We're building a fully automated, phage-based platform that compresses protein engineering from years into days. The goal: make continuous, directed evolution a standard tool for labs optimising antibodies, enzymes and other functional proteins.

Over the past year, three ETH biology/biochemistry students have designed and built a fully automated PACE (Phage-Assisted Continuous Evolution) system from scratch: custom lagoons, pumps, sensors and control software, together with a modular plasmid toolkit for assembling the selection circuits. Our main goal is to get continuous, hands-off directed evolution working end to end: first validating it on a standard benchmark, then using it to optimise proteins like antibodies and enzyme.

We first started out as a small fun project working with yeast in the life science lab until we stumbled upon PACE. At that point we thought why not do something with an actual real world application. That is when we started EvoLapse.