Welcome to Twist Bioscience fiscal 2020 second quarter financial results conference call. At this time, all participant lines are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Jim Thorburn, Chief Financial Officer.
All right. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. First and foremost, we hope each of you is safe and healthy wherever you are during this time. I'd like to thank all of you for joining us today for Twist Bioscience conference call to review our fiscal 2020 second quarter financial results and business progress. We did issue our financial results earlier today, which is available at our website at www.twistbioscience.com. With me on today's call is Dr. Emily Leproust, CEO and Co-founder of Twist. Emily will begin with a review of recent progress in Twist's businesses. I will report on our financial and operational performance. Emily will discuss our upcoming milestones and direction. We will then open the call up for questions. As a reminder, this call is being recorded.
The audio portion will be archived in the Investor section of our website and will be available for one week. During today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events , or future financial, or operating performance. Our expectations and beliefs regarding these matters may not materialize, and actual results in financial periods are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks include those set forth in the press release we issued earlier today, as well as those more fully described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The forward-looking statements in this presentation are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we cannot, at this time, predict the full extent of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and any results, businesses or economic impact. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. With that, I'll now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Dr Emily Leproust.
Thank you, Jim. Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to add my wishes that we find you safe and healthy at this time. The global pandemic has changed our lives substantially since our last call in February. At Twist, even before the state of California called for a shelter-in-place, we quickly transitioned a majority of our employees to working from home. We wanted to ensure that our production workers who do not have the option of working from home stay safe and healthy, and that we will be able to continue to deliver our products to customers conducting important research. Despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, we reported record revenues of $19.3 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2020, resulting from strong NGS sales, significant revenue from Ginkgo, initial revenue from biopharma collaboration, as well as the addition of two new COVID-19 products.
Orders for the current quarter came in strong, approximately on par with the previous quarter at $24.6 million, resulting in a booking rate of about $50 million for the first six months of fiscal 2020. For the first time, we reported gross margins of approximately 30%, confirming that as we scale our products and revenue, and building on our established infrastructure, we're able to increase our margin. Turning to specific results for SynBio, we shipped more than 88,000 genes during the second quarter. Also, we added two new writers to augment our capacity and continue reducing our turnaround time. Our SynBio revenue includes genes and fragments for customers who are developing vaccines and therapeutics against COVID-19, so we cannot accurately break that revenue out specifically at this time.
We reported a total of $11 million in SynBio revenue, $4 million of that from Ginkgo, which has made a substantial commitment in the fight against COVID-19 and is facilitating substantive research. This is a very strong quarter for SynBio, but we do see the shelter-in-place order impacting our academic customers substantially. We have launched a new campaign where customers can order DNA now, as they're able to conduct the design portion of the design build test cycle from home. When their lab reopens, we will ship the product to them immediately. Balancing out the reduction in academic revenue, we see an escalation in orders from biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies ramping up their efforts to fight COVID-19 through vaccine and therapeutic development. Overall, SynBio orders remain strong at $14.1 million, as those larger customers remain open for essential research.
While we are optimistic about the future, we are closely monitoring the situation as well as across our customer base and in all regions, so that we're in the best position to react to any change in market conditions. Importantly, on schedule and as planned, which was much more challenging during the pandemic, in mid-April, we launched a new product to bring larger masses of DNA to customers who need those options. This product, an expanded offering of our Twist Clonal Genes, is the preferred format for pharma and biotech companies, and therefore expands our addressable market. This extension of our clonal genes offering enables Twist to become more of a one-stop shop for pharmaceutical and biotechnology research companies.
