Eurofins MWG Operon, the genomics division of Eurofins Scientific, said today it will expand its gene synthesis business through its acquisition of service provider Entelechon for an undisclosed price.
Entelechon’s gene synthesis business and its brand were integrated into the Eurofins MWG Operon gene synthesis business unit as of June 1. Entelechon’s customers include pharmaceutical companies as well as academic and public research institutes.
According to Entelechon’s website, almost half of its customers (45%) are based in Germany, followed by 15 other European nations (22%), the U.K. (11%), the U.S. (8%) and the rest of the world (14%).
Markus Fischer, managing director of Entelechon, “will actively contribute to the integration of Entelechon into Eurofins,” Eurofins said in a statement that added he will remain CEO of PolyQuant, an Entelechon spinoff involved in protein expression and quantitative proteomics.
Founded in 1999 in Regensburg, Germany, as one of the first companies to specialize in custom gene synthesis and synthetic biology, Entelechon carried out nearly half (45%) of its projects for medical biotech companies over the past five years, followed by plant biotechs (19%) and academic customers (18%).
In the statement, Fischer said the combined company will continue to offer the GENEius 2.0 software platform, designed to optimize and adapt amino acid or DNA sequences by adopting the codon usage of cloned DNA fragments. Its advantages, according to Eurofins, include avoidance of rare codons of the expressing organism, removal of unwanted motifs or secondary structures like repeat or hairpin structures, and the evening of distribution of G and C bases.
GENEius software was designed and developed for Eurofins by Biolink Informationstechnologie.
“Entelechon is an excellent strategic fit with Eurofins MWG Operon’s genomic service offering, and their competence on gene synthesis services and synthetic biology complements our DNA synthesis and sequencing units in an excellent way, while providing us with additional tools to serve the fast-growing applied genetics markets,” Bruno Poddevin, vp of Eurofins MWG Operon, said in the statement.
