Twist Bioscience to Provide One Billion Base Pairs of Synthetic DNA to Ginkgo Bioworks to Support Expansion into New Industries

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. and BOSTON, Mass. – October 3, 2017 – Ginkgo Bioworks, the organism company, and Twist Bioscience Corporation, a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of rapid, high-quality synthetic DNA, today announced the expansion of a supply agreement for one billion base pairs of synthetic DNA – the largest volume supply agreement in the industry. The supply agreement will include genes up to five kilobases in length.

Ginkgo intends to use the one billion base pairs of synthetic DNA for work in its newest automated foundry for organism design, Bioworks3, opening in November 2017. The third foundry will be used in part by the new company that Ginkgo and Bayer recently launched with $100M in Series A funding focused on nitrogen fixation for sustainable agriculture. This supply of synthetic DNA will also fuel Ginkgo’s continued expansion into new industries for a wider breadth of companies to leverage the power of biology in their lines of business.

“An increasingly diverse scope of companies are looking to tap the power of biology to rethink traditional manufacturing, and demand for synthetic biology is at an all time high,” said Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks. “Our continued partnership with Twist allows us to meet those demands and scale our work so we can continue to bring biology to new industries. We’re excited to be at the forefront of this shift and Twist is a critical part of the equation.”

Twist Bioscience has been supplying synthetic DNA to Ginkgo Bioworks since November of 2015, when the companies announced an agreement for Twist Bioscience to deliver a minimum of 100 million base pairs of synthetic DNA over the course of 2016 — a quantity equal to approximately 10 percent of the total DNA synthesis market in 2015. Ginkgo is the largest consumer of synthetic DNA globally, and with this supply expansion, it is expected to order approximately one third of the global supply of synthetic DNA.

Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience commented, “We are thrilled to enable Ginkgo’s exponential expansion as we are the only provider of synthetic DNA capable of supporting their rapidly increasing DNA needs. Our ongoing collaboration, pairing Ginkgo’s tremendous organism design capabilities and Twist Bioscience’s core DNA synthesis scalability, showcases the growth of the bioeconomy by enabling the development of sustainable methods for producing new and important consumer goods.”

About Ginkgo Bioworks
Headquartered in Boston, Ginkgo Bioworks uses the most advanced technology on the planet – biology – to grow products instead of manufacture them. The company’s technology platform is bringing biotechnology into consumer goods markets, enabling fragrance, cosmetic, nutrition, food companies, and more to make better products. For more information, visit www.ginkgobioworks.com.

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

Our innovative silicon-based DNA Synthesis Platform provides precision at a scale that 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.