-- New Purchase of 300 Million Base Pairs Provides Raw Material for Ginkgo’s Biological Prototypes, Signals Market Growth --
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – June 8, 2016 – Twist Bioscience, a company accelerating science and innovation through rapid, high-quality DNA synthesis on silicon, today announced it has expanded its existing relationship with Ginkgo Bioworks, one of its initial Beta access customers, to deliver an additional 300 million base pairs of synthetic DNA. In total, Twist Bioscience will deliver at least 400 million base pairs of synthetic DNA to Ginkgo by the end of 2017.
“We’ve already received millions of bases on-time and on-spec from Twist Bioscience in the first several months of our partnership. We’re excited about how quickly they’re scaling their DNA synthesis technology and infrastructure that we’re already tripling our order for next year,” said Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks. “With the orders announced today, Ginkgo is moving towards fully outsourcing our in vitro DNA construction to the DNA synthesis industry. If your company is still cloning by hand you’re missing out on a big opportunity.”
In November 2015, Ginkgo and Twist Bioscience announced an agreement whereby Twist Bioscience delivers to Ginkgo Bioworks a minimum of 100 million base pairs of synthetic DNA over the course of 2016 — a quantity equal to approximately ten per cent of the total DNA synthesis market in 2015. Ginkgo Bioworks is using the synthetic DNA — comprised of gene-length, de novo sequences — to enable rapid prototyping of organism designs for Ginkgo’s customers in the fragrance & flavor and food industries. Through the expanded agreement, Twist Bioscience will continue to support the rapid growth of Ginkgo Bioworks in 2017.
“We are thrilled to support Ginkgo in their significant growth and unprecedented success both through our current agreement and their escalating demand through 2017,” commented Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience. “As we expand our product offering to include longer genes and a diversified product mix, we look forward to serving Ginkgo’s future growth beyond 2017, where the rapid scalability of our high throughput silicon platform will enable our customers to work with unparalleled quantities of synthetic DNA, driving new applications and innovative scientific developments.”
About Twist Bioscience
At Twist Bioscience, our expertise is accelerating science and innovation by leveraging the power of scale. We have developed a proprietary semiconductor-based synthetic DNA manufacturing process featuring a 10,000-well high throughput silicon platform capable of producing synthetic biology tools, including genes, oligonucleotide pools and variant libraries. By synthesizing DNA on silicon instead of on traditional 96-well plastic plates, our platform overcomes the current inefficiencies of synthetic DNA production, and enables cost-effective, rapid, high-quality and high throughput synthetic gene production, which in turn, expedites the design, build, test cycle to enable personalized medicines, pharmaceuticals, sustainable chemical production, improved agriculture production, diagnostics, biodetection and data storage. For more information, please visit www.twistbioscience.com. Twist Bioscience is on Twitter. Sign up to follow our Twitter feed @TwistBioscience at https://twitter.com/TwistBioscience.
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CONTACTS:
Investor Contact:
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Maeve Conneighton
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maeve@argotpartners.com
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925-202-6211
media@twistbioscience.com
