Emily Leproust - Twist Bioscience

CEO & Co-Founder - Twist Bioscience

Scaling SemiSynBio to fuel the growth towards a $1T semiconductor industry 
The semiconductor industry has seen unprecedented growth enabled through technology as well as cost scaling in its more than half a century history. Synthetic biology is in its early stages, growing quickly and represents an equivalent growth opportunity. This growth will be fueled by the deployment of semiconductor technology using CMOS-based chips for molecular writing, sensing, and sequencing, as well as non-traditional hybrid biological computing systems. 

Molecular writers (for DNA, RNA, proteins, and other molecules) will enable applications ranging from personalized healthcare to data storage, working in concert with molecular sensors and sequencers to monitor environments, diagnose and treat disease or to retrieve data stored in DNA. 

Molecular computing systems will leverage hybrid silicon and biological circuits to perform non-traditional computation in standalone systems or integrated into hybrid biological- or neural interfaces. Such systems could leverage massively parallel thermodynamic interactions to carry out otherwise intractable computations in bulk fluid (writing the molecules necessary for the computation and then reading back the results). They could also be used to translate between digital and neural signals (serving as brain or spinal computer interfaces) or engage in two-way communication with cell populations via electrochemistry. 

Twist recently demonstrated the ability to scale molecular writing of 100 million unique DNA sequences per square centimeter on a CMOS-based chip using advanced semiconductor processing on 300mm wafer technology, scaling up by 5,000 times from Twist’s first-generation silicon platform writing 20,000 unique DNA sequences per square centimeter. Twist’s roadmap projects scale up to writing 8Tbit per chip run for DNA data storage applications. As an example of the pace of scale expected for these technologies, DNA data storage density is likely to surpass the highest density NAND flash semiconductor chips available within this decade.

In addition to DNA writing, CMOS-based molecular sensing and sequencing will enable reading DNA at massive scale, well beyond the reach of current DNA sequencer technologies. Twist is uniquely positioned to expand its development work from its core strength in molecular writers to scale up synthesis capabilities to tens of billions of unique DNA sequences on CMOS-based chips through a massively parallel approach. Enabling this technology development and scaling requires the most advanced 300mm semiconductor manufacturing technologies including the handling of new materials, manufacturing processes and tooling. While the investment required is sizeable, the corresponding market opportunity will drive the semiconductor industry to a trillion-dollar industry and beyond.