Sestina Bio Launches Engineering Biology to Create Revolutionary Products

Sestina Bio, a new company creating a platform for automated synthetic biology, today announced that it has launched with seed funding from Foresite Capital, General Inception and OMX Ventures. The funds will be used to further the development of its digital cellular engineering and phenotyping platforms and support initial product development. The firm is the first company to launch from incubator Foresite Labs. Practitioners of synthetic biology aim to engineer novel living organisms -- usually yeast and bacteria -- that produce new materials, fine and bulk chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, or which act as sensors that report on their environment. By combining new instruments for single cell genome editing, tools for single cell phenotyping, and closed-loop, machine learning-driven design and control of experiments, Sestina is developing the next generation of the automated synthetic biology toolkit. Sestina will harness these tools to rapidly and deterministically engineer new biological capabilities and produce novel products across several verticals.