In addition, we are looking at different market opportunities to pursue DNA makers and support growth in the long tail of the market, such as customers that need a few genes at a time, rather than massive orders. We remain on track to launch our Clonal-Ready Gene Fragments in the second half of calendar 2020. Both the new preparation and the Clonal-Ready Gene Fragments target two very different and important sub-segments that we do not serve well today, and we believe that over time, they will represent substantive areas of growth for our SynBio segment. For genomics and targeted NGS, at the end of the second quarter, we introduced two new products to facilitate COVID-19 testing and monitoring of viral evolution. We introduced SARS-CoV-2 synthetic RNA reference sequences, which can be used as positive controls for development, validation, and verification of diagnostic assays, as well as in routine testing.
These reference sequences are also posted on the FDA's website within their reference materials for SARS-CoV-2. We also launched a target enrichment panel for viral detection and characterization of samples for SARS-CoV-2, which can be used for environmental monitoring and surveillance testing while providing insight into full sequence information to track viral evolution and strain origin. These new product offerings are a perfect illustration of what Twist does well. We're presented with a new challenge, like this global pandemic, and we look at how our core strengths can address this problem. We were able to launch this product in just a few weeks, serving our existing customer needs and also meeting the emerging global concern. These products were only available for two weeks at the end of the quarter, and in that time, we recorded approximately $400,000 in revenue, and we shipped to 231 customers.
We are grateful to be in a position where we are able to help in the global effort to combat this virus while the business remains healthy. This is a tremendous testament to the hard work and dedication of our employees across the organization. For our overall NGS products, we reported revenues of $7.7 million, an increase of 38% year-over-year, as well as strong orders of $9.8 million. We had another six customers adopt our products this quarter for a total of 43. During the quarter, one of our customers published results of their liquid biopsy product, which includes our customized target enrichment panel. The data demonstrated that their technology is able to detect more than 50 types of cancers across all stages with a false positive rate of less than 1% through a single blood draw.
These data from more than 15,000 participants are extremely impressive and the most robust data set on liquid biopsy to date. As we all know, the ability to identify cancer early remains critical to effective treatment. We are thrilled to play a role in this potential pivotal shift in cancer diagnosis. More broadly, to address the large liquid biopsy market, we introduced a targeted methylation sequencing solution during the 2020 AGBT meeting in February. This product is ideal for customers focused on liquid biopsy, as it can be used to study methylation pattern changes in a wide range of research fields. For those of you not familiar with methylation, the addition and subtraction of a methyl group changes which proteins are made in the cell, which in turn has deep implications for cancer, epigenetics, and non-invasive pre-natal testing.
We are working with initial customers and believe it represents an important area of growth for NGS solutions. Turning to our vertical market opportunities, in addition to our collaboration to supply synthetic genes and antibodies for Vanderbilt, Twist Bioscience is working with them to provide custom antibody drug discovery libraries and is screening these libraries for potential antibody therapeutics that could treat patients with COVID-19. In March, as the global pandemic was gaining traction rapidly, we leveraged our robust laboratory synthetic antibody discovery laboratories, each containing more than 10 billion antibody sequences to identify antibody candidates for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2. We have identified key competitive antibodies with potent binding to the receptor binding domain of the S1 protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In addition, we have identified a series of antibodies that bind to the extracellular domain of ACE2 in human cells.
As a reminder, ACE2 is a receptor that SARS-CoV-2 binds to in order to enter and co-opt human cells. The fact that we were able to go from publicly available reference sequences to competitive antibodies for two different targets in a matter of six weeks demonstrates the power of our biopharma platform, and something that we believe we can repeat for other targets, even ones which are hard to drug. Apart from our biopharma work against COVID-19, we continue our discussions with a large number of potential partners. I am very pleased to report that we have signed one partnership with an undisclosed party, which includes milestones and royalties, and look forward to announcing additional deals. As a result, we reported $600,000 in revenue for our biopharma division this quarter.
