Five Principles We Use When Designing a Chassis for a Partner Program
Practical principles that guide our chassis engineering choices — from genome reduction strategy to characterization benchmarks.
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Synthetic Biology Infrastructure
Engineering the cells that build tomorrow's biology
Chassiscell develops genome-reduced, functionally characterized microbial and mammalian chassis for synthetic biology partner programs — so your team can introduce a new pathway into a host that won't fight it.
The Platform
A chassis is not a product — it is infrastructure
In synthetic biology, the chassis is the cellular background your new pathway inherits. Most programs start with a standard laboratory strain — and then spend the first six months fighting native regulatory networks, competing metabolic drains, and plasmid burden that grows with each element you add.
Chassiscell builds minimal, well-characterized cell backgrounds designed for this job: non-essential genomic regions deleted to reduce metabolic competition, stress-response systems profiled under production-relevant conditions, and genetic architectures validated for compatibility with common synthetic biology tooling including MoClo- and Golden Gate-assembled part libraries.
We characterize what we deliver. Growth curves, flux data, and proteomics benchmarks ship with every chassis — structured data your team can act on, not a vial and a sequence file.
Who We Work With
Built for collaboration
Pharmaceutical R&D
Biosynthesis programs for complex natural products, terpenoids, polyketides, or non-ribosomal peptides — where metabolic flux control and precursor availability determine whether the pathway performs.
Biotech Engineering Teams
Therapeutic protein or antibody expression programs requiring mammalian or yeast chassis with characterized N-glycosylation profiles, disulfide bond capacity, and stable expression under scalable conditions.
Industrial Biology
Specialty chemical, biopolymer, and bio-based material programs that need microbial hosts tolerant to product accumulation, osmotic stress, and fed-batch process conditions.
The Team
Scientists building what they know
Rebecca Hartmann
CEO & Co-Founder
Marcus Tran
Co-Founder & Head of Chassis Engineering
Sofia Bellini
Co-Founder & Head of Characterization
Science Updates
From the lab
Building at the Intersection: Boston's Biotech Corridor and Early-Stage Synbio
Why Boston's concentration of pharma, academic, and early-stage biotech makes it the right place to build a chassis platform company.
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Why Synthetic Biology Needs a Better Partnership Model
The case for dedicated chassis partnerships versus each team building from scratch — and what a structured engagement looks like.
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Get Involved
Ready to explore a collaboration?
We're currently characterizing strains with our founding partner cohort. If your program needs a chassis built for your pathway — not a strain you borrowed from a plate inventory — this is the right time to reach out.
Discuss Partnership