Twist Bioscience Corporation

Welcome to Twist Bioscience Fiscal 2021 Second Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press the Start and the 1 key on your touch-tone telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Jim Thorburn, Chief Financial Officer.

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to thank all of you for joining us today for TWIST Bioscience conference call to review our fiscal 2021 second quarter financial results and business progress. We did issue our financial results earlier this afternoon, which is available at our website at www.twistbioscience.com. With me on today's call is Dr. Emily LaProst, CEO and co-founder of TWIST. Emily will begin with a review of our recent progress and twist businesses. I will report on our financial and operational performance. And Emily will discuss our upcoming milestones and direction. We will then open the call for questions. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. The audio portion will be archived in the Investors section of our website and will be available for two weeks. During today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements generally relate to the future events or future financial or operating performance. Our expectations and beliefs regarding these matters may not materialize, and actual results in financial periods are subject to risks and certainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks include those set forth in the press release we issued earlier today, as well as those more fully described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements in this presentation are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we cannot at this time predict the full extent of the impact of the COVID pandemic and any resulting business or economic impact. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Dr. Emily LaProste.

Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon, everyone. During the second quarter of fiscal 2021, we reported strong revenue and robust order growth with progress across all four areas of our business, Symbio, NGS, BioPharma, and data storage. While we remain in the middle of the pandemic and the landscape is evolving, we see customers returning to the lab after receiving vaccinations and incredible excitement around new applications of SynBio and genomic technologies, including drug discovery, gene editing, liquid biopsy, and minimal residual disease, or MRB. We grew revenue to $31.2 million for the quarter, an increase of 62% over the second quarter of 2020, with trends coming from both Symbio and NGS across multiple industries. Of note, no single customer accounted for a significant percentage of our revenue, indicating broad and diversified trends. In addition, we reported 41.7 million dollars in orders, an increase of 69% over the second quarter of fiscal 2020, a strong signal for the remainder of fiscal 2021. Now, I'd like to dive into the details of our four business segments. Beginning with Synthetic Biology, we reported $12.9 million in revenue, with orders coming in very strong at over $20 million for the quarter, as we continue to expand our footprint in the market. Across the Symbol business, we are diversifying our customer base and product mix, We see more customers ordering Oligo pools for gene editing, an increase in revenue for clonology gene fragments, and DNA threats, as well as happy customers for early access IGGs. We booked revenue of $2.4 million for Ginkgo in the second quarter, returning to a more regular cadence for their business. Ginkgo continues to be an important customer for Twist, and we have one year remaining on our contractors. As we continue to grow and diversify our business, we expect that we'll account for less than 10% of our revenues at some point in the near future, not because they're ordering less, but simply because our revenue from the broad base of customers continues to increase quickly. In fact, year to date, they only account for about 6% of our revenue. To support our growth, we are ramping our efforts to make our Factory of the Future in Portland Oregon operational in 2022. As the Factor of the Future comes online next year, we believe it will allow us to tap into customers who need their synthetic DNA products very quickly and important next avenue to convert DNA makers into DNA buyers. In addition, to further support our rapid growth, we exercise our right of first refusal to approximately double the Portland facility. made to plan for space approximately 18 to 24 months in advance. And this additional square footage provides us with optionality to build out manufacturing space for product lines, including DNA data storage or other emerging applications of our synthetic DNA technology platform. Looking at the competitive landscape, we are trying to do success in driving synthesis at scale. We are seeing other potential entrants. And some of you have asked about enzymatic synthesis companies specifically. And while enzymatic synthesis holds much promise for less expensive and longer beans, there is still a long way to go to make this technology commercially scalable. That said, we do believe that it is a matter of if, not when. So let me address what I believe an enzymatic company needs in order to be successful in our market segments of gene synthesis and NGR. For gene synthesis and NGS, the method must be high-quality and able to make long pieces of DNA beginning with low-cost building blocks and error rates that are significantly lower than phosphorylated chemistry. There needs to be a high speed of incorporation of bases and no sequence-specific error modes. To be truly green, there should be no organic solvents in the production of building blocks or their assemblies. It is critical that but the method incorporates quality control and even more importantly, biosecurity screening of all sequences. Indeed, the customer should be able to get a final DNA needed without needing to do the onerous QC themselves. This is a tall order. That's because gene synthesis requires delivering the perfect DNA. And so high cost, low quality DNA just won't get it. For the near term, we believe that classic phosphorylated chemistry remains the sole method of scalable DNA synthesis for the applications that we serve. Turning to Genomics and targeted MDS, we reported $17 million in revenue and $18.6 million in order for the