It is clear that synthetic biology has the potential to impact many aspects of drug discovery, but the scale of the impact will depend on the further development of its underlying technologies. These include DNA synthesis, powerful bioinformatics, suitable chassis organisms and the ability to build/engineer pathways and organisms in a predictable fashion. In the same way that DNA sequencing underwent a revolution in the mid-2000s resulting in massive parallelisation and reduction in cost, a comparable breakthrough in DNA synthesis would catalyse many opportunities in this area, especially for optimising the drug discovery process.