Twist Bioscience Corporation, a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, today announced the expansion of its growing portfolio of synthetic viral controls with the launch of a synthetic RNA control for H5N1 Influenza A, which is one of the causes of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) or bird flu, covering 99.9% of hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) genome regions.
“As agricultural and infectious disease researchers around the world continue to monitor the spread of H5N1, we continue our unwavering commitment to responding rapidly to threats to public health by providing innovative and critical tools to safeguard our global community and enable monitoring and surveillance as well as vaccine and assay development,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. “Our synthetic controls, including the H5N1 Influenza A control, enable broader research access without the need for live viruses. This allows critical work to be conducted in BSL-1 labs, accelerating research and development efforts. Importantly, we maintain biosecurity as a core tenet across all our products and processes. By empowering global research with safe, synthetic tools, we’re advancing science while upholding the highest safety standards.”
Positive controls provide quality control measures for the development, verification, and ongoing validation of both next-generation sequencing (NGS) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays. The Twist control contains synthetic RNA segments of the complete H5N1 HA and NA genome regions, which determine the subtype of the strain.
Twist provides a suite of research tools and NGS products, including custom controls and reference standards for H5N1 Influenza A, mpox, respiratory diseases including coronaviruses, influenza viruses, paramyxoviruses and enteroviruses as well as cfDNA controls for liquid biopsy assay and cancer research. Twist also offers the Twist Comprehensive Viral Research Panel, featured in a recent scientific publication for the detection of H5N1 in wastewater, which contains over one million probes for the targeted enrichment of over three thousand viral human pathogens.
Twist Bioscience is a leading and rapidly growing synthetic biology and genomics company that has developed a disruptive DNA synthesis platform to industrialize the engineering of biology. The core of the platform is a proprietary technology that pioneers a new method of manufacturing synthetic DNA by “writing” DNA on a silicon chip. Twist is leveraging its unique technology to manufacture a broad range of synthetic DNA-based products, including synthetic genes, tools for next-generation sequencing (NGS) preparation, and antibody libraries for drug discovery and development. Twist is also pursuing longer-term opportunities in digital data storage in DNA and biologics drug discovery. Twist makes products for use across many industries including healthcare, industrial chemicals, agriculture and academic research.
SOURCE: PRNewswire