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 percent 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.”