Evonetix Announces the Appointment of Dr Tim Brears as CEO

Evonetix, the Cambridge-based company pioneering a novel and disruptive approach to DNA synthesis, announced today the appointment of Dr Tim Brears as Chief Executive Officer.

Tim previously served as Chief Executive of a number of bioscience companies, including Xention, a biopharmaceutical company specialising in the discovery and development of ion-channel-modulating drugs for the control of atrial fibrillation and Gendaq, a company focused on the development of zinc finger proteins for gene regulation.

Prior to that, he spent ten years in the US, initially as a long-term fellow of the European Molecular Biology Organisation at Rockefeller University, New York, and subsequently as Director of Licensing at Ciba-Geigy (later Novartis) Agribusiness in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Tim is a graduate of Oxford University and holds a PhD in molecular biology from Cambridge University. He also has an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and is a Registered US Patent Agent.

About Evonetix Ltd:

Evonetix is developing a novel, highly disruptive approach to gene synthesis, the technology which underpins the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology.

The Company was co-founded in late 2015 by Cambridge entrepreneur Hermann Hauser and technology consultants Cambridge Consultants Ltd (CCL). Its executive management team has many years’ experience in the development and delivery of successful biotech ventures.
There are two key components of the Evonetix approach: (i) a highly scalable platform, with up to 10,000 sites for DNA synthesis, at each of which there is independent, exquisite control of the synthesis process; and (ii) the ability to assemble DNA molecules with a very low error rate using a process of error detection throughout assembly. In addition, the approach will permit the synthesis of ‘difficult’ sequences, such as those with a high GC content or with repeats.

The company’s technology is based upon a novel silicon array, manufactured with semiconductor microfabrication techniques and permitting the independent control required at the miniaturised reaction sites. This will allow massive parallelism in the DNA synthesis process and therefore very high throughput. The approach will be suitable for the large-scale projects of synthetic biology.

About synthetic biology:

With the huge increase in DNA sequence information available to mankind over the past ten years, there now exists an unprecedented opportunity to engineer metabolic pathways and organisms, improve industrial processes, create new processes, engineer genomes with new and improved traits and use DNA as a medium for data storage. This opportunity, known as synthetic biology, will grow rapidly over the coming years, reaching $40 billion in value in the early 2020s.

However, only a highly disruptive technology is likely to achieve the significant improvements in DNA synthesis required to enable and facilitate these opportunities. Evonetix believes that, by providing high-fidelity DNA at scale, without the need for post-synthesis error correction, it will be well placed to capture a significant part of the growing multi-billion dollar synthetic biology opportunity.