SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 5, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Twist Bioscience, a company focused on synthetic DNA, today congratulated alGas Biotech, GigaGen and Koliber Biosciences on winning the Blue Sky Bio Competition hosted by SynBioBeta 2015. As part of the prize, these companies will receive a combined total of $100,000 in synthetic DNA from Twist Bioscience, which will be used to advance their businesses. 

"We are delighted to support the business proposals presented by all three contestants, all of which continue to drive innovation and growth within the synthetic biology industry," said Patrick J. Finn, Ph.D., vice president of sales and marketing for Twist Bioscience. "Twist Bioscience provides synthetic genes on an unprecedented scale that, in turn, enables our partners to accelerate their research and development programs.  We look forward to working further with each of these exciting companies as we expand our customer base through our upcoming beta program, scheduled to launch in early 2016, which will offer industry leading throughput, turnaround time and customer service."

"With the DNA from Twist Bioscience, we plan to engineer probiotic organisms to produce tryptophan directly in the gut, in order to combat depression and have many more 'Blue Sky' days," commented Ewa Lis, Ph.D., founder and chief technical officer of Koliber Biosciences.  

"Our mission at GigaGen is to discover and develop novel antibody therapies that seamlessly integrate into the body's natural immune system," said David Scott Johnson, Ph.D., MBA, co-founder and CEO of GigaGen. "The DNA from Twist Bioscience will help us advance development of our first product candidate, a recombinant intravenous immunoglobulin (rIVIG)."

"At alGas, we are thrilled to win this synthetic DNA from Twist Bioscience to advance our production of our algae-based batteries that are rechargeable, non-toxic, biodegradable and injection-moldable," said Adam Freeman, founder and CEO of alGas Biotech. "This is an exciting market with a world of potential, and with this DNA, we have a head start in manufacturing our batteries."

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.

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SOURCE Twist Bioscience

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