Benzinga | Mar 2, 2021 08:14AM EST

Twist Bioscience, Watchmaker Genomics Report Partnership For New Applications Of High-Throughput Genetic Sequencing

Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ:TWST), a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, and Watchmaker Genomics today announced a broad partnership to enable innovative research across a wide range of high throughput sequencing applications including oncology and tumor profiling, inherited disease detection, liquid biopsy assays, and minimal residual disease monitoring.

In their first product offering together, Twist will leverage Watchmaker's expertise in enzyme engineering by incorporating the company's high-fidelity library amplification master mix into Twist's enzymatic library preparation kit, providing a superior solution that can be accessed from Twist as a single source.

"With our eye squarely on working in service of our customers, this partnership brings together two teams relentlessly focused on innovation and execution to provide superior products," said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. "By pairing superior enzymes with best-in-class DNA, we expect to offer differentiated products that simplify and streamline workflows before putting samples on the sequencer."

"This is the first in what we believe will be a series of joint product development opportunities between Twist and Watchmaker aimed at driving continued improvement in performance and data quality for high-resolution genomic applications including NGS-based cfDNA and ctDNA studies, single-cell work, low allele somatic variant detection and tumor mutation burden," said Trey Foskett, co-founder of Watchmaker. "In addition, we look forward to bringing our protein engineering technologies into the product mix to fuel new avenues of research across many disease areas."