quarter. We continue to work with an increasing number of customers, adapting our technology into their products, with several key customer wins. We announced three new customers specific to APEC, A geography we believe holds untapped potential for MGS solutions. We launched our MGS methylation detection system in February to detect varied methylation patterns that play a key role in many biological processes, including cancer. This world offers customers a complete workflow solution that can be quickly customized for their specific needs. It includes near-end line-by-lap sample preparation together with our packet analysis system for a robust end-to-end workflow. Already, we are hearing positive results from customers. We are committed to developing the most robust, flexible solutions for our customers to ensure that they can run samples they want with the greatest uniformity. In addition to our partnerships with NAB for our methodization system, We announced a collaboration with Watchmaker Genomics, an innovative company applying advanced enzyme engineering to new applications of genomics. By having different partners for laboratory preparation, we can create tailor-made solutions for our customers for a wide array of applications, while at the same time mitigating supply chain dependencies. Second quarter, together with Biosha, we received emergency use authorization from the FDA for our SARS-CoV-2 next-generation sequencing assay. Our assay has the ability to analyze the entire RNA viral sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to determine the presence or absence of the virus, as well as a researchers-only report that analyzes the sequence to detect genetic variants and lineages of SARS-CoV-2. While we are 15 months into the pandemic, we believe SARS-CoV-2 will remain with us for some time. As new variants continue to accumulate, we believe that it would be very important to enable our customers to routinely sequence clinical samples and track variants as they emerge. Importantly, TWIST as an organization learned a great deal by applying for and receiving the authorization, validating our creative management system, and building relationships with the FDA that will guide product development across our businesses. We also launched several new synthetic RNA controls for new variants of COVID, first identified in Brazil and South Africa. Revenue from controls, while not material, has been consistent, and so many customers coming to twist to buy controls return to buy additional products. Often, our NGS custom panels, so this is a great source of new customer force. For biopharma, We reported $2.6 million in order and $1.3 million in revenue. Revenue only includes a portion of the upfront or license fees associated with our partnerships, as we recognize revenue over the course of each project. We announced partnerships with Stanford's Innovative Medicines Accelerator, as well as KeoEye Curing and Pure Biologics, and we now have 21 partners, many of whom have multiple programs ongoing at Twist. Currently, we are advancing 25 active programs, 17 of which have milestones and royalties associated with them. An additional nine programs are complete and now in the hands of our customers. We published our first peer-reviewed paper on Twist Generated Compounds for QMP1R this quarter, a significant accomplishment for the bioformatting As many of you may know, GLP-1R is a hard-to-go target, and we identified our compound from our GPCR library, and this was the first internal target we had then to demonstrate proof of concept for a bioinformal vertical. The publication details our positive preclinical results for a panel of 13 high-affinity GLP-1R targeting antagonist antibodies generated from our GPCR library. as well as an agonist antibody, TB59-2. These data demonstrate the power of our antibody libraries to generate potent antibodies in a wide range of clinical indications. For Hedera 2a, our top leads have been tested in a humanized tumor model. We found that our antibodies increased T-cell proliferation in the tumor, and as a result, tumor volume decreased. We are eager to see a TWIS compound meet clinical trials and are pursuing many paths forward. We are working with multiple partners in multiple programs as well as selecting our own antibodies to advance through a preclinical release stage for out-licensing. We have many shots on goal. During the quarter, we exercised our options to purchase all rights to our GPCR library and TWIS antibody optimization software. both developed in collaboration with Distributed Bio. We began working with Distributed Bio back in 2016, before Twilist Biopharma existed. We now make four to five libraries each month using our silicon-based platform, and have created a robust library of libraries to benefit both our partners and our internal NWD discovery efforts. Moving to data storage, We continue to make solid progress on our engineering roadmap, driving towards $100 per terabyte. We shared last quarter that we had the one-micron chip in hand. This quarter, our team was able to synthesize 200 base oligonucleotides in 300-millimeter wells on this one-micron chip. This is a significant engineering accomplishment and further de-risks our approach to DNA data storage. While there is still more work to do on the 1-micron chip, this is truly an exciting attempt and we remain encouraged and engaged in the continued drive for increased density. The DNA Data Storage Alliance is now 29 members strong, and soon we'll be releasing a white paper on the state of DNA data storage as well as opportunities ahead. As we talk to potential users of data storage, several factors are clear. First, is a growing appreciation for an alternative method of storage. Second, initially DNA will be used as a supplemental data storage system to augment current storage capabilities. Working through the alliance, we will ensure that all IT leaders, not just the visionary ones, are ready to conduct pilot studies when the solution is available. And third, we found that cultural preservation including TV and movie production archives, and industrial data storage required for regulatory reasons will be the first applications of DNA data storage. This is a very large market, and many other opportunities quickly will be followed. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Jim to review our financial results for the quarter.

