Twist Bioscience Corporation (TWST)
NASDAQ: TWST · Real-Time Price · USD
60.94
+2.09 (3.55%)
At close: Apr 24, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT
62.15
+1.21 (1.99%)
After-hours: Apr 24, 2026, 7:46 PM EDT
← View all transcripts

J.P. Morgan 42nd Annual Healthcare Conference 2024

Jan 9, 2024

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Marta Nazarovets. I'm from the Life Science Tools and Diagnostics team here at J.P. Morgan. It is my pleasure to introduce our next company, Twist Bioscience. Just as a reminder, after the presentation, we will have a Q&A, and if you're in the audience and want to ask a question, raise your hand and somebody will pass you over a mic. If you're online, you can submit it online, your question. With that, I will turn it over to the Twist CEO, Emily Leproust.

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

Thank you very much for the invitation and the introduction. It's my great pleasure to present the Twist story. I'll start by saying that today I'll be making some forward-looking statement. For those of you that are new to Twist, we make DNA from scratch, and we have delivered consistent revenue growth as well as market share expansion. That is really on the strength of a very strong commercial execution, execution from the ops team, execution from marketing and R&D to develop exciting new product. We now have a very defined path to profitability. Really, all of that is possible because of our platform. We have a silicon platform where we can write DNA.

We've miniaturized the chemistry, so instead of writing DNA in a 96-well plate, we can write 1 million oligos or piece of DNA at the same time. From that one chip, we can make all the products for all the customers, all the applications, and all the markets at the same time. Even though we started with DNA, we've been extending into RNA and protein. We sometimes get the question about, "How does all of your product line fit together?" I'll talk about our product groups later. But really, I like this view that shows how all the products are interconnected. So it all starts from the Silicon Chip. We make the oligos, and so the oligos is where the magic happens.

And then we have a back end where we can either sell the oligos, or we can assemble them into gene fragments or in clonal genes or in IgG. Or we can assemble them into variant libraries, that together with the IgG, form the basis of our Biopharma Solutions , or we can amplify them to make NGS panels. And so really, again, the value of the platform is the silicon chip. And I often say that the back end, the rest, is remarkable by how unremarkable it is. It is sophisticated, it is highly automated, but without the oligos, you don't have the fuel to run the car. And so based on that, as I mentioned, we have a very strong platform.

We've built a very powerful production line that can make millions of oligos every day. We have a very scalable infrastructure where we can make hundreds of thousands of genes and serve thousands of customers. The user experience is exceptional, thanks to our focus with e-commerce to transact. And we've built a business model that is very similar to a semiconductor industry, where we do have high fixed costs, but we have very low variable costs. Which means that once we have absorbed the variable cost, every extra dollars of sales very high percentage drops to the bottom line. And so overall, we have a business model that is quite differentiated and different from our peers and competitors, and I think it's a very compelling business.

Looking at the financials over the last few years, when we launched our first year, we had a $2.3 million year. By the time of the IPO in 2018, we had 10x to $25 million, and then last year we 10x again to $249 million for the year. As we ramp revenue, we also ramp gross margin. Last year was an exception as we added a second manufacturing site, our Factory of the Future, online. And so there was a temporary dip in gross margin, but as we ramp revenue again, we anticipate that the gross margin will grow again.

If we double-click at looking by quarter, I think the view there, kind of starting from the time of the IPO, where most of our revenue was in blue, SynBio. Over time, we've grown SynBio, we've added NGS, grown it, we've added biopharma. And so we have a highly diversified number of businesses or product group, but again, they all come down to the same silicon chip. And so that's really a very powerful way of producing, where on the same chip we can serve all of those groups. In the next few slide, I'll go through each of our products group. The first three, SynBio, NGS, and Biopharma Solutions , are revenue generating, and then the last one, the Data Storage , is not yet.

So starting with SynBio, again, from the silicon chip, we have hundreds of SKUs that we sell from clonal genetics, fragment, oligopools, a number of different variant libraries, even IgG. The main customer that we serve are in the top left with our SynBio tools. Those are pharma and biotech companies that are discovering target, validating target, discovering drug, validating drug, engineering drugs. We also have a number of industrial chemical companies that are engineering enzyme or engineering cells. So the number of end markets and number of applications that we serve is really high. Historically, we won because of our cost, our scale, and our quality, and the last few years, we've made a deliberate effort to invest in speed.