While we expect the orders and revenues to be lumpy, we look forward to seeing that number increase as we continue to derive value from this growing market opportunity, despite near-term uncertainty posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. As we generate additional data and validation for our internally generated targets, we expect to move along the spectrum towards being a value-added pharma partner rather than just a reagent provider. We do expect this to take time, but we are encouraged by the progress we are seeing today. As we shared last quarter, we will not give an update on data storage due to the length of time it takes for the silicon design build test cycle. However, we can share that we have added an additional four engineers to drive this important project forward.
We are extremely fortunate at Twist that we have attracted and retained dedicated and resilient employees who are inspired by our mission to improve health and sustainability. We've been put to the test in the last three months and the challenge continues. I am pleased to lead a company that is rising to address the global pandemic and also serve our customers working in many other important areas of research. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Jim to review our financial results for the quarter.
All right. Thank you, Emily. Our results for quarter two were strong and proved out our business model in an extremely challenging environment. Revenue was $19.3 million. That's 42% growth year-over-year, 12% sequential growth from the $17.2 million in the previous quarter. Our gross margin for the quarter was 29.7% as compared to approximately 13% in the same quarter last year, up from 20% in quarter one. This reflects the benefit of scaling our revenue and leveraging our fixed cost. Before I cover the detailed financials, we would like to thank all of our investors for their continued support in the last quarter as we continue to strengthen our balance sheet with approximately $190 million in a follow-on offering, plus our at the market offering.
In addition, we'd like to thank our customers, suppliers, and our incredible Twisters for their loyalty, dedication, and commitment during these challenging times. Our operations, R&D, logistics, and supply chain teams have been adjusting to this challenging environment while launching new products aimed at combating the virus. The commercial team executed well, and w e booked $24.6 million in orders in the quarter, which includes approximately $10 million of orders in March, a very challenging month as many of the geographies implemented shelter-in-place. Our Ginkgo business is going well with $4 million of revenue in the quarter. We continue to build our broader customer base. We built approximately 1,160 customers during the quarter and 1,440 year -to -date. Our COVID products launched in the middle of March are doing well.
In fact, they contributed approximately $400,000 in revenue. Our biopharma antibody products continue to gain traction with orders of approximately $700,000 and revenue of $600,000. Now, I'll give you some more detail on our orders in the quarter. Just breaking down our orders to $24.6 million. For the year, we've now booked almost $50 million, actually $49.4 million, and that's approximately 55% year-over-year growth, over the first six months of 2019. Our SynBio orders, which are defined as genes, libraries, oligopools in quarter two or $14.1 million, and this includes Ginkgo orders of $3 million.
Our genes business is doing extremely well with orders of $11.3 million in the quarter and year-to-date orders of almost $21 million, actually $20.8 million, which is 42% year-over-year growth, primarily from EMEA and the U.S. markets. NGS orders, our genomics products, which are referred to as our NGS products, continue to perform well. We booked approximately $9.8 million in orders in the quarter, which brings year-to-date orders to $21.6 million for NGS. Although Q2 was lower than Q1, we anticipate fluctuations quarter-to-quarter. We received orders from 357 accounts in the quarter. That's up from approximately 250 in quarter one.
Even in these uncertain times, the pipeline for our largest NGS opportunities continues to scale, and we're now tracking 113 customers progressing through the pilot, validation, and adoption phases, with 43 adopting up from 37, and a total of 17 pilot in validation. We're very encouraged by what we're seeing in these uncertain, challenging times. Our biopharma antibody discovery products are also scaling, and we continue to build the pipeline with bookings of approximately $700,000. In terms of our progress with our global expansion, EMEA is doing well with bookings of almost $9 million, and that includes approximately $4.4 million from NGS, with solid orders across industrial biotech, academic, and pharma segments in EMEA. In fact, we've almost got about 600 customers in EMEA now.