All right. Thank you, Emily. As Emily noted, we continued to prove out the power of our platform and had another very robust quarter. Revenue for the quarter was 31.2 million, up sequentially 11%, and year-over-year 62%. Orders were 41.7 million, up sequentially by 24%, and year-over-year 69%. Cross-margin for the second quarter was 39%. And we shipped to approximately 1,700 customers in the quarter and 2,100 customers year-to-date. And we concluded the quarter with cash and short-term investments of approximately $555 million. Now, I'll provide more details and orders for the second quarter. NGS orders for the second quarter were $18.6 million as compared to $16.7 million and our quarter ended December 31st, 2020, with a 90% year-on-year growth, which reflects the increased adoption and increasing number of NGS applications. During the quarter, we also received orders from approximately 700 NGS customers, and customers with the top 10 accounts placed orders of approximately 8 million, as we continue to expand the breadth of our customer footprint. Our pipeline for larger opportunities continues to scale, and we're now tracking 170 accounts up from 160 accounts we noted on our last earnings call. 65 have adopted our platform, and that's an increase from 59 last quarter. Now turning to SynBio. Our SynBio orders, which includes Genco, Genes, DNA Preps, IGG, Libraries, and all the good pools, increased to $20.4 million in the second quarter, and that's up from $14.1 million in March 2020 quarter. Our Symbio non-gainful business continues to scale, and orders rose to $16.3 million, and that's representing sequential growth of approximately 34% and 46% year-over-year growth, which highlights we continue to make progress in penetrating the market and expanding our portfolio. Our jeans business continues to be strong as total jeans orders grew to approximately 15.7 million from 12.2 million in the previous quarter. Non-genku jeans orders for the quarter were 11.5 million, and that's up from 8.7 million in the quarter one, with key segments contributing to our growth, including pharma, academic, and industrial segments. Oligo pools rose again in the quarter to 2.4 million, with strong order demand largely coming from a pickup in the academic segment and gene therapy applications. Biopharma orders in the quarter were 2.6 million per antibody discovery activities. And as noted earlier, we have 21 partners with 25 active programs, with 17 of which have milestones and or royalties. In summary, we provide orders not to directly translate into revenue, but to provide a trend line for each product group. We anticipate both NGS and Ginkgo orders will fluctuate quarter to quarter. Now let me cover revenue for the quarter. Revenue is $31.2 million, and that's a growth of 62% year over year, and sequentially increased to 11%. NGS product revenue climbed to $17 million for the quarter, as compared to $7.7 million for the same quarter in the prior year. Year-over-year growth is approximately 120%, with sequential growth of 10%. Our same-bio product revenue for the quarter was $12.9 million, and that's up sequentially from $11.5 million last quarter, and an increase from $11 million in Q2 FY20. 4 million, and our outlook for Ginkgo revenue remains the same as our previous guidance of 11 to 12 million for the fiscal year. Q2 genes revenue was 9.2 million, essentially flat with Q1 and also flat with Q2 FY20. During the quarter, we shipped approximately 90,000 genes as compared to 84,000 in the previous quarter, with the growth in genes reflecting the success of of our clonal-ready gene fragments, which were launched in December 2020. Gene's revenue excluding Ginkgo was $6.8 million in the quarter, as compared to $5.1 million in the same quarter last year. By a farmer, our revenue in the quarter is $1.3 million, and that reflects upfront services on our antibody discovery project activities, including panning, screening, and high-throughput IgG purification. Now quickly touching the regions, America's revenue was $18.6 million as compared to $12.1 million for the same period last year. EMEA continues to grow strongly with Q2 revenue of $10 million versus $6.2 