Geneart AG was founded in 1999 as a spin-off of the University of Regensburg by Ralf Wagner, Marcus Graf and Hans Wolf. For the development of vaccines, Wagner needed special genes that could not be obtained on the open market and therefore had to be produced in-house. The synthesized genes provided good test results, and the scientists recognized the potential benefits of synthetic genes for research and industry. They founded the company with the goal of producing artificial genes in large volumes at low prices, making them available to all scientists worldwide. In April 2010, Geneart was acquired by the U.S. group Life Technologies for about 56 million euros. Since February 4, 2014, Life Technologies has been part of Thermo Fisher Scientific and has been operating under the name Thermo Fisher Scientific GENEART GmbH since August 10, 2015.