Career Chat: A Synthetic Biologist-Turned-Startup Founder Leads the Company’s Scientific Vision

When Daniel Lin-Arlow, today the chief scientific officer (CSO) for the DNA synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, was in college, DNA wasn’t at the top of his list of interests. He was a self-described computer nerd as an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002. But that changed when he took a biology course with Eric Lander, a geneticist and mathematician at MIT at the time, who made him see biology in a new light: as a logical string of concepts to make hypotheses. At the time, the introduction of DNA sequencing and microarrays was causing an influx of data that was drawing computer scientists into biology. So, Lin-Arlow joined Lander’s lab to apply his computer skills to these budding research topics, where he built software tools to help scientists study gene regulation. Here, he caught the “tool builder bug” that would eventually lead to founding and running his own biotech company.

How did you start Ansa Biotechnologies?

After undergraduate school, I worked as a computational biologist building molecular simulation tools for the biotechnology company D.E. Shaw Research. After five years, I decided that I wanted to get back into generating data, so I went to graduate school in 2012 to study synthetic biology under Jay Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley. I thought I would continue research in metabolic engineering and then use this to make some chemicals that would be useful to scientists. But I realized that while sequencing techniques had made a huge leap, DNA writing capacity was largely the same as it had been a decade earlier. I also heard so many colleagues complain about challenges in DNA cloning using these traditional methods, and I thought this was an area that could be improved and I could really make an impact on.

Around 2015 Sebastian Palluk joined the Keasling lab as a graduate student with an interest in DNA synthesis. He had previously used an enzyme, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT), in this process. Combining his expertise with my experience in linking molecules to their targets to facilitate reactions, we developed a new idea for DNA synthesis where we tethered a nucleotide to TdT to create an oligonucleotide without a template strand.¹

This concept for enzymatic DNA synthesis became the seed for Ansa Biotechnologies. We were lucky that around that time in 2018, interest rates were good for startup businesses, and we received some angel investment to get started. At first, we focused on synthesizing gene fragments that were too difficult for other companies using traditional approaches to make, like those with repeated regions or high areas of GC content. We’ve expanded since then and have our sights on full plasmid constructs.

Why did you choose to transition from the chief executive officer to CSO?

I started running the company as the chief executive office and cofounder, so I had to learn how to run a company and raise money all at the same time. As the company grew, I had new things to learn, so it was a very dynamic role. It was exciting and a lot of fun, but also a tremendous amount of responsibility, especially as I navigated the company through a downturn in the market a few years ago. Eventually, I realized that it was time to bring someone on who had more commercial experience to lead the company as we continue to expand. I was lucky to find Jason Gammack, who had experience in life science tools and also commercial startups, to take on leading the company which allowed me to move into the CSO role.

What are your responsibilities as the CSO?

I set the vision for our platform and keep an eye on what researchers are doing in the lab, what they are looking for, and how we can provide improvements to their work. I really enjoy that part since I’m a lot more connected to the science rather than the administrative aspects of the company now. I do still work on grants and setting up partnerships, and I also jump in wherever else we need some extra help because I want to see the company succeed. It’s really exciting also to hear from customers about how our service has helped their research. For instance, at the SynBioBeta conference this year, I have heard stories from scientists talking about how our technology saved their project and how their work depends on the DNA that we provide. It’s really inspiring and feels like a full-circle moment.

What advice do you have for trainees interested in this career path?

Founding a company and leading it is an emotional marathon. There are a lot of big responsibilities with several relationships that you need to balance. So I really recommend getting set up with a therapist or another sort of life coach to help take care of yourself during those challenging times.

Running a company also takes a bit of intuition about the product that you are putting out. You can’t just follow market signals; you need to talk to the customers and take their feedback. You also have to make peace with the idea of not fully knowing what you are doing and being wrong. But you have to balance all of that with the vision that you have for the product.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.