Origins of 4basebio
In 2008, X-Pol SLU was founded with a focus on the development of technologies for the DNA amplification and sequencing market. Since those early days, the Madrid based team has continued to build on its unique expertise in this field, which is now being applied in the development of synthetic DNA.
The company has since changed its name to 4basebio SLU and holds much of the intellectual property which underpins the DNA products now being developed and sold by the 4basebio PLC group of companies. 4basebio SLU continues to work on platform development and is part of the group.
The origins of X-Pol SLU, and so 4basebio PLC, rest with Professor Luis Blanco, a prestigious researcher in the study of DNA polymerases, having discovered and characterized new and important DNA polymerases. He has led several national and international projects in the field of polymerases and is the author of more than 100 articles published in high impact international peer-reviewed journals.
Luis received his PhD from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1985, where he also became professor, then moving to the Spanish Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas – CSIC) where he did much of his research along the last 35 years.
During his PhD studies at Margarita Salas lab, Luis discovered and characterized the unique properties of bacteriophage Phi29 DNA polymerase, an enzyme that has transformed the DNA amplification and sequencing world. Later on, Luis identified and characterized two novel eukaryotic DNA polymerases (DNA polymerase lambda and DNA polymerase mu), with roles in different DNA repair mechanisms. Subsequently, in 2013 he discovered another novel human polymerase, PrimPol, responsible for re-starting stalled replication forks by priming beyond DNA lesions by means of its unique ability to synthesize DNA primers.
Luis was a co-founder of X-Pol which created and developed a unique primer-free DNA amplification method, TruePrime©.
TruePrime© uses the combination of two proprietary enzymes, to couple continuous enzymatic priming to faithful and processive strand-displacement elongation, thus enabling isothermal amplification of the DNA strands. This enables 4basebio to cost effectively produce large quantities of high-quality DNA.
TruePrime© is suitable for small and large constructs (0.1 – 20kb), with no sequence context bias or primer artefacts and can work on any DNA starting material.
TruePrime© has been a key technology in the development of 4basebio’s synthetic DNA, alongside the significant further development undertaken in both Madrid and Cambridge on scaling production to commercial levels. Luis however remains closely associated with 4basebio and continues to contribute to its development agenda.
