Benzinga | Jan 10, 2022 08:05AM EST

Twist Bioscience's Comprehensive DNA Synthesis Capabilities Expanded As Industry-Leading Enzymatic Synthesis Process Unveiled At Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ:TWST), a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, today announced that it has developed an innovative, low cost, scarless and scalable enzymatic DNA synthesis process. With these comprehensive capabilities in synthesis, Twist offers multiple approaches to serve the growing number of markets leveraging synthetic DNA. Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience, will unveil the advancement during her presentation at the 40th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

Twist Enzymatic DNA Synthesis 3.0

Scientists at Twist have worked for the past 18 months to develop a novel approach to synthesize strands of DNA enzymatically. By leveraging Twist's unique gene and variant library synthesis and screening capabilities, Twist developed novel enzyme/nucleotide conjugates that drastically reduce the quantity of nucleotide triphosphate (NTP) used by traditional enzymatic approaches, which significantly reduces the cost and offers a much more sustainable method of synthesis. In addition, the linkage between the enzyme and the nucleotide developed by Twist maintains the integrity of the DNA, with no 'scars' on the nucleobase from linker molecules. This allows the resulting enzymatically created synthetic DNA strand to be used interchangeably with naturally occurring DNA.

"Our culture of innovation and execution has once again delivered a breakthrough in DNA synthesis, this time using enzymes. Overcoming a significant drawback of existing enzymatic approaches, we have been able to create low cost synthetic DNA using enzymes which also circumvent the issue of scarring, so that the DNA synthesized using our process is identical to natural DNA," said Dr. Leproust.

"Today, we use phosphoramidite chemistry in our robust commercial infrastructure to deliver billions of bases in DNA and RNA products to serve almost 3,000 customers in fiscal 2021 alone. We will continue to use this proven chemistry as we optimize our enzymatic capabilities. We see enzymatic synthesis playing a critical role in applications like DNA data storage, primers and probes for PCR, cell-free production of plasmid DNA, qPCR assays, decentralized DNA synthesis, and look forward to expanding our markets by offering these applications either directly through our channel or as OEM to our customers in the future," she continued.