Synthego said today it will partner with Thermo Fisher Scientific to distribute synthetic guide RNA (gRNA) products for CRISPR genome editing, through an agreement whose value was not disclosed.
Synthego said its synthetic gRNA portfolio and synthetic gRNA manufacturing capabilities will be used for producing synthetic gRNAs under Thermo Fisher’s Invitrogen TrueGuide™ brand, to be marketed and sold worldwide across Thermo Fisher channels.
Thermo Fisher said the new offering represented the first synthetic gRNA technologies in its portfolio, increasing its competitive advantage over its large biotech provider competitors.
Until now, Synthego has sold its products online and through its direct salesforce.
“With Thermo Fisher’s reputation and extensive market reach, this partnership will make high-quality synthetic gRNA technologies for CRISPR genome engineering readily accessible to all scientists worldwide,” Synthego CEO Paul Dabrowski said in a statement.
Synthetic gRNA products available under the Thermo Fisher Scientific TrueGuide brand include synthetic crRNA:tracrRNA, synthetic single-guide RNA (sgRNA), and chemically modified sgRNA. The products, available for research use only and marketed under Invitrogen’s TrueGuide brand, may differ from those sold by Synthego in configuration and design.
Synthego said it will continue to make its own products available directly to customers. Those products include software and synthetic RNA kits designed for CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) genome editing and research.
Commercial and academic institutions in over 32 countries use Synthego’s synthetic gRNAs, which according to the company have achieved up to 90% editing efficiency at among the lowest costs and shortest turnaround times available.
On the company’s website, users can design gRNAs to knock out a given gene by searching 113,934,776,281 targets across 123,769 genomes in less than 10 seconds.
Synthego says its customer base includes eight of the world’s 10 largest biotechnology companies, and all but one of the top 25 global biology universities.
“With the addition of TrueGuide synthetic gRNAs, Invitrogen’s TrueEdit portfolio now provides end-to-end solutions for researchers’ genome-editing applications,” added Helge Bastian, Ph.D., VP and general manager of Synthetic Biology for Thermo Fisher Scientific.