So while in the past, when we started in 2016, we were slow compared to the competitors to about a year ago, where we were on par with our competitors in terms of speed. Now, with the launch of Express Genes and building our Express portfolio, we're actually best in class. And there's a lot of questions around the Express Genes, so over the next couple slide, I'll try to demystify it a little bit. And so first looking at the competitive landscape of genes. On the left side, I'm comparing the price that can be commanded at different speed. And so historically, we were in the bottom right of the chart.

We are selling genes at 10 days turnaround time for $0.09 a base, which is 2-3 times cheaper than the way the competition did. But now that we launch Express Genes, we have a 5-day turnaround time offering, which, even though we have a dynamic pricing, the price changes every day based on the demand and the capacity in the fab. Again, our price at 5 days is significantly lower than other offerings in the market. And in addition, looking at the right, there's another fundamental difference in our Express Genes compared to the competition. The way we make genes, all of our genes, 100% of our genes are made fast.

So our capacity for Express Genes is very high, whereas with the competition, the way they make their gene, they have a very small capacity at making fast gene. Basically, what they do is, for a few genes, they skip all the lines, they get in front of the line, so it's kind of like heroic effort to make a few genes, express or fast. Whereas for us, again, all of our capacity is fast, and if you order a standard gene from us, we will make it fast in five days, and then we'll wait five days before we ship it to you. The second view of our Express Genes is our portfolio of product. Again, we don't sell... It's not a one-size-fits-all.

Every customer wants their own flavor of DNA, and so here I'm showing the product portfolio. Starting with fragments. We don't call them express, but they are express. They are shipped in three days, extremely high quality. We have our standard clonal genes, which are shipped in ten days. And then we've recently launched our Express Clonal, which are shipped in half the time. Again, perfect quality and with dynamic pricing. And we've said that in early 2024 we'll expand to all of our gene products with miniprep and maxiprep. And then later we'll launch our Express IgG product.

And so, as you can see, we're really making a concerted effort to have the entire product portfolio SynBio with an express opportunity capability, which again, because the costs is the same for express or non-express, enables us to get better margin. In addition to being fast and high quality and low cost, our gene production is also extremely sustainable and how sustainable? So we compared it, and we compared what does it take in terms of carbon emission to make one gene? And the Twist way is equivalent to driving a car for 0.9 miles, and the standard way is equivalent to driving a car for 59 miles. So if you're a customer and you switch to Twist, if you buy one gene a day, you save your commute away in terms of carbon emission.

Moving to the second product line or product groups that we have, and that is NGS. In NGS, it's different. Again, it all starts from the same silicon chip, but what we do is we make panels. And those panels can be fixed, they can be custom, they can be with Alliance Panel . And the vast majority of our products are used by diagnostic companies, where they take patient DNA from patient, they use our products, and they provide a clinical report to the customer, to the patient.

The applications can be diverse from rare disease diagnostics, which uses low depths of sequencing to maybe 30x coverage, to cancer testing, which maybe needs 500x coverage, to liquid biopsy testing, which may require 50,000x coverage and/or MRD. In addition to the panels, we also have the entire reagents needed to go from the sample to the sequencer. The reason we win in NGS is slightly different. We win because of the quality of our DNA synthesis.

And that quality means that when we make a panel of thousands or hundreds of thousands, or even of a million probes, that panel is very uniform, meaning that the relative concentration of the probes is very balanced, and that means that as a customer, you can save in sequencing cost. And we've made a big push in DNA sequencing, and we are one of the leading suppliers to liquid biopsy companies and MRD companies. Recently, we've made a push in RNA-Seq as well, and to help exemplify how we serve the NGS market, I prepared this double view. And the first view, top view, is a sequencing workflow view.

And you can see from the sample to the sequencer, all the reagents that are needed to prepare a sample, we have the reagents for it. We have the enzymes, we have the buffer, we have the adapters, we have the beads, the blockers, the probes, the UMI, UDI, everything that you need. And then the second view below is more of a disease view, what our customers use. And here we're taking the example of cancer, which is one of our leading product, but from the initial cancer screen to therapy selection, treatment response, surveillance, and MRD, our customers use our products to be able to have early detection all the way to disease monitoring. So those two businesses or product groups, Synbio and NGS together, the TAM is about $6 billion.

So, we are only scratching the surface with the revenue that we have, and there's two high growth—two high growing market opportunities that we have. The first one is in liquid biopsy for NGS, where the library prep portion of liquid biopsy is about $300 million now and projected to grow to $2.2 billion. And again, we are one of the leading providers in that space. And then the second opportunity that we have for SynBio is to go after the DNA maker market. That market is very time-sensitive. They are making their own DNA because it takes too long to buy it. And with our Express Genes, we think we have a great opportunity to go after the DNA makers.

The other great thing that between the combination of the SynBio and NGS product is that we sell, as you saw, a large number of applications, but we've grown our customer base from 1,300 in 2019 to 3,400 in 2023. And so we have thousands of customers serving hundreds of SKUs, and that means that we have a very resilient business model, and we've been able to ramp our revenue smoothly. Of note, on the right, about 56% of our revenue is from healthcare, and later in the deck, I'll show how that 56% maps to the products that we have. The third business group that we have is our Biopharma Solutions group. There, we provide a service.

You give us a drug, a target, sorry, we give you a drug. And we are the only company that has an integrated offering of in vivo drug discovery, in vitro drug discovery, and AI/ML drug discovery. And we are leveraging that integrated offering to enable hard drug targets. In terms of business performance, in addition to the integrated offering, we have now a full commercial team, which means that we've been able to show in Q4 order growth compared to Q3, and as we're signing a few key agreements. And so, we've done one quarter in a row of order growth. We need to go to one quarter in a row of revenue growth and then do that again, and I think it's going to be a nice growing business.

In addition to being a great business on its own, Biopharma, the combination of SynBio and Biopharma is very powerful because we serve the same customer. But in Biopharma, we do a service, and we sell to the heads of biologics. In SynBio, we sell the tools to do drug discovery and drug development to the researcher at the bench. And so with a combination of the two, we serve the same customers in different ways, and so therefore, we are not a vendor, but we can be a partner. I mentioned earlier that the 56% of our revenue was in healthcare. This is a map of how our products map along the value chain of healthcare.

From target identification, target validation, drug discovery, drug development, and disease monitoring, we have our products map, and so we're able to touch the customers in many different applications, in many different revenue stream, and that's what makes us very powerful. The last thing I'll share about those three businesses that are revenue generating is the fact that something that's maybe underappreciated is that we have an amazing commercial channel. We deploy what I call commercial violence, and now we are adding product extensions to that channel. We've added new talent to the company. We've elevated the game of the management team today.

It's the first day of our new CFO, and that means we are primed to leverage all of that to expand our market share, drive revenue, drive gross margin , and ultimately drive shareholder value. In the next section, I'll talk about the fourth product group, which is non-revenue generating for Twist. That is DNA Data Storage . We believe that DNA has the opportunity to become a new media for archiving. Our hard drive is our DNA. We can take a file of zeros and ones, convert it into ACGT, synthesize it on the silicon chip, and when you want to read it back, you just put in a sequencer. The benefit of DNA, there's a few, but the main one is, the second one, is the longevity.

You can use DNA to archive data for the very long term, and our first product will be a Century Archive solution, where we'll be able to archive data for 100 years. And so there, the technological development is such that we increase the density on our silicon chip, and as we started with a million bases on a chip, we're going to 256 million bases, and then 10 billion. At 10 billion, that's when we'll have a terabyte archive, and we are expecting to have an early access in 2025. For the company, we have set ourselves aggressive goals. I won't go through the details, but for each product group, we have goals that we want to achieve.

We have shared guidance back in November, and our guidance was to deliver $285 -$290 million of revenue this fiscal year, and our fiscal year starts October 1. Gross margin of 39%-40%, and very importantly for us is managing the cash burn, because we do not want to raise money, and we are guiding that we'll end the year at $245 million in the bank. We've also shared the guidance for Q1 and Q4, with... And if you look at the revenue between Q1 and Q4, it increased by $10 million. And if you look at the losses between Q1 and Q4, it decreases by about $10 million.

So almost 100% of the revenue growth drops to the bottom line. And in that, lower right, guidance for loss from operations, $38 -$40 million, there's a number of non-cash item, such as the $15 million stock-based pay comp and $10 million, depreciation. So overall, this is my last slide. We are very, very excited about the business opportunity. I think we have a very innovative platform based on silicon. We are going after a large and growing markets. We have highly differentiated product, a compelling business model with scalable infrastructure, and that is also sustainable. And we are well on our way to build a scalable, profitable, and growing business. And with that, I'll stop, and we'll be very happy to answer your question. Thank you.

We can let the minutes know that I was exactly at 20 minutes.

