Start-Up Profile: Imagene, French Company Moving to DNA Storage

For sure, DNA storage, evaluated since several years, could be a big technology, but, up to know, nothing appears on the market.

What is it?

It’s the process of encoding and decoding binary data to and from synthesized strands of DNA.

“While DNA as a storage medium has enormous potential because of its high storage density, its practical use is currently severely limited because of its high cost and very slow read and write times,” according to Wikipedia.

One of the earliest uses of DNA storage occurred in a 1988 collaboration between artist Joe Davis and researchers from Harvard.

Born in 1998, French start-up Imagene SA is based in Pessac, France, near Bordeaux, with a platform in Evry, France.

Main executives are:

• Sophie Tuffet, GM, and

• David Georges de Souza

Its patented DNAshell is the new hard drive enclosure for DNA storage industry. It’s a tiny little capsule of 0.7mL and 1.3g, which is laser-sealed (for absolute and long-term air tightness) under inert atmosphere to keep DNA safe from air, humidity and other contaminants. The technology allows a robust and energy-free standalone preservation of dehydrated DNA at room temperature.

So far, Imagene’s technology has been used for biobanking applications at healthcare institutions and museums, and for quality control and reference material distribution in the molecular diagnostic industry.

Now, with a DNA storage capacity of half a gram down to picograms, DNAshells can store exabytes of data with sufficient redundancy. Which makes Imagene a DNA HDD manufacturer, for very large capacity DNA drives.

Also, with a standard-sized DNA fragment calculated half-life of 50,000 years when stored at 25°C in a DNAshell, data can be preserved for millennia. Creating a new standard for the storage hardware industry, that comes with a high level of protection and stability associated to a zero-energy footprint.

The DNA storage project was announced recently by UNICEF Norway, and globally later in the US by UNICEF Global. UNICEF has asked EMBL-EBI to encode the Children Rights Convention text into a DNA sequence, DNA was synthesized by Twist Bioscience, and DNA was encapsulated by Imagene.

But French firm is facing hard financial times, even if it hopes to solve the issue.

Last June, it was put into receivership.

It has initiated conversations with investors since then but the company has few contacts in the storage industry as its initial biobanking business model has partially failed. But is expected to reveal investments next January from IT related investors. For this kind of business, Imagene needs a lot of money to succeed.

There are also 6 known companies at least in DNA for storage: Catalog, Iridia (formerly Dodo Omnidata), Evonetix, Gibson Assembly and Molecular Assemblies (getting $12.2 million investment last October), Twist Bioscience (in partnership With Imagene), and Microsoft having files patents on the subject as well as many other companies.

Read also:
Twist Bioscience in Partnership With Imagene
To enhance DNA storage capabilities
August 2, 2019 | Press Release