2024: A Year Dedicated To Science’s Most Valuable Commodity

I’m often asked why I picked synthetic DNA for my career and, to be honest, sometimes we make decisions in our 20s that impact our lifelong career trajectory. I made a decision to pursue DNA synthesis as I wanted to think, analyze and push past boundaries to unearth truths about this world—and, a decade later, this passion drove me to launch Twist, a company whose products truly enable world changing research.

This is what drives all of us at Twist. We innovate and introduce new products to meet our evolving customer needs and we’ve spent more than a decade helping researchers do what they love by building out an expansive synthetic toolbox that includes DNA, RNA and proteins.

Time saved on a micro scale can massively accelerate project timelines.

Synthetic DNA is a cornerstone material in modern science. With the ability to synthesize DNA sequences at will, researchers may engineer nitrogen-fixing bacteria to improve crop yields while reducing our reliance on fertilizers and the fossil fuels that create them. Synthetic oligonucleotides are foundational to the development of CRISPR, prime-, and base editing technologies, which are collectively enabling a new wave of transformative cell and gene therapies. With small, custom strands of synthetic DNA, researchers ensnare wayward bits of tumor cell DNA, enabling targeted sequencing of the cancer genome from just a drop of blood. The ways in which synthetic DNA is changing the world seem endless.

Of course, creating a world where synthetic DNA can drive such breakthroughs requires both innovation and access, and that's where Twist continues to push the boundaries of what's possible for our customers. We celebrated our eleventh anniversary this year and continue our commitment to driving transformation—not just for Twist, but for the researchers who rely on us.

Few things can be more transformative than the gift of time. Which is why in January of this year we expanded our Express portfolio by offering sequence-perfect clonal genes up to 5kb in length with as little as a five day turnaround time. Now instead of spending weeks at the bench cloning, or worse—waiting for product delivery—researchers can just order the genes they need and begin using them the following week. Gaining the speed and accuracy of Twist’s Express Genes can have a domino effect for researchers. Time saved on a micro, day-to-day scale, can lead to a massive acceleration of project timelines. And for scientists that need more mass, high throughput IgG proteins or antibody characterization, we continue to offer more and more services to meet those needs.

After continuously hearing from our community that the scale and speed of next generation screening projects were limited by the short length of synthetic oligos that is typical for the industry, we introduced 300mer oligo pools as a game changing product. But, researchers still need longer! In seeing this, we launched multiplex gene fragments (MGF) this year. I cannot overemphasize the impact of MGF’s for the research community.

For the first time, entire antibody CDR sequences can be synthesized

MGFs are pools of customizable double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) between 301-500 base pairs in length which have no apparent limit to scaling. Not only does this provide remarkable accuracy for gene fragments of this length, but MGFs enable the direct synthesis of complex genes that may otherwise be inaccessible for laboratories to produce. This means that, for the first time, researchers can order the synthesis of entire antibody CDR sequences and they can get them as a multiplexed pool of variants in as little as eight business days.

Put simply, MGFs make it so that synthetic DNA is no longer a limiting factor when performing large-scale, complex CRISPR screens or when optimizing antibody variants (among many other applications). At a time when AI and machine learning can identify and design promising sequences at an unprecedented pace, MGFs empower researchers to act on that data with ease and expedience.

This intertwining of scale and time savings enables researchers to expand the impact of their research and gives them the chance to accelerate their studies by asking more questions—and potentially gaining more answers—from each project. We leaned into this theme with the launch of our advanced library preparation kit earlier this year, known as Twist FlexPrep^TM. This product is built to reduce the pains of large-scale, pooled library preparation by automatically normalizing sample input. Among its many applications, this can help researchers carry out large population genomics studies (in human or livestock populations) with greater time and resource efficiency.

These are just a few of the highlights from a banner year at Twist, one that saw our first Twist-discovered antibody candidate enter clinical trials, the AAALAC certification of our new laboratory in Quincy Massachusetts, and our recently minted collaboration with Absci to design a novel therapeutic using generative AI. I'm immensely proud of all of these projects, but I'm also proud that Twist continues to do this work responsibly.

Biosecurity has always been a priority at Twist, and this year is no different. Growing access to both affordable synthetic DNA and AI has led to concerns that bad actors may manufacture de novo pathogens using these tools. With some of the world’s leading experts on our team, Twist has been active in raising the bar for biosecurity protocols to prevent such a scenario, and we have been working with local and federal governments to encourage the adoption of responsible regulations around DNA synthesis technology. We believe that innovation and security must grow hand-in-hand to shape a safer, more sustainable future.

I’m excited to say that we’re entering 2025 with strong momentum as this year’s new products are increasingly adopted for a wide range of projects (including by the Nobel prize winning Baker lab, who recently used Twist MGF to design and test single-domain antibodies). In this new year, we will continue to expand the synthetic DNA toolkit, from the synthesis of short genes to the manufacture of bispecific biologics. We do all of this with the goal of empowering researchers, not just by giving them tools to overcome technical barriers, but with tools that grant them free time and allow them to do what they love doing!