Scientists and entrepreneurs in the new field of synthetic biology have come together to form a company called Codon Devices, which just pulled in a $13 million Series A round financing.

Codon - the term for the combination of three DNA bases that uniquely specify amino acids - represents the company's ability "to do things at the level of the code, at the level of DNA," said its founding CEO, Samir Kaul.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company plans to form commercial relationships within the next six to 12 months for its platform technology, BioFAB, which is expected to accurately synthesize kilobase- to megabase-length genetic code more rapidly and cheaper than the current technology can.

Founding investor Flagship Ventures, also of Cambridge, led the Series A round, which included participation from Alloy Ventures, of Palo Alto, Calif.; Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, of Menlo Park, Calif., and a co-founder Vinod Khosla.

Kaul, who also is a principal at Flagship Ventures, said the company is "one of those rare" opportunities investors sometimes see to get in at "the beginning of a new field."

Kaul said the financing will cover Codon's operations for up to two-and-a-half years. Because synthetic biology is an emerging field, the company does not yet have a clear business model. It might license out its technology to a variety of partners, work with only one partner in particular areas, build its own internal pipeline, or do all three. Either way, the company's technology should address "significant markets," said Noubar Afeyan, Codon's founding chairman and a managing partner at Flagship Ventures. "We'll be able to generate growth just based on the revenue that we can command."

Short-term product opportunities include sets of biological parts for large-scale research projects, engineered cells that produce novel pharmaceuticals, engineered protein biotherapeutics and novel biosensor devices. Down the road, the company's technology could enable the development of improved vaccines, agricultural products and biorefineries for the production of industrial chemicals and energy.

"The way in which we engineer biological systems right now, or optimize proteins, are all techniques that have been derived from nature," Kaul said. "And they are, by and large, the same that Genentech and Amgen used 30 years ago."

Genetic engineering is done by putting individual genes together with additional pieces of DNA in a plasmid, which is then inserted into a bacterial cell to produce products such as insulin or growth hormone. The whole process can be time-consuming, considering researchers currently order oligos that are only 40 or 50 bases long.

"If you wanted to make an instruction that was 10,000 bases long, you need to spend weeks and weeks cutting and pasting different pieces to make a long piece," Afeyan said.

That often leads to errors and slows down the experimental process.

"The problem with errors is it's a little like computer programming," Afeyan said. "Imagine every few words there's a spelling error."

But scientists have believed for years that there might be better, more efficient ways to shuffle the little pieces of genes. With the human genome, they now have a vast set of sequences of DNA, a map of every single gene. They understand the different biological parts, and how they can be put together. Codon's technology offers larger instructions for how to make a cell into another cell.

One of Codon's founding scientists, Jay Keasling, of the University of California at Berkeley, spent more than three years cutting and pasting DNA in his efforts to produce the anti-malarial drug, artemisinin, a naturally occurring compound extracted from wormwood plants. But BioFAB should provide a smoother process for producing such products.

"The whole optimization becomes far more systematic and [precise] than what would have been possible," Afeyan said.

Founded last fall, Codon was the result of a collaboration among several academic researchers, entrepreneurs and start-up investors. The researchers include Keasling, as well as George Church from the Harvard Medical School, and Drew Endy and Joseph Jacobson at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other founders are Kaul, Afeyan and Khosla.

As a result of the first round, Michael Hunkapiller of Alloy Ventures and Joe Lacob of Kleiner Perkins have joined Codon's board.