million in the same period last year, and EMEA now accounts for approximately 32% of our worldwide business. APAC revenue was $2.7 million versus 0.9 million, and we're seeing a strong rebound in Asia this year. In terms of segments, healthcare is now our largest segment and accounts for 53% of our business, with a revenue of $16.6 million in Q2, and that's compared to $5.8 million in Q2 last year. Industrial chemicals was $8.7 million in Q2, versus $7.5 million in Q2 FY20. Academic revenue in fiscal Q2 was $5.6 million versus $5.5 million, and as we noted earlier, we saw strong order pick up in the academic sector this quarter. Now moving down the P&L, gross margin was $12.2 million, or 39% of revenue, as compared to 30% in Q2 last year. This increase in margin reflects the impact of scaling our revenue, leveraging our fixed costs, and the benefit of higher mix of NGS products. Our operating expenses, excluding the cost of revenues for the second quarter, increased to approximately 50.2 million. R&D for the quarter was 15.8 million, compared to 10.6 million in the second quarter of FY20, and 14 million in quarter one of FY21. Just a reminder, in quarter one of this year, we had 1.1 million of spend offset for IARPA and the confidential program. Major contributors to the year-over-year growth in R&D were 1.4 million investment data storage, 1.4 million investment biopharma, and our core R&D increased by 1.1 million. SG&E, increased to 34.4 million from 28.8 million in quarter one, and that's primarily due to higher stock-based comp and increased investment in our commercial organization. Our loss from operations for the quarter was 38 million, an increase from 32.8 million in the first quarter, and that's primarily due to the growth in stock-based compensation. Note the loss from operations in Q2 include stock-based comp, reeling 0.7 million, and 2.4 million depreciation. CapEx was approximately 8.6 million a quarter, which brings total year-to-date CapEx to approximately 12 million. We ended the quarter with cash and short-term investments of approximately 555 million. I'll briefly provide an update to our financial guidance for fiscal 21. We had a very robust start to our fiscal year, and at the same time there remains uncertainty associated with the pandemic. And although we have successfully navigated many challenges throughout the pandemic, we are experiencing headwinds from a key supplier for one of our products. We're working actively to mitigate this, although it does remain a concern. We've seen strong orders in the quarter, and we're increasing our guidance from the prior guidance 110 to 118, 221 to 129 for fiscal year 21. Gainful revenue is estimated to be approximately 11 to 12 million. Non-gainful sin bio, 43 to 46 million. NGS revenue estimated to be 62 to 66 million. And biopharma estimates to be approximately 5 million. Our gross margin range for the year, is now expected to be 36% to 38% as compared to 32% to 34% in our last guidance. Operating expense, which includes R&D and SG&A, is expected to be approximately $192 million for the year as compared to $182 million in our prior guidance, which reflects higher stock-based comp charges and investment in our R&D and sales and marketing organizations to support growth in FY22. Our R&D guidance for the year is approximately $66 million, up from $60 million in our last guidance, and that's due to additional investment in data storage and biopharma investments. Our net loss for the year is expected to be in the range of $144 to $150 million. And stock-based comp, which is included, is approximately $33 million, and depreciation is $10 million. CapEx for the year is $40 million, and that's up from $30 million, which includes $16 million in capex for our Portland expansion. Due to equipment lead times being extended, we're placing orders ahead of original plan. In summary, with a solid first half to fiscal 21, we increased our guidance for the year. We're enjoying broad demand from our customer base. Our new products are being well-received. And we're investing in our platform as we continue to tap into new revenue streams. And with that, I'll now turn the call back to Emily.

