Camena Bioscience

About Camena Bioscience

Camena Bioscience is a synthetic biology company, founded in 2016 by CEO Steve Harvey, PhD, and CSO Derek Stemple, PhD, that is addressing the challenges of accuracy and speed in DNA synthesis. Based in Cambridge, UK, the company originated from ideas developed in both Cambridge and Pasadena, California. Harvey is a genomics research leader, and Stemple is a molecular biologist who previously co-founded TwistDX, which was acquired by Alere (now part of Abbott) in 2010.

The company's core technology is gSynth®, a multi-enzymatic platform for the de novo synthesis and assembly of DNA. This technology was developed to overcome the limitations of traditional phosphoramidite synthesis methods, which have been in use since the 1980s and struggle with cost, time, and accuracy, especially for long or complex gene sequences. The gSynth® platform offers significantly higher accuracy, achieving 90% accuracy for 300 base pair sequences, compared to around 30% for phosphoramidite methods. It is particularly effective for synthesizing challenging sequences, such as those with high GC content or repetitive regions. Camena's enzymatic approach is also a more sustainable, or "green," technology, as it avoids the use of large quantities of hazardous solvents required by chemical synthesis.

Camena Bioscience serves the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, providing synthetic genes that are crucial for research into disease mechanisms and drug discovery. The business model involves commercial agreements with major consumers of synthetic genes, and the company has already secured a multi-million-pound revenue stream. By providing rapid and accurate access to complex DNA sequences, Camena helps accelerate discovery pipelines for its clients. The company has received notable funding, including a $10 million Series A round in July 2023 led by Mercia. In August 2025, Camena joined a collaborative research initiative led by the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology to develop synthetic chloroplast genomes, a project backed by £9.1m in funding from ARIA, the UK's Advanced Research + Invention Agency. This project aims to unlock applications in crop performance optimization and the development of plants as biofactories.