs by integrating FRAGLER with algorithmic search functionality in Benchling and achieving sequence search at scale, eliminating the need for a new synthesis steps.

A live Q&A session will follow the presentation, offering you a chance to pose questions to our expert panelists.