NEW YORK – Molecular Assemblies said Wednesday afternoon that it has terminated "many" of its employees while it is "evaluating the best path forward" for its enzymatic DNA synthesis technology.
"Simply put, we ran out of time," the San Diego-based company said in a statement posted on LinkedIn. "[A]s we began our commercial launch, we encountered an unprecedented and challenging financial funding market for tools companies that has proved insurmountable given our cash runway."
In an email, Larry Stambaugh, Molecular Assemblies' acting CEO and chairman of its board, said the company "is engaged in seeking potential strategic engagements for the technology." He did not mention how many employees are left or whether the company filed for bankruptcy protection. He also noted that the company plans to sell its assets and will provide further information as the process proceeds.
In conjunction with its announcement, Molecular Assemblies created a website for the staff it has let go. The 42 employees include scientists in biochemistry, bioinformatics, molecular biology, and hardware and software engineering, as well as those who worked in manufacturing, finance, sales, and marketing.
The layoffs come two years after the firm raised $25.8 million in a Series B financing round and began offering enzymatic DNA synthesis services using its fully enzymatic synthesis (FES) technology. William Efcavitch, the firm's cofounder and former CSO, told GenomeWeb at the time that FES can yield "longer, purer pieces of synthetic DNA" than existing chemical DNA synthesis methods.
Efcavitch appears to have left the company in September 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In August of this year, Molecular Assemblies announced that it had won $4 million in additional funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) after achieving "key milestones for therapeutic DNA target accuracy and technology automation" under the Nucleic Acids On-Demand Worldwide (NOW) project led by GE HealthCare’s Technology and Innovation Center.