SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – December 1, 2015 — Twist Bioscience, a company focused on synthetic DNA, today announced that its CEO, Emily Leproust, Ph.D., has been selected as one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015 for fast-tracking the building blocks of life. Each year, Foreign Policy selects the leading Global Thinkers whose contributions and work have changed lives and are shaping the world.
“It is an honor to be recognized among these incredible global leaders,” said Leproust. “At Twist Bioscience, we continue to accelerate applications that benefit from DNA writing, from health and medical breakthroughs to environmental sustainability, to improve the lives of people around the world. We look forward to continued innovation through all areas of research that benefit from the decreasing cost and increasing scale of DNA synthesis.”
Emily Leproust, Ph.D. serves as CEO, co-founder and director of Twist Bioscience. As an early pioneer in the high throughput synthesis and sequencing of DNA, Dr. Leproust is disrupting the current process of gene synthesis to enable the exponential growth of synthetic biology applications in multiple fields including medicine, agricultural biology and industrial chemicals. Prior to Twist Bioscience, she held escalating positions at Agilent Technologies where she architected the successful SureSelect product line that lowered the cost of sequencing and elucidated dozens of Mendelian diseases. She also developed the Oligo Library Synthesis technology, where she initiated and led product and business development activities for the team. Dr. Leproust designed and developed multiple commercial synthesis platforms to streamline microarray manufacturing and fabrication. Prior to Agilent, she worked with Dr. X. Gao at the University of Houston developing DNA and RNA parallel synthesis processes on solid support, a project developed commercially by Xeotron Corporation. She was named one of the Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. Dr. Leproust has published more than 34 peer-reviewed papers—many on applications of synthetic DNA, and is the author of numerous patents. She earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Houston and her M.Sc. in industrial chemistry from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry in France.
About Twist Bioscience
At Twist Bioscience, our expertise is synthetic DNA. We have developed a proprietary semiconductor-based synthetic DNA manufacturing process featuring a 10,000-well silicon platform capable of producing synthetic biology tools, such as oligonucleotides, genes, pathways, chassis and genomes. By synthesizing DNA on silicon instead of on traditional 96-well plastic plates, our platform overcomes the current inefficiencies of synthetic DNA production, and enables cost-effective, rapid, high-quality and high throughput synthetic gene production. The Twist Bioscience platform has the potential to greatly accelerate the development of personalized medicine, sustainable chemical production, improved agriculture production as well as new applications such as in vivo diagnostics, biodetection and data storage. For more information, please visit www.twistbioscience.com. Twist Bioscience is on Twitter. Sign up to follow our Twitter feed @TwistBioscience at https://twitter.com/TwistBioscience.
Contacts
Investor Contact:
Argot Partners | Maeve Conneighton
T 212-600-1902 E maeve@argotpartners.com
Media Contact | Angela Bitting
T 925-202-6211 E media@twistbioscience.com