Natural product drug discovery has many advantages, namely chemical novelty and medicinal relevance. However, effectively capturing natural products faces several challenges. Even with advancements in genome engineering, cultivating microbes and executing complex cloning protocols to express biosynthetic genes and their products is prohibitively difficult in many cases and infeasible to scale. The revolution in DNA synthesis, as exemplified by technologies like Twist, has made it possible to approach natural product discovery as a scalable platform by identifying and designing genes computationally, printing them, and expressing them directly in cell-free systems, changing how new medicines and chemistries are discovered.