APAC bookings were $1 million. As we expected to be impacted by COVID-19, we saw a weak January, a weak February, and a very strong recovery in March. America's orders for quarter two were approximately $15 million, of which $9 million was SynBio and $5 million was NGS. Biopharma was about $700,000. Please note, we provide orders not to directly translate into revenue for the following quarter, but more to provide a trend line for each product group. Additionally, in an uncertain business and economic environment like the one we're in today, it is possible that these orders will not convert into revenue. While we feel our orders are firm, we're closely monitoring the situation to ensure we're poised to react to any changing market conditions. Now let me cover revenue. NGS product revenue for the quarter was $7.7 million.
This is 10% sequential growth and year-over-year growth of approximately 38%. This brings our year-to-date NGS revenue to $14.7 million, which is a 57% growth from last year. As noted, we continue to expand our customer base and ship to approximately 340 customers versus 190 in the previous quarter. Our SynBio product revenue was $11 million, up from approximately $10 million in the first quarter. For the first six months of our fiscal 2020, SynBio revenue grew to $21 million, compared to $15.7 million in the same period of fiscal 2019. That's about 33% year-over-year growth. Our genes business continues to do very well, with quarter revenue of $9.1 million. This is 50% growth year-over-year and 16% sequential growth. Although March was challenging for us all, we shipped 32,000 genes in the month, and for the quarter, we shipped 88,000 genes, up from 80,000 in the previous quarter.
It's worth noting that longer genes accounted for approximately 50% of our gene revenue in the quarter. Our biopharma antibody product revenue was $600,000 for the quarter, and we continue to make progress in building the pipeline. I'll quickly touch on the geographies. EMEA revenue is $6 million, and that brings EMEA revenue to the first half to $12 million compared to just under $6 million in the same period last year. APAC revenue for the quarter, second quarter declined as expected to $900,000, and that's compared to $900,000 , and that's compared to $1.2 million the first quarter. It's worth noting that APAC revenue for the first half of this year is double what it was last year, i.e., $2.2 million for the first half of 2020 versus the $1.1 million for the first half of 2019.
In terms of segment revenue, our largest segments were industrial chemicals, $7.5 million, followed by healthcare at $5.8 million, academic at $5.5 million. Moving down the P&L. Gross margins, continuing to grow as we scale their business and very excited to announce we actually hit the 29.7% or nearly 30% gross margin, in quarter two. That includes about $300,000 in stock-based comp for the quarter and approximately $100,000 in shelter-in-place compensation for our operations employees. Our operating expense, excluding the cost of revenue for the second quarter, increased to approximately $37.8 million compared to $36.9 million in the first quarter. R&D was $10.6 million compared to $10.3 million in the first quarter. SG&A increased to $27.2 million in the second quarter, reflecting additional commercial costs, mainly marketing and stock-based comp of $600,000. Our net loss for the second quarter was $31.8 million.
In summary, the quarter ended with $230 million in cash. We've proven out our business model, strong revenue growth, gross margin nearly 30%, and we're focused on growing aggressively. However, due to the evolving environment, we believe it is prudent to withdraw our fiscal 2020 financial guidance. With that, I will now turn the call back over to Emily.
Thank you, Jim. As Jim said, we had a strong first half. Now we are monitoring business conditions and the impact of COVID-19 on our customers. While COVID-19 has impacted our business, it has neither been a bust nor a boon to our operations. We see a positive impact of COVID-19 in the resilience of our employees and our new and innovative products to meet market needs. Overall, orders remain strong. Our team continues to innovate in a challenging environment, and we continue to execute our business plan. Looking ahead, for SynBio, we expect continued revenue growth and diversification of customers. We expect to expand our offering for both pharmaceutical companies and for the long term market. For NGS, we expect to build our customer base by offering new products that expand our infectious disease offering over time.
We remain focused on pursuing new market opportunities, including liquid biopsy and on converting organizations currently using SNP microarrays. For Biopharma, we expect to continue to advance our internally generated competitive antibody candidates and sign additional revenue-generating partnerships. We remain on track to sign between five and 10 collaborations, some of which will include both milestones and royalties. With that, let's open the call for questions. Operator?
