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What is Asimov Labs - Launch | Asimov

2 years ago
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Today, we announced that the MIT-Broad Foundry team has joined Asimov and set up shop in our main office. This move happened a while ago, but we held off on announcing it until now. We are also retiring the name “Foundry” and switching over to Asimov Labs. The rebrand is inspired by the pioneering work of historic teams at Bell Labs, HP Labs, and Xerox PARC, for reasons that we hope will become clear in this blog. ‍



The MIT-Broad Foundry formed in 2012. Over the next decade, its team designed and engineered pathways and living cells to make over 1,200 different molecules and materials, as well as hundreds of genetic devices, such as circuits and sensors. The Foundry was designed to take on wildly different challenges under tight time constraints, like making ten different molecules in 90 days without knowing them ahead of time.



By retiring the Foundry name and shifting over to Asimov Labs, we are reimagining how high-throughput experiments can drive biological progress. Our goal with Asimov Labs is not to use robots to screen thousands of strains, but rather to solve genetic design. We want to reduce the implementation risk in engineering a biological system — a bacterium, mammalian cell, or anything else — to zero.



We think of genetic design as applying biophysical insight to compose and layer genetically-encoded functions to achieve a cellular behavior. It means working backwards from, say, synthetic photosynthesis or the eradication of a cancerous cell in the body to a DNA sequence that encodes all the biochemistry to make it happen. We’re currently able to design systems with 10-100 discrete genetic functions in mammalian cells; but not with zero implementation risk. Design tools and models help, but there is still a lot of trial and error that we are trying to minimize. Our goal is to engineer increasingly complex behaviors until, ultimately, we can design entire genomes. ‍



This is our moonshot. It may sound outlandish, but our ability to design large and complex circuits using computer-based models has improved massively in the last decade. And now, Asimov Labs will help us move even faster.


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hello@asimov.com

+1 (617) 539-8659

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