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

Perfect. All right, thank you for the presentation. I guess let's start off with the last slide that you talked about, which was your guidance. So you initiated a solid fiscal 2024 top line guidance of 18% at the midpoint, despite some choppy end market environment, right? And you're guiding NGS growth of 20% at midpoint and SynBio 16%. So what gives you confidence in such above-market growth for 2024? And then how is Twist's business insulated from customer funding pressure and other headwinds seen in our space by other companies?

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

Yeah, no, thank you for the question. I think, I'll start maybe with NGS, and maybe I can have Paddy talk about SynBio. So in NGS, what happened last year, and I think will continue to happen this year, because of the funding environment, our customers, they mostly diagnostic companies, are under intense pressure to get to profitability. And so what that means is that, historically, they have been developing diagnostic tests. Historically, those tests were based on the technology from Twist's competitors before we were even on the market. So those are typically older tests. And then newer tests have been developed on the Twist technology.

Part of our marketing pitch to our diagnostic customers is that we sell them a gross margin improvement. The price of our kits is the same as the competition, but you're going to need half of the sequencing that you used to need with the competition. So what has happened over the last few years, or last year, as our customers were under funding pressure, they rationalized their test menu, and they obsoleted a number of old tests and focused on the newer tests that had better gross margin profile. It turns out that our tests are the ones that they kept. So over time, we see our competitors lose revenue. They don't only lose market share, but their revenue are going down.

Whereas in NGS, our revenue went up 25% last year, and we project that they'll continue to ramp. So that's the dynamic that happened in NGS and will continue. And I'll let Paddy talk to us about the dynamics in SynBio.

Patrick Finn
President and Chief Operating Officer, Twist Bioscience

Thank you. In the SynBio market, we're off to a good start. I think we proved that we could take a certain amount of market share over the last few years. As the Factory of the Future has come online, and we're now three commercial quarters into that factory being up and running, it gives us just tremendous scale to stand behind the progress the sales team is making. So with things like the Express Genes offering, where turnaround time really matters, we also get the gain of the serviceable market expanding.

And so over the coming quarters, as we scale that product offering, not only do I expect the sales team to execute into the current opportunity, but new products sold through that channel, plus possible digital channel reaching out to a broader customer base, makes us very optimistic that we can really accelerate growth. Another thing, in a tough funding environment, our value proposition resonates. You know, basically more shots on goal for equivalent budget is outstanding. When your budget is tight, then it's very clear that there should be one vendor you should be going to, to maximize whatever R&D budget you have. So very optimistic outlook.

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

Okay, thank you. So then, taking a step back at your fiscal 2023, in 2Q, you took down guidance and cited that you needed some time to digest the reduced workforce, and specifically, but you did state at the time that order book in SynBio NGS was solid. Now that more than six months have passed since that, guide down and workforce reduction, how have things progressed relative to your expectation?

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

Yeah, so I think it's very important for us, and we have that as a North Star as a company, to say what we're going to do and then do what we said we would. So I think post that restructure, which was, you know, very difficult for the people that were affected, but very necessary for the business, we've met and beat guidance, and we're guiding a strong 2024. Ultimately, it has helped us be a better company. We have reduced our burn rate. We ended the fiscal 2023 fiscal year with significantly higher cash in the bank than we had initially guided.

And so we're just a better company. The revenue ramp is still there, and the strength of a new product introduction is still there. We're able to launch Express Genes, which is a key product portfolio for us. And so at the end of the day, it was definitely the right. As difficult as it was, it was the right decision to do. And now it has redefined our path to profitability, and it has those actions enabled us to make sure that we do not need to go back to the market. And so looking ahead in a tough environment where our competitors are losing steam, we're growing nicely.

We are focusing on expanding our gross margin, managing cash, managing expenses, and we will continue to deliver on what we said we would do.

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

... Great. Thank you. So in your presentation today, you talked about expanding the portfolio of products or features on the SynBio side. So can you talk about the significance of these new products and features, that you highlighted in the slides earlier? And how should we think about them from the financial standpoint?

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

You want to take that, Paddy?

Patrick Finn
President and Chief Operating Officer, Twist Bioscience

Take first pass, yeah. So I mean, it's what speed gives us is an ability to reach a broader customer base, and particularly to people that are time-sensitive. That's great. So first of all, it's a nice expansion in subsequent customers. Second part is with speed, we can start to reach downstream of the DNA product. And so that opens up, you know, for example, how would you like your DNA prepped? So truly DNA your way, turned around quickly. It's a very powerful thing. Continuing along that path into the IgG space, turnaround time and scale is incredibly important. And so with the factory, not only do we have the square footage, room, staff, skills to make it happen, but the product performance that we're getting from that scale is really going to give us differentiation.

It's going to be a very, very nice expansion of product portfolio. Again, all underpinned by speed and scale.

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

And if I can build on that from a financial point of view, the second part of your question. We've introduced with Express Genes the concept of dynamic pricing. And I think we are all used to it. You know, if you take Uber, you order your Uber, it takes five minutes, and you say, you know, if you press here and you get... You spend extra $3, you'll get it faster. So we are very familiar with surge pricing in many areas of our lives, but not in the bio and tool space. And so I think we are bringing another innovative approach.

It's not innovation in the silicon chip, but it's in innovation in the business model, where we think we can leverage that, what Paddy described as very unique product offering, to be able to increase price in a way that's dynamic. As a reminder, all of the genes are made Express, even if they are not sold Express, which means that the COGS of an Express Gene or standard gene is the same, which means that way, if we can convince a customer to click on, "Yes, I want it Express," that extra dollar is 100% gross margin for us.

So, in addition to being able to leverage Express to take market share, we also have the opportunity to leverage Express Genes to ramp our gross margin, thanks to the premium pricing.

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

Thank you. I actually have a follow-up question on the premium pricing. You previously talked about the premium being 20%-100% above the $0.09. Is that still the case? How do you see that evolve?

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

Yeah. So, the premium comes as an equation of demand versus capacity.

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

Mm-hmm.

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

And, so far, I think we've explored somewhere between as low as 20% premium, as high as 140% premium, although I think this week we may go north of 100%. And it basically depends on the capacity. Typically, Fridays are our lowest premium of the week. Typically, Mondays are the highest premium of the week. We just see that there's more on Monday, and so there's more demand, less capacity. And so, that's what happens. And now we're starting to learn the cadence of our customers and learn their willingness to pay a premium.

In the near future, we'll go out and offer customer an opportunity to get fixed pricing in exchange for a volume commitment. And so we're very happy to fix the price as long as there is a win-win commitment to each other's business. At the same time, I want to be very careful. We are students of previous companies in the tool space that may have had a very strong positioning and they may have lost the sense of who pays the bill and lost the respect for the PO. And so we're very careful to respect our customers, make sure they have a great experience. And so we are not taking away the ten-day turnaround time at a very good price.

And so, to the extent that there are some customers that are not interested in the express aspect or find that it is too expensive, the standard gene offering at the very incredible price of $0.09 a base is there to stay. And so they always will have that option. And so we're expanding the menu of what's available to our customer, and those that take advantage of it will get a huge benefit in their science, because in the design, build, test, learn cycle, the build is coming down from 10 days to five days. And we believe that we'll be able to share the benefit with revenue growth and margin expansion.

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

Just wanted to check if there's any questions in the audience?

Speaker 4

Thank you. Great presentation. Can you speak a little bit about the work you're doing to manage any downside risk for bad actors taking some of the genes that you create to create bioterrorism or some of those? I understand there's more regulatory scrutiny. HHS recently put out some DNA synthesis screening guidance. Curious how you're managing that in your business. Thanks.

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

Yeah, no, thank you very much for the question. DNA is a dual-use technology, like dynamite, right? You can make tunnels, and you can kill people. And so we are very, very sensitive to that, and we are, I think, one of the leaders in the field of biosecurity. And indeed, there was a new heightened regulatory process around biosecurity, and you know, I'd love to take a little bit of credit for that, for nudging the U.S. government towards tightening up the rules. It's our strong belief that every company should screen the sequence and the customer.

And so if someone orders Ebola, an Ebola gene, but it's the CDC in Atlanta, and they're developing a vaccine or diagnostic test, yes, we will do it. But if someone is ordering a smallpox to be sent to a PO box in North Korea, we will not do it, and we'll call the FBI. And we believe that that standard should be applied broadly, and so we're very thankful for the new regulation. We think it's it makes the world a safer place and is a good thing for industry. At the same time, I'll speak from now slightly the other side of my mouth. At the same time, I don't believe there's a big risk from, you know, grad student making a mistake in the lab.

At the end of the day, nature is the biggest bioterrorist, because nature has this amazing power of evolution. And so in addition to doing biosecurity for DNA supplier, I think we do need a very robust surveillance of nature to make sure that if there is an outbreak, it gets caught quickly. And I will point you to, I think, a paper in The Lancet from 2017, where the U.S. Army, there was an outbreak in Nigeria. They used a Twist product, a panviral NGS assay, and they were able to very quickly identify it was a horsepox, and nobody has heard of the horsepox outbreak because it got caught early. And so I'm also a big advocate for biosecurity, as well as a big advocate for surveillance of nature.

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

Any other questions? Okay. Okay, so on the initial market opportunity for Express Genes, can you quantify how much this launch expands your TAM? And then can you also elaborate on how the Express Gene product would unlock new applications such as long genes, RNA production, et cetera, and over what timeframe do you think that will happen?

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

Yeah. There's two market opportunity for genes in general. One is the DNA makers, and the other is the DNA buyer. DNA buyer is about $450 million plus. This is our typical market we're going after, we have about maybe 20% market share. And then, there's the big market of $1.4 billion for the DNA makers. Those are the people who make their own DNA because it's too slow to buy it. If you go to them, you say, "Hey, here is a free gene for free." They say, "No," because they rather go in the lab, do it themselves, because they need the DNA to do the science, to get the publication or get the patent.

So with our Express Genes, we have the opportunity to unlock that DNA makers market and bring new customer that are currently basically home brewing, making their own DNA that are cloning. I'm sure in this room there's a lot of people that have cloned in their life, and that's why you're bankers or analysts now because nobody likes cloning, and our goal as Twist is to make cloning obsolete. We always say, "Friends don't let friends clone," and that is really the opportunity that we have, is that $1.4 billion of money that is being spent cloning. We have the opportunity to have that move to the DNA buyer.

In terms of other product extension on our roadmap, we have extensions towards RNA. We are being dragged by our customers into RNA synthesis because now RNA is a new modality since billions of people have had RNA; it's a safe molecule. Our customers are discovering, engineering, optimizing new modalities, new therapies based on RNA, and they need access to thousands or tens of thousands of different RNA sequences. So we have the opportunity to make the DNA, and then in two more steps, in vitro transcription and capping, be able to make RNA that can then be screened. So we need to launch.

We've done early access, very, very positive feedback from customers on RNA. Now we need to launch it commercially, and it will tie in exactly, perfectly, I'll say, with Express Gene. And potentially, customer will have the option of Express RNA or regular RNA, but all the speed benefit of a gene is the first step of making RNA. And so potentially, you could get the DNA in five days and then in two more days, get the RNA. So there's a potential for RNA offering the future in the seven days, business days, time frame.

Patrick Finn
President and Chief Operating Officer, Twist Bioscience

Even from a therapeutic standpoint, we're well connected to the therapeutic players in this space, and there's this lovely sort of tagline of 20 days, needle to needle. So some form of biopsy, diagnosis, idea of what you're trying to make at scale, quickly turned into something formulated back into the patient. If you look at that number of different sequences that's required to support that effort, we're north of 10 million oligonucleotides every single day, and so we believe the platform just lines up perfectly with those needs. So lots of upside, lots of new and emerging applications that we think are, you know, we're well primed to serve.

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

Okay, and then in the last few minutes here that we have left, what do you think is the most underappreciated part of Twist's story as we head into 2024?

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

Yeah, I think there's a couple aspects. I've tried to make it more appreciated in this transition. The first one is that all the products are interconnected on the same silicon chip. I think that's one of the things that may be hard to wrap your mind around. You know, you get an oligo pool, a gene fragment, an enzyme library, a liquid biopsy panel, and MRD panel. How can they be rated on the same thing? And actually, they do all come from the same silicon chip. So I think that is one thing that is underappreciated at Twist. The second thing that is, I think underappreciated is the absolute strength of the channel that we've built.

Maybe the third thing, and I won't go to too many fingers, but the third thing is, there may be a perception that to launch new product is a huge R&D lift, an investment of a brand new technology, and it's not. For every product line extension, we are building on the development, building on the silicon chip, the same silicon chip that has been made before. And maybe the last one I'll mention is, there is some fear, uncertainty, and doubts out there around the quality of our product, and I highly encourage people to do channel check. Our products, all of them, are of the highest quality. Our oligos are so good that now we're in early access with 500 base pair oligos.

Our fragments are best-in-class, our clonal genes are perfect, and in NGS, we win because of quality. And so I think, it's probably worth setting the record straight on quality.

Marta Nazarovets
Equity Research Associate, J.P. Morgan

Wonderful. Thank you so much. I think we all like that.

Emily Leproust
CEO and Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

Thank you very much.

Powered by