{"id":34978,"date":"2018-10-31T16:10:37","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T20:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sciencebusiness.technewslit.com\/?p=34978"},"modified":"2018-11-01T13:11:19","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T17:11:19","slug":"synthetic-dna-company-raising-70-million-in-ipo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/technewslit.com\/sciencebusiness\/?p=34978","title":{"rendered":"Synthetic DNA Company Raising $70 Million in IPO"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"NASDAQ<\/a>
(Julien Gong Min, Flickr)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

31 October 2018. A 5 year-old enterprise developing synthetic DNA for medical and agricultural chemicals, as well as data storage, is raising $70 million in its initial public stock offering. Twist Bioscience<\/a> in San Francisco issued 5 million shares of common stock at $14.00 a share on the Nasdaq exchange, where the company trades under the symbol TWST.<\/p>\n

Twist Bioscience develops synthetic genetic materials<\/a>\u00a0on a silicon platform, patterned after semiconductors, instead of traditional plastic plates and receptacles. This process, says the company, overcomes conventional limitations and inefficiencies to design and construct genes,\u00a0oligonucleotide<\/a>\u00a0collections for Crispr genome-editing RNA, and libraries of genetic variations. Twist says its process based on semiconductors<\/a> makes it possible to reduce the chemical reaction volumes required, but at the same time increase production throughput by a factor of 1,000. As a result, says the company, it can produce 9,600 genes on a single chip, while traditional plastic lab plates produce a single gene in the same space.<\/p>\n

Twist\u2019s customers include companies developing pharmaceuticals, sustainable chemicals, agricultural products, and medical diagnostics. An emerging application for synthetic DNA is data storage, to meet a growing need to store digital data<\/a>, while options for this task are rapidly depleting. In December 2017, Twist Bioscience cited a study by EMC Corporation indicating by the year 2020 we’ll be able to store only 15 percent of our digital data, down from about one-third in 2013.<\/p>\n

The company designs its digital DNA storage product for archival purposes<\/a>, rather than for immediate or short-term retrieval. DNA takes advantage of a chemistry made up of 4 basic nucleotides, referred to as A, C, G and T, instead of binary electronic states represented as 1 and 0. In addition, the cost of genomics processing is falling rapidly, with sequencing of a whole human genome, made up of 3 billion base pairs, now costing less than $1,000. DNA data storage, says the company, is also compact, requires low energy, allows for encryption, and is as permanent a storage medium as nature itself.<\/p>\n

In December 2017, Twist announced a deal to provide Microsoft Corp.<\/a> with 10 million long oligonucleotides to encode digital data on DNA. Twist’s latest financing in April raised $50 million<\/a> for its work in data storage and drug discovery, according to Emily Leproust<\/a>, the company’s CEO. And as reported by Science & Enterprise<\/a> in July, a semiconductor industry group and National Science Foundation are supporting a series of projects investigating interactions between biology and circuits for data transfer and storage.<\/p>\n

Investors seemed to balk at Twist’s asking share price of $14.00, with the stock falling today to $12.50 at mid-day, but recovering to $14.00 a share<\/a> by the 4:00 pm ET closing bell. By that time, the entire Nasdaq composite index<\/a> rose by 2 percent since the beginning of the day.<\/p>\n

More from Science & Enterprise:<\/p>\n