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question will come from the line of Doug Schenkel from Cowen. You may begin.
Hey, guys. This is Subbu on for Doug. It seems like things have held up for you pretty well, all things considered. Fair to assume that customer activity was most resilient amongst traditional clinical activities and in COVID-related application, maybe less so in SynBio customers. How has this evolved over the past few weeks, and were there any stocking behavior late in Q2?
Jim, you want to take this question?
Yeah. Obviously, can't comment on what's happened in April. All I can say is that over the last quarter, we're actually very surprised. I mean, our bookings were very strong as late as March. We had large orders from some of the diagnostic companies, and we're shipping to them. Overall in Asia, we saw a bounce back in China. Right now, our view is although the business is very strong, there's a lot of uncertainty about how customers are going to ramp in the next six to eight weeks as they start to come back to work. I would say a lot of the large pharma companies are still working. If you take a look at Twist, we implemented shelter-in-place policies. The operations staff are working, R&D staff are working. We're receiving sequences from our customers.
We thought it was prudent to pull the guidance and at the same time, the business has been very strong, performing really well, which goes back to our platform strength and our platform, that we're able to scale the business. We're able to innovate and launch COVID products. We're seeing a lot of demand for the COVID products. We saw a revenue of about $400,000, and we launched those products in the middle of March. Overall, we're very encouraged by the business and the opportunity.
Along those lines, are you a key supplier of primers, probes for any big COVID diagnostic companies? Assuming that's the case, how much of a tailwind would that be in this quarter?
If you're asking about a primer for RT-PCR test, we are not.
No.
However, we are supplying our synthetic RNA control for a number of people that are developing those RT-PCR tests and for the users that are running RT-PCR tests in routine mode. That is a very innovative product that we launched, like Jim said, in the second half of March with only a few weeks, but it came at the right moment where I think we're the only companies that sell the full synthetic RNA control. Therefore, we are participating with RT-PCR tests. There are some people that are using NGS sequencing. Not only to get a yes, no answer, but to actually sequence the full viral genome and understand how the virus is evolving. We are selling a kit to do that, some people are using our kit for NGS.
At this time, I think the NGS portion is not as prevalent as an RT-PCR, mostly because NGS takes a bit more time. I think over time, there'll be a need to track how the virus is evolving from months to months, from regions to regions, because the virus evolution may inform the types of vaccines that will work, the types of antibodies that will work, the types of primers that are needed for RT-PCR tests. It may even inform how fast people can get out of shelter-in-place and/or if people have to go back in.
That's helpful. It is pretty commendable that you have successfully launched a number of COVID-related products and you're helping the wider community, and I truly appreciate that. My next question was on gross margin. They were great this quarter. Any one-time dynamics that we should be mindful of, and how should we think about sustainability considering there was some fixed cost leverage and probably the volumes might go down? Just any color you provide would be helpful. I have one follow-up, and that is the last one, I promise.
Obviously, can't comment on the future. All I can say is, over the last year and a half, we've talked about the leverage in our business model. It's really satisfying to see in this last quarter that on $19.3 million revenue, our gross margin was approximately 30%, which is consistent with our long-term discussions on where the business is going, i.e., the higher the revenue with the leverage of fixed costs. We brought two new synthesizers on the quarter. That allowed us to really scale the business and we delivered up to 32,000 genes in the last month, and we're going to bring another two synthesizers on in the course of the next four or five months. Our goal is to position ourselves to be very strong for next year.
I think if you go back to the model, $19.3 million revenue, 30% gross margin, that's almost 100% flow through in terms of revenue from the previous quarter. There wasn't a huge mix change. NGS business and the gene margins came in as we expected. It's good to deliver a 30% gross margin.
Got it. A patent was issued as recent as, I think, day before yesterday related to de novo synthesized gene libraries. Any color you could provide on the issued claims, and more specifically, if this patent in itself provides any material competitive mode?
