Touchlight and New England Biolabs launch EnClose cell-free dbDNA synthesis kit for nucleic acid therapeutic development
Touchlight, in collaboration with New England Biolabs (NEB®), has announced the launch of the EnClose™ Cell-free dbDNA™ Synthesis Kit – a benchtop solution for the rapid enzymatic production of doggybone DNA™ (dbDNA™), Touchlight’s proprietary linear, covalently closed, double-stranded DNA format.
Addressing a persistent manufacturing bottleneck
Conventional plasmid DNA (pDNA) manufacturing relies on bacterial fermentation and cell banking processes that impose substantial time and operational burdens on advanced therapy developers. The EnClose kit is designed to circumvent this by enabling researchers to generate high-purity, closed-ended DNA constructs in a single day, entirely free of bacterial sequences and antibiotic resistance genes – attributes that carry advantages for regulatory alignment and safety profiling.
Ashley Luck, Associate Director of Applications and Development at NEB, described the significance of the approach: “Traditional plasmid DNA manufacturing is a significant bottleneck in Advanced Therapies development, often requiring large-scale fermentation, cell banking, and long lead times that can slow the path to the clinic. This kit enables the rapid screening and production of high-purity DNA templates right at the benchtop, cutting months off the development timeline for mRNA vaccines and gene therapies.”
Workflow and application scope
The kit integrates NEB’s enzymatic expertise with the dbDNA platform, supporting applications including AAV and lentiviral vector production, non-viral gene therapy, mRNA therapeutics, and gene editing systems. Enzymatic synthesis also permits the generation of constructs that are difficult to produce in bacterial expression systems, such as long poly(A) tails and viral inverted terminal repeats.
Broadening access to dbDNA technology
Dr Tommy Duncan, Chief Business Officer at Touchlight, said the collaboration marks a significant step in making the technology accessible at the research stage: “Collaborating with NEB allows us to significantly broaden the accessibility of our technology, putting it directly and easily into the hands of researchers for the first time.
We’ve optimised a workflow that allows scientists to screen constructs and prototype high-throughput designs rapidly, before moving on to larger-scale manufacturing.”
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dbDNA (doggybone DNA) is a linear, double-stranded DNA with covalently-closed ends
