Emily Leproust Reflects on 2022 and Looks at the Year Ahead

While 2022 was a year marked by macroeconomic uncertainty and geopolitical instability, it was also a year of growth and progress for Twist and for our customers, who are truly changing the world for the better.

Twist delivered on the central dogma of DNA, RNA and protein, each modality a growing portion of our company. We served over 3 300 customers throughout the year, across multiple areas of our business, delivering more than 558 000 genes to researchers developing new therapeutics, engineering enzymes, developing tests and tracking patient blood samples. We launched Mpox and SARS-CoV-2 controls to support researchers in addressing public health emergencies. And, with the launch of the Twist High Throughput Antibody Production Platform which enables us to turn our customer’s sequences into purified IgG antibodies, we expanded beyond DNA and RNA to proteins.

To support our continued product expansion, we prepared the Factory of the Future outside of Portland, Oregon, and expect to begin shipping products out of this much larger manufacturing site in January 2023. The additional capacity will also allow us to serve organizations making their own DNA by delivering it with an unmatched turnaround time.

We enabled many projects to advance scientific research. As an example, when a customer was looking to make a four-gigabase artificial bacterial genome, we were the only company to take on the project of such an incredible scope. In the process, we gained experience with highly complex genes and created methods to move us closer to the 100% sequence acceptance success rate that we strive to achieve.

In the biopharma industry, drug development for cancer advanced with progress made in several approaches. Industry excitement around checkpoint inhibitors reignited with the FDA approval of relatlimab, an inhibitor targeting LAG-3, in combination with nivolumab, a PD-1 inhibitor. Minimum residual disease (MRD) continued to be important as precision medicine approaches move toward one day becoming standard of care. In cell therapy, the first bispecific T-cell receptor (TCR) therapy received FDA approval. It’s also the only immunotherapy approved for solid tumors, an area that has been extremely difficult to treat. These approvals and advancements show what next-generation therapies and precision medicine approaches could mean for both patients and the industry.

At Twist, we entered into an exclusive out-licensing option agreement with Astellas for a checkpoint inhibitor, our first out-licensing agreement for a Twist-discovered antibody. In 2023, we will further enhance our antibody discovery capabilities by offering an integrated portfolio of in vivo and in vitro approaches. To enable precision medicine approaches, we launched the Twist MRD Rapid 500 panel, which is customizable and priced at $50 per sample, reducing the cost barrier and enabling more researchers to pursue this essential tool. In addition, our suite of offerings can support cell therapy drug discovery. Researchers can use next-generation sequencing (NGS) to sequence a patient’s tumor and identify targets relevant to that patient’s specific form of cancer. We can then create custom libraries of antibodies, genes, CARs, etc. to find the best candidates to treat a patient’s specific form of cancer.

We continued to lay the groundwork in DNA Data storage ahead of the early access launch of our Century Archive solution in 2023. The DNA Data Storage Alliance, formed by Twist, Illumina, Microsoft and Western Digital, joined SNIA, a global authority on storage leadership and standards, as a Technology Affiliate. This will allow the Alliance to begin technical work to create an interoperable DNA data storage ecosystem by developing industry standards and best practices to ensure that customers receive the best solutions. These standards will be essential as we rise to meet demand as the need for data storage grows. We sponsored a whitepaper with Fujifilm that found that in 2021 demand for data storage grew by 48,3%. If demand grows at a rate of 45%, by 2023 the zone of potential insufficiency (the point where the predicted supply of storage cannot meet the demand for storage) could exceed 25 million petabytes (a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes).

This past year we made public our commitment to upstanding environmental, social, and governance practices with the issuance of our inaugural ESG report. We committed to continuing to grow our diverse workforce and to drive innovation by building a team of people with different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. As ESG gains more attention from the industry and regulators, we work to set an industry standard and work to put processes into place that align with anticipated future requirements.

In addition to growing our offering and team, we also expanded globally. We entered into our first Biopharma partnership with a South Korea-based company and partnered with the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology (CoESB) to accelerate synthetic biology research in Australia. We continued our national and international efforts to maintain the highest standards of biosecurity, not only at Twist but throughout the industry, by engaging with governments at home and abroad.

This past year our Twisters continued to perform for our customers, and we ended the year reporting record revenue in a tough macroeconomic environment. I am proud of the team we’ve built and how much progress we’ve made in the past year. The work we accomplished in 2022 laid the foundation for growth in 2023 and beyond. As I look ahead, I am confident we have put in the work to execute on the next phase of growth for Twist.