SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--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 the availability of new product solutions for its Twist Human Core Exome Kit and Twist Custom Panels next-generation sequencing (NGS) target enrichment workflows, allowing customers to move from sample to sequencer in a single day. Twist will showcase these new features at the 2019 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting from February 28, 2019 to March 2, 2019 in Florida. During the meeting, several customers will demonstrate their use of Twist’s NGS library preparation and target enrichment solutions for a wide variety of applications.
“Our customers consistently dive deep to explore genetic variability and uncover disease-causing mutations, elucidating biology and studying pathways involved in disease,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. “Our NGS products provide uniform amplification and coverage of target sequences, lowering the overall sequencing costs as confirmed by many customers. By continuously innovating our product line to meet evolving research needs, we believe our products can enable the full range of healthcare applications, from surveillance to identification to monitoring.”
New Products for Twist Human Core Exome Kit and Twist Custom Panels
Twist’s enhanced NGS target enrichment product line, available to Early Access customers, can offer dramatic time savings by accelerating hybridization to as little as 15 minutes, is designed to seamlessly integrate into any automation workflow and is compatible with Covaris fragmentation for FFPE and other highly-degraded samples. In addition, Twist’s quality management systems governing the design and manufacture of its NGS Target Enrichment Panels received ISO 9001:2015 and 13485:2016 certification, allowing Twist to support customers in more regulated markets that require this certification.
New products include Twist Fast Hybridization and Wash Kit, Twist Universal Blockers to allow flexible blocking and improved on-target capture; the Twist Universal Adapter System, to maximize performance for library preparation; and, the Twist Mechanical Fragmentation Library Prep Kit for highly-degraded samples.
Presentations at AGBT
On Friday, March 1, 2019, in addition to a keynote from Dr. Leproust, customers from several institutions will demonstrate the power of using the Twist NGS Target Enrichment Solutions to identify neurological and inherited diseases, quickly scale direct-to-consumer DNA testing, and the development of liquid (blood) biopsies.
- Brendan Blumenstiel of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard will give a presentation titled ‘Leveraging custom deep targeted sequencing for low allele fraction variant detection in cfDNA and challenging sample types’
- Renata Pellegrino, Ph.D. of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia will provide insight on ‘High-efficiency neurological panel design using Twist Bioscience double-stranded custom target enrichment probes and capture optimization for aged dry blood spot samples’
- William Lee, Ph.D. of Helix will give a talk on ‘Design and optimization of an enhanced medical exome’
- Pertteli Salmenperä, Ph.D. of Blueprint Genetics will detail ‘Evaluation of a custom inherited diseases panel for clinical sequencing’
For more information, or to attend the session, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/twist-bioscience-at-agbt-2019-tickets-55610359081. Posters will be available on the Twist website here.
Poster Presentations
Also on March 1, 2019, researchers from Twist will present two posters:
- Data-Driven Improvements in NGS Target Enrichment Performance [Abstract #512]
- Development of a High-Throughput Target Enrichment System [Abstract #816]
About the Twist NGS Target Enrichment Solutions
Applying its proprietary silicon-based DNA synthesis platform, Twist Bioscience manufactures double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) that is then incorporated into sample preparation products for customers performing next-generation sequencing experiments and analysis. Because Twist is able to apply its custom oligonucleotide pools to precisely target, extract, and uniformly amplify the target DNA segments, its NGS target enrichment solutions considerably improve the accuracy of the downstream sequencing analysis. This enables customers to perform fewer sequencing runs per sample, without sacrificing accuracy, saving them time and money. The Twist Human Core Exome Kit includes all the tools needed for library construction, target capture and enrichment to prepare a sample for sequencing. This product suite is designed to provide exceptional performance, maximum capture efficiency and the flexibility to customize kit configuration. Twist Bioscience believes it is the only company to offer double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) probes within a comprehensive target enrichment kit used for exome and targeted sequencing. Using dsDNA as opposed to single-stranded DNA captures all specified sequences uniformly and avoids the problem of deamination (removal of an amino group). Deamination interferes with the accurate detection of gene mutations, and may hinder genetic results and clinical diagnoses, particularly in cancer and ancient samples. For more information please visit: https://www.twistbioscience.com/products/ngs.
The Human Core Exome Complete Kit is indicated for Research Use Only.
About Twist Bioscience Corporation
Twist Bioscience is a leading and rapidly growing synthetic biology company that has developed a disruptive DNA synthesis platform to industrialize the engineering of biology. The core of the platform is a proprietary technology that pioneers a new method of manufacturing synthetic DNA by “writing” DNA on a silicon chip. Twist is leveraging its unique technology to manufacture a broad range of synthetic DNA-based products, including synthetic genes, tools for next-generation sequencing (NGS) preparation, and antibody libraries for drug discovery and development. Twist is also pursuing longer-term opportunities in digital data storage in DNA and biologics drug discovery. Twist make products for use across many industries including healthcare, industrial chemicals, agriculture and academic research.
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Legal Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained herein are forward-looking statements reflecting the current beliefs and expectations of management made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including, but not limited to, Twist Bioscience’s enhanced NGS product solutions and related dramatic time savings. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors that may cause Twist Bioscience’s actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, among others, the risks and uncertainties of the ability to attract new customers and retain and grow sales from existing customers; risks and uncertainties of rapidly changing technologies and extensive competition in synthetic biology could make the products Twist Bioscience is developing obsolete or non-competitive; uncertainties of the retention of a significant customer; risks of third party claims alleging infringement of patents and proprietary rights or seeking to invalidate Twist Bioscience’s patents or proprietary rights; and the risk that Twist Bioscience’s proprietary rights may be insufficient to protect its technologies. For a further description of the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those expressed in these forward-looking statements, as well as risks relating to Twist Bioscience’s business in general, see Twist Bioscience’s risk factors set forth in Twist Bioscience’s Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on December 20, 2018 and Twist Bioscience’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2018 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 11, 2019. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date hereof, and Twist Bioscience specifically disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