Yes. We continue to invest in our patent portfolio. We strongly believe in patent as one of the modes that we have. Our software that enables custom synthesis, our innovation spirit are also other modes, such that if you want to compete with Twist because we are moving, you don't want to compete where we are today, but you'll have to compete where we are going to be in three years. This particular patent is quite broad and it's one more in our protection. I think there was more than one coming yesterday. I thought there was four coming yesterday.
Got it. Thank you.
Yeah, we have 180 patents pending. The team's been very innovative and we've been very focused on building the patent portfolio to protect our position. We've got a lot of innovative engineers and we're going to keep building our patent portfolio.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Luke Sergott from Evercore ISI. You may begin.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Starting off on the biopharma customer that you guys signed with the $600,000 in revenues, how much of the $600,000 was from that new sign or was this part of it come from the existing biopharma customers?
It comes from the existing biopharma customers. We had about, I think it was roughly about four, five that we had recognized revenue on this last quarter. We keep building the portfolio. Obviously don't release names. We get some exciting opportunities in the pipeline.
Yeah. Actually, that's helpful. I'll come back to that one. I just want to get into the COVID antibodies before it slips my mind. The two antibodies that you talked about yesterday and everybody got really excited about it and either used for diagnostic use or in a antigen testing mode or used for maybe even a therapeutic. Can you give us an update on where you are in the development stage? What kind of partners? Are you looking for partners and how far along is that project and when can we expect some type of benefit?
Thank you, Luke, for the question. We're quite excited about the development. We actually started late. We started end of March into the foray against COVID-19 when we thought it was becoming a big issue for the country. As you know, we have libraries that are human-derived and that are fully human. What that means is that coupled with our high throughput synthesis and high throughput screening abilities, in just six weeks, we were able to find very strong binders, nanomolar, picomolar range against two targets. One is the S1 protein of the coronavirus itself, as well as antibodies against the human receptor, ACE2. It kind of shows the platform that what we can do is very quickly discover a strong binder. Again, because human-derived and fully human, those should behave well in the clinic.
Now we are at the point where we have leads. I should say that we have dozens of leads in each category. It's not just one antibody of each. We have many antibodies. We're open for business, either for people that want to license it and move it on their own or partner with us. In the area of either research or diagnostic or therapeutics, and we're in discussion with a number of groups. Ourself, we'll also do a bit more characterization. For instance, we don't yet have the results of a virus neutralization assay. We know it binds well. We know it competes with its natural ligand, but we don't have yet the virus neutralization data, which we'll seek. Achieving that in six weeks is just great. I should add that the coronavirus is not particularly a hard to drug target.
Our platform is especially strong for hard drug, where we have a huge advantage over others. In a case like this where other platforms can also discover antibody, our advantage are twofold. One is that it's very quick, so we're faster, we think, than others. Then secondly, again, it's a human-derived and fully human sequences that comes out of the pipeline. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, it does. It's helpful. I guess we can look for that, the neutralization data coming out in the next couple of weeks, just to keep you guys moving forward?
Yeah, I think it's more in the June timeframe.
Okay, that's helpful. Turning to the NGS side, you guys added six more customers in production. Can you give us a sense of the applications here? Any of the regions change? I guess another offshoot of that would be with BGI. Can you give us a sense of how the orders and the revenue trended from BGI as COVID-19 shut down and through China, and then came back online? Just to give us a sense of how we could think about how it could return here.
I can't talk specifically about BGI. I can share with you what happened in overall Asia, particularly China. Orders were very weak in January and February. We saw a great bounce back in March. Overall, in terms of, yes, we expanded the pipeline. We saw a number of additional customers coming from Asia, actually. We saw a number of additional customers coming from the U.S. In fact, it's across all regions, but it's mostly biased towards Asia. We've got some very interesting developments here in the U.S. that I can't go into. What's very encouraging is the pipeline continues to build. We're adding more adopted. Of those that have adopted, the revenue in the first half for the customer adopted was roughly about $8 million. We're tracking in terms of growth.
Obviously, as we scale the revenue with NGS as well, you see our gross margin came to approximately 30% in the quarter.
Okay, that's helpful. Thanks. I'll follow up offline on the continued biopharma partnerships. Thanks again.
Okay.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Tycho Peterson from JP Morgan. You may begin.
Hey, this is Elenia for Tycho. Thanks for taking our questions. Firstly, in light of the pandemic and just thinking about the possible impact to conversion of your order book or backlog, wondering if you could talk a little about how the backlog looks today, the current mix, and which pieces may be quicker to burn and which may lag?
First of all, thanks for the question. Yeah, the backlog, we came into this quarter with a strong backlog, which is extremely encouraging for us. In terms of the business, we're seeing strong demand from larger customers. Pharma, large diagnostic, on NGS. Where we're seeing weakness tends to be academic and some of the smaller customers. Although the volume of orders has gone down in the smaller customers, that's been sort of offset by strong, broad demand from the larger customers. Obviously, we're going to continue to evaluate this over the next six, 12, 15 weeks, because it's very difficult to predict how customers are going to reengage in terms of production. It goes through the design build test cycle. Even though a lot of the designers, a lot of our customers' R&D teams are at home, they are actually still designing and sending in sequences.
At the end of last quarter, we did have some customers who actually put us on hold because they'd shut down their operations, and that was about $400,000 or $500,000, if I recall, in terms of product that was still sitting on our shelves into the quarter. We're very encouraged because we had a lot of customers, a lot of large customers that placed orders in March time period. Very strong backlog coming into this quarter. However, we're really uncertain about how they're going to ramp back up in terms of production over the next three, four months.
That's helpful. Then just getting into some of the trends from the academic end market, just wondering, sort of, you've already given some color, but what you've seen so far, and if you can talk about April, and can you also remind us of your exposure to academic customers?
Yeah. Academic customers is about 25% of our revenue. I can't share what's going on in April. I can only say again that the end of March was very strong. We're encouraged with what we're seeing. I think in terms of academic, it's really broad. Some may describe, Emily maybe you can jump in here, but we would class Vanderbilt as part of that. We've seen ourselves in terms of, you've seen the public release on Vanderbilt. We've built a lot of interesting programs in the pipeline, particularly on the COVID side.
Okay.
I think what I.
Go ahead.
What I can add is, I think Jim really set it up perfectly, which is, in academic, you may have big projects, and those big projects, by and large, seems to be going forward. We also have a lot of very small orders, and those are affected significantly, but they are a small fraction of our revenue base. The number of orders may be down, but the dollar from orders is not as affected because, at the end of the day, we don't have a lot of exposure from the long tail yet. The long tail is what we want to get to in the future because it's a big number. Because we have not yet done a lot of penetration in the long tail, we are somewhat less exposed.
What we saw this quarter is with the launch of our positive control and COVID products, it somewhat balanced the outcome.
Yeah. Can I add a couple of comments? What was interesting for us is we quickly adopted shelter-in-place. We have tremendous team and operations, supply, logistics, and R&D. What we did at the end of last quarter was we actually tracked shipments from the 15th of March to the end of the quarter because all we were concerned about was disruption in supply chain. We made sure that all our shipments got to the customer's destination. We're very vigorously looking at making sure we continue to monitor our supply chain. We did increase our inventory at the end of the quarter. We do have a lot of raw materials in place, w e've built that over time strategically. Combined with the great work our logistics and operations team done, we managed to deliver all the products to the customers they wanted in time.
From an operational point of view and market point of view, we're feeling that we're in a strong position.
That's helpful. Thank you. Lastly, just going back to the COVID-19 antibodies, just wondering if you could help us frame the diagnostic and therapeutic opportunity here. Could you be partnering with several different bodies, or how should we be thinking about the potential opportunities? Thank you.
Yeah. We have multiple antibodies with strong binding affinity, strong competitive affinity against the natural ligand. We have multiple shots on goal. I think we look for partnerships that could or could not be exclusive, and we will see if we ultimately end up into something that goes broadly from a diagnostic or therapeutic point of view. However, even if it does not, the fact that we are able to generate such great antibodies so quickly is data that we add to our data package, and that data package is what we need to generate more business in general. At the minimum, we're getting fantastic data that we can leverage for our marketing purposes. In addition, we have multiple shots on goal to participate in a diagnostic or therapeutic application, and potentially participate in the upside.
Thank you. One last one. Here I see that you're planning to scale up those compounds for in vitro functional testing. Just wondering how your supply chain looks like, and if you've seen any disruption this quarter? Thanks.
Do you mean for the biopharma antibodies?
Yeah.
Yeah. No, I think, like Jim said, we were early in sheltering -in -place. We actually moved to working from home before there was a mandate from California. We anticipated that there could be disruption and our supply chain team has been really proactive in making sure that we had all the supplies that we need. At this point, we're not seeing any issue in supply chain, either for the biopharma or actually the business broadly.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Catherine Schulte from Baird. You may begin.
Hey, guys. This is actually Tom on for Catherine. A fair amount of my questions have been covered already. Just want to cover a few more things. One, just want to confirm I heard you correctly. Still expecting 5-10 pharma collaborations by the end of the fiscal year. I think you had mentioned that earlier in the call?
Yeah, That's right. We are really excited that this quarter we reported our first royalty and milestone bearing contract. It's with an unnamed party at this time. Over time, there probably will be a public release of who they are when that partner is ready. Now we have proof point that we can get milestones and royalty based on the data package that we have had so far. As I mentioned, that data package is only enhanced by our work on COVID-19. We may get more partnerships around COVID-19, but, even outside of the COVID-19 fight, we are still on track for 5-10 contracts and partnerships this year. Again, some more of them will have milestones and royalty in addition to the one we already disclosed.
Great. That's great color. Then on some of the COVID work you had done around vaccines and therapeutics, kind of pre the antibody announcement, things like Inovio or Vanderbilt. I was just kind of curious if you could speak to some of the structure on these partnerships, anything around time frames or monetization. Just wanted to get your sense or get a sense of how set in stone these things are?
When we started Twist, initially we were only a vendor where, and it's a great business. Someone comes to us, they have a sequence, we make it, we give the DNA to them, and we get paid. That's where our SynBio and NGS market, our business, started. There is a number of customers that are now in the fight against COVID-19 that needs access to DNA. You mentioned Vanderbilt, COVID. Ginkgo is another one that's public, and there are others. They come to us, they purchase, and we are a vendor to them. In addition, we have opportunities to do some of the work, and that's what our pharma team has done. When we do some of the work, at that point, we're able to discover antibodies that then we can attempt to monetize for a higher economic return.
Some of those are done on our own. Some of those are done in partnership with Vanderbilt. If we do some work, we have an opportunity to get potential enhanced monetization. If we are quote-unquote a vendor, that's the nature of the business model where it's an exchange of payment for a reagent. Now that we have a pharma business on top of our core business, we have the ability to participate in some upside potential which we did not have earlier in the development of Twist as a company.
Great, thanks. Thanks again for all you guys have done in the COVID fight. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, that's star one for questions, star one. I'm not showing any questions at this time.
Thank you, Victor, and thank you all for joining us today. As you heard from our remarks and from the Q&A, Twist had a very strong first half. We are open for business, and we continue to innovate and execute. This last quarter has provided all of the Twisters with an important opportunity to do well by doing good, and we remain committed to continuing to doing so moving forward, no matter the uncertainty or challenges placed in our path. We wish you all well and hope you remain safe and healthy in the days and months ahead. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.