Panel Includes Adenoviruses, Coronaviruses, Influenzas, Rhinoviruses and More

Twist Bioscience Corporation, a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, has announced the availability of the Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel, a robust next-generation sequencing (NGS) approach to detecting a wide range of respiratory diseases including SARS-CoV-2, several other coronaviruses, influenzas, rhinoviruses and respiratory syncytial virus. The panel will be bundled with an analysis platform from One Codex to enable an easy-to-use, complete end-to-end workflow that begins from the Twist target enrichment panel and continues through publication-ready visualizations.

Detecting and identifying viral pathogens remains an acute global health concern, exacerbated by the COVID-19 global pandemic. A wide range of viral pathogens manifest similar symptoms making it difficult to identify the cause(s) of disease. Unlike common RT-PCR assays, which detects only one pathogen at a time, the Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel is designed to identify, detect and characterize active pathogen presence, screening for 29 common human respiratory viruses in one sample.

“The symptoms of COVID-19 are extremely varied, in many cases mimicking a number of other common illnesses including influenza, adenovirus infections or even the common cold,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. “By offering a comprehensive respiratory panel with the ability to detect and characterize a wide range of viruses, this assay provides an important tool that fits within multiple workflows to appropriately identify and research the underlying virus causing the infection or co-infection. Importantly, this panel can also be used to surveil populations for early signs of outbreak, viral transmission and evolution to enhance public health response.”

About the Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel

The Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel targets all common viral pathogens that cause respiratory symptoms in humans. The panel includes both RNA-based and DNA-based viruses in one kit with 41,047 nucleic acid probes. The probes are subject to Twist’s proprietary NGS quality control process, ensuring the probe representation in every lot meets our specifications to provide researchers with high quality, highly uniform capture performance.

The panel allows researchers to separate COVID-19 symptoms from those of other respiratory illnesses, both influenza- and non-influenza-related. The probes within the panel cover both viral genomes and their reverse complements. The panel is optimized for standard and FastHyb or Fast Hybridization workflows, resulting in extreme uniformity after capture with FOLD 80 base penalty in the range of 1.2 to 1.5 for the synthetic viral targets. Highly sensitive, the panel is able to detect as little as 100 copies of viral material, and has coverage of > 99.9% of the genome at 1X or greater post-enrichment. All viruses included can be found here.

An End-to-End Offering that Includes Analysis with One Codex Platform

The Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel includes genetic analysis on the One Codex platform allowing customers to generate easy-to-share publication-ready visuals and reports for clinical research for a complete solution from panel to results. One Codex is the leading bioinformatics platform for microbial genomics, supporting taxonomic and functional analysis of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data.

The Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel is available for Research Use Only (RUO). Customers purchasing the Twist Respiratory Virus Research Panel are subject to Twist’s leading biosecurity screening protocols and applicable laws and regulations.

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About Twist Bioscience Corporation

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.