Twist Bioscience Expands Executive Team with Industry Veterans

— Appoints James Thorburn as Chief Financial Officer –

— Adds Dr. Aaron Sato as Chief Scientific Officer, Pharma —

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.  – June 20, 2018 — Twist Bioscience Corporation, a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA, today announced the appointment of Jim Thorburn as its chief financial officer and Aaron Sato, Ph.D., as chief scientific officer, pharma.

“Jim’s depth and breadth of operational expertise as well as his financial acumen augment our executive team and support our efforts to grow the business within our existing markets, to expand internationally and to invest in our longer-term vertical market opportunities of drug discovery and digital data storage in DNA,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience.

Mr. Thorburn joins Twist Bioscience Corporation as chief financial officer bringing more than 30 years of finance and operating experience in both private and public technology companies to Twist Bioscience. Most recently, he served as chief sales officer of Televerde, a demand generation and sales acceleration enterprise, focused on scaling the business internationally. Prior to Televerde, he served as interim CFO of several public and private companies including Enercore, Next Autoworks, Fisker Automotive and Numonyx (acquired by Micron). As interim CFO of Numonyx, he was responsible for coordination of the merger between ST Microelectronics and the Intel Flash Memory divisions as well as the financing to support the $2B revenue company. Before Numonyx, he served as chairman and CEO of ZiLOG, leading the successful turnaround of the business, as well as a successful public offering and ultimate sale to IXYS. He has served as an operator consultant to Texas Pacific Group (TPG), COO and co-president of ON Semiconductor and led the buyout and IPO of ON. Prior to ON, he held various senior executive financial positions in the business units of National Semiconductor. Mr. Thorburn is a former member of the board of directors for IXYS Corporation. He received his BSc (Hons.) in Agricultural Economics from the University of Glasgow and passed the Chartered Institute Management Accountant exams.

Dr. Sato joins Twist Bioscience Corporation as chief scientific officer, pharma, and vice president, protein engineering, bringing more than 20 years of scientific leadership and antibody discovery expertise. Most recently, he served as chief scientific officer of LakePharma, leading the California Antibody Center, which discovers novel antibody therapeutics for its clients. Prior to LakePharma, Dr. Sato oversaw all discovery research functions both as vice president of protein sciences at Surrozen, and previously, as vice president of research at Sutro Biopharma, Inc. He also served as senior director of antibody engineering at OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, where he was responsible for human antibody lead discovery and he served as project team leader on several key antibody projects through IND filing. Before OncoMed, Dr. Sato held positions of increasing responsibility at Dyax Corp., most recently as senior director of lead discovery, leading antibody, peptide, and small protein discovery using their proprietary phage display technology. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied MHC class II structure-function relationships. He is an author of over 30 peer reviewed papers and 40 issued patents in the antibody space.

Dr. Leproust continued, “Aaron’s extensive experience and proven track record leading successful discovery and development efforts pairs well with our ability to generate novel antibody libraries quickly. We now have the technology and leadership in place to build a robust antibody discovery engine, leveraging our core competency in DNA synthesis. Through our biopharmaceutical subsidiary, we intend to move from supplier to partner, meeting more and more of our customer’s needs as we believe our solutions will optimize antibody discovery and have the potential to reduce the time it takes to move an antibody from concept to the clinic.”

About Twist Bioscience Corporation

At Twist Bioscience Corporation, we work in service of customers who are changing the world for the better. In fields such as health care, agriculture, industrial chemicals, academic research and data storage, by using our synthetic DNA tools, our customers are developing ways to better lives and improve the sustainability of the planet. We believe that the faster our customers succeed, the better for all of us, and we believe Twist Bioscience is uniquely positioned to help accelerate their efforts.

Our innovative silicon-based DNA synthesis platform provides precision at a scale that we believe is otherwise unavailable to our customers. Our platform technologies overcome inefficiencies and enable cost-effective, rapid, precise, high-throughput synthesis and sequencing, providing both the quality and quantity of the tools they need to rapidly realize the opportunity ahead. For more information about our products and services, please visit www.twistbioscience.com. Twist Bioscience is on Twitter. Sign up to follow our Twitter feed @TwistBioscience at https://twitter.com/TwistBioscience.