Evonetix appoints Andrew Diston as Chief Executive Officer

Appointment will drive the development Evonetix’s semiconductor-based gene synthesis platform

Cambridge, UK, 13 March 2024 – EVONETIX LTD (‘Evonetix’), the company developing semiconductor scale technology to improve access to gene synthesis, today announced the appointment of Andrew Diston as Chief Executive Officer with immediate effect. Andrew’s appointment will support the ongoing development and commercialization of Evonetix’s semiconductor-based gene assembly technology.

Andrew has held numerous executive leadership positions including Global Head of Cambridge Consultants’ Medical Technology Business and most recently as Chief Science and Technology Officer at Science Group PLC, providing consultancy and systems to an international client base. He has extensive experience in driving commercial growth and managing major projects, with a proven track-record of leading the development of complex, multi-disciplinary engineering teams in the medical device and life science industries. Andrew has served on the Board of Directors of MassMEDIC, the Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Device Industry Council, is a Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and is a Chartered Engineer. He holds an MA in Electrical Sciences from Cambridge University.

Andrew Diston, CEO, Evonetix, commented: “Evonetix’s benchtop gene synthesis platform will revolutionize engineering biology, enabling scientists to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges across healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and sustainability. I look forward to working with the team at Evonetix to continue the development of its groundbreaking semiconductor technology.”

Dr Matthew Hayes, Founder and CTO at Evonetix, said: “Andrew’s extensive experience in leading inter-disciplinary teams of engineers and scientists will be invaluable in building Evonetix’s future. Under Andrew’s leadership, we will continue to develop our novel gene assembly technologies, optimizing our semiconductor chip and binary assembly process to address the gene synthesis bottleneck”

ENDS

For further information, please contact:

Lorna Cuddon, Zyme Communications, Tel: +44(0)7811996942, Email: lorna.cuddon@zymecommunications.com

About Evonetix Ltd – www.evonetix.com

Evonetix is reimagining biology by developing a radically different approach to gene synthesis – a highly parallel desktop platform to synthesise DNA at unprecedented accuracy and scale. The technology builds on scalability and density from the semiconductor industry to deliver a step-change in performance for the production of DNA. The company’s platform will place DNA synthesis in the hands of every researcher and change how DNA is accessed, made, and used. This new paradigm in gene synthesis will facilitate and enable the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology.

The proprietary Evonetix approach utilises a silicon chip, made by MEMS processing, that integrates physics with biology, and controls the synthesis of DNA at many thousands of independently controlled reaction sites or ‘pixels’ on the chip surface in a highly parallel fashion. The approach is compatible with both chemical and enzymatic DNA synthesis. Following synthesis, strands are assembled on-chip into double-stranded DNA in a process that identifies and removes errors, providing accuracy that is several orders of magnitude better than the conventional approach.

The Evonetix DNA writer will be a desktop device, available to every researcher, and providing scalable, accurate DNA synthesis to enable biological systems to be engineered with unprecedented accuracy and scale – this is third-generation DNA synthesis.