Thank you, Jim. In conclusion, in the first half of our fiscal year, we reported almost $16 million in revenue, with strong momentum heading into the second half of the year. Looking forward, for Synbio, we expect continued growth and diversification of our revenue streams, continued commercial RAM for clonal-radiogen fragments and DNA prep, as well as production RAM for IGG. We also expect rollout of our B2B solutions to allow us to capture specific multi-site institutions and an ongoing preparation of the infrastructure and software platform for Factory of the Future to enable strong growth in 2022 and beyond. For NGS, we expect continued revenue growth and customer-ranking production, the technical addition of EMIs, and continued conversion of stint inquiries to twist-plus sequencing. For biopharma, we intend to find additional partnerships and add programs with a majority generating milestones and royalties. In addition, we will continue to advance our internal pipelines of antibodies and pursue out-licensing opportunities, targeting our first out-licensing program that meets 2022. And for data storage, we will continue to drive our engineering roadmap towards further miniaturization, execute on the IAPAC contract, and pave the way for market adoption of this new storage medium. With that, let's open up the call for questions. Operator?

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question, you will need to press the star then the one key on your touchtone telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. And our first question coming from the lineup, Doug Stenco with Cowan. Your line is open.

Hi, this is a learn for Doug, and thanks for taking my question. I have one in competitive landscape, and then I will ask a follow-up question. There are a number of companies that seem to be emerging into the market with the concept of taking a more distributed model for oligos and gene synthesis. What is your view on that? Specifically, are they competitive, complementary, or none of the above? And at a higher level, is the distributed model attractive, and how are you positioning for it?

Thank you. That's a great question. Right now, the distributed model is for markets that are adjacent to ours because the quality is just not there enough. to be in the market that we serve of gene synthesis and enzyme bio so for instance as a comparison you can buy an oligo for 3 cents on our website or as a distribution model as oligos at 50 dollars per oligo so it's kind of a very different product offering and then the quality that we have we have extremely high co-hating, we can make oligos up to 300 base spells. So at this point, what we see is that we don't have a demand from our customers. We don't hear a demand from our customers to make DNA in their labs. What we hear is people want high co-hating, they want very low price, and they want speed. And we think we're very well very well suited to deliver that. But at the same time, we're a student of the market, and our platform is agnostic to the chemistry, and if there was a better chemistry, we would be very happy to deploy it on our platform.

That's very helpful. Thank you. And for my follow-up, I'd like to ask a question on the guidance. The increase in gross margins Is that due to a higher share of NGS markets like Q2, or is there something else driving the upside there? Thank you.

Yeah, no, the increase in cross-margin guidance is a higher share of NGS, plus we've increased our overall guidance from 110 to 118 up to 121 to 129, so we're leveraging our fixed costs. So it's a combination of... increased revenue plus the higher NGS.

Thank you.

And our next question coming from the line of Catherine Schultz with Baird. Your line is open.

Yeah, this is Tom. I'm for Catherine. Thanks for taking the questions. First one I touch on for the core academic customer. It seems like from order trends, rather, that activity levels have improved. But I just wanted to get a sense for what you saw in the quarter, and then specifically if there's any geographic dynamics to call out here, given we've heard the U.S. has sort of lagged from a recovery standpoint here.

So, good question. The dynamics in the quarter are interesting. January started off a little bit weaker. I mean, if you go back to January with the vaccine rollout was just starting. As the quarter progressed, we saw increasing orders. So academic sector recover significantly from previous trends. We had a good quarter in Asia. Revenue was up 2.7 million, so almost 3x what we saw last year. Europe is very strong. So we're doing well in all regions. The products are obviously being well received by customers. So number of customers actually increased to 1,700. So over the last year, customer base has grown. We've seen steady increase in bookings. I mean, bookings were over 41 million, which just highlights the strength of the portfolio. Healthcare was up. Industrial biotech was doing extremely well. And what's noticeable, we're doing well excluding our Ginkgo business, so we continue to broaden that platform.

Great, thanks. And as a follow-up, appreciate the color on expectations around some additional biopharma partnerships. Seems like the funnel is strong. Just want to get a sense for expectations as to development timelines and budgets. you know, if those are fairly consistent to any sort of COVID uncertainty at this point, if biopharma is sort of operating in a new normal, you would expect those budgets to be fairly locked in at this point.

You're asking in terms of our spending budget or budget for our customers?

Yeah, the customer spending budgets as well as sort of their development timelines.

Yeah, so in biopharma, we... I have made a big push in that area over the last few quarters, both with the BioPharm team that is covering antibody and optimizing them for partners. You can see that the number of partners is growing, the number of programs is growing, so that's going well. And then we also made a push on SynBio by launching our IGG product. So as I said, we're doing really well in pharma. COVID has been useful to us, even though it's been pretty bad for society, it's been useful because we did our own discovery program against COVID and we were able to show that not only we can discover antibodies against hard-to-drug targets, but also we can do it very fast. And so Basically, the offering that we have now for biopharma is really strong and very much in line with what they need. And so we can say that the funnel is very strong. And our response to COVID actually has probably more more of a tailwind than a headwind.

Our next question coming from the line of Nigel Peterson with JP Morgan. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. This is Casey on for Tycho. Can you elaborate a little bit on the academic markets rebound, given Illumina's commentary, and then maybe how that can serve as upside to NGS numbers? I know you guys raised your NGS guidance during the full-year guidance, but is there any upside there from academic recovery?

Yeah, the academic sector was up by, I would say, roughly 20% in terms of orders, and which is good in terms of positioning as well for second half. Not significant in terms of impact on NGS. Most of the academic pickup relates to, although we don't break it out, it's in bio. The good news is it did pick up. We didn't see a significant drop off in academic over the last year, but it's a good early indicator recovery there. And In terms of NGS, uh, we're very strong, um, first half in NGS. And, uh, you know, we've upped, upped our guidance, even though we have, uh, one, one supplier that's, that's, uh, we're working with, uh, who's, uh, constrained in terms of, uh, providing us a product in the, in the short term. Um, but we feel good in terms of where we're at, uh, strong orders, broad customer base, uh, adoption and, uh, We believe that the product, I mean, the increasing number of large accounts working with us increased again, and we continue to be very optimistic and bullish in terms of where we can take the business. As you probably saw, we increased our investment in Portland, and that's in anticipation of positioning us for strong growth in 2022-2023.

Gotcha. And then maybe just, you know, you've talked previously about how COVID isn't really material to the business. I'm just wondering if anything's changed there regarding, you know, the new variants, you know, research into variant spread and so forth.

Thank you. So we have students of the variants. As you may remember, we Now, a year ago, in March, we launched our first COVID test through MGS in order to enable scientists to read the entire virus sequence in order to detect variants and to understand lineages. So we had... a year ago that variants would be important. As variants have emerged, we have launched new positive controls against, I think now we have more than 15 variants available on our website. And then on the antibody side, we've tested the potential of how antibodies against different variants. So definitely, Science is top of mind, and we're offering the tools to our customers to help in the detection and study of the science. Gotcha. Thank you.

And our next question coming from the line of Vijay Kumar with Evercore. Your line is open.

Hey, guys, Kratz and Goodprint here, and thanks for taking my question. I had three questions. Jim, that supply headwind that you mentioned, is that based on the guidance, I guess, asking the question the other way, without the supply headwind, would the revenue guide be higher?

Um, DJ, I'd love your questions. Um, yeah, the supply headwind is baked into the guidance. Uh, we're working with the supplier. Uh, we have a really good relationship with the supplier. Uh, we're working this, uh, week to week and we'll give an update in our next earnings call. And, uh, yeah, we had a very strong first half. So, I mean, when we're growing as rapidly as we are, um, We've been anticipating supply issues. We did increase our inventory over the last year. It's just we've seen significant increase in demand, and we'll work it out. And we did bake it into the guidance, and as we work on resolving it, we'll give an update on the next earnings call.

Any, I guess, any way to quantify it, Jim? I'm looking at your NGS guidance. You guys did about 120% growth for first half. The annual guide at the high end, I think it's baking in a 50% growth. So perhaps is that where it's hitting you guys on the NGS side in any way to quantify it?

Yeah, I mean, on the NGS side, it is impacting us on the NGS side. And although we did increase guidance, you know, it's... we wanted to note that we do have a headwind there. We will give an update in the next earnings call. We're obviously working to resolve it. And we'll keep you posted.

Gotcha. And then, Emily, one for you. You know, I missed a part. I think you made some comments on data storage, having reached an important milestone. Maybe if you could just simplify it in terms of you know, where we are, you know, towards the end goal. I think you guys had to get to certain cost metrics. So where we are in the journey and what was this update, you know, if you could flesh it out, that would be helpful.

Yeah, happy to do it, EJ. So as you remember, the goal is to get to a price point of $100 per terabyte. And so to do that, