Twist Bioscience, a company focused on synthetic DNA, and Ginkgo Bioworks, an organism design company, today announced an unprecedented agreement for the purchase of synthetic DNA. Twist Bioscience will supply Ginkgo Bioworks with a minimum of 100 million base pairs of synthetic DNA over the course of a one-year period — a quantity equal to ten per cent of the total DNA synthesis market in 2015. Ginkgo Bioworks will use the synthetic DNA — comprised of gene-length, de novo sequences — to enable rapid prototyping to meet customer needs in industries from fragrance and flavors to cosmetics, nutrition, and health. The DNA provided by Twist is the raw material for full-capacity production in Ginkgo’s foundry, Bioworks1, and will enable the projected expansion of Bioworks2 in 2016.
“More and more companies are reaching out to Ginkgo to develop their biotech strategy for product development and manufacturing. The ability to access this quantity and quality of synthetic DNA at a reasonable cost enables us to meet our customers’ needs for custom organisms built at the full scale of our foundry,” said Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. “After participating in Twist’s alpha manufacturing program, we are very excited to receive synthetic DNA on this unprecedented scale, representing a significant and growing share of the global DNA synthesis market.”
“This agreement with Ginkgo Bioworks marks a significant milestone for Twist Bioscience and sets the stage for continued growth as we head into our beta launch of our silicon-based DNA synthesis platform in early 2016,” said Emily Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience. “Biological research and development is a time-intensive, sequence- and gene-specific effort that has been constrained by relatively limited DNA. Our ability to synthesize and supply DNA on an increasingly large scale expands the opportunity to design in biological code across multiple industries, which we believe, coupled with Ginkgo’s novel foundry Bioworks1, will drive innovation and experimentation throughout the synthetic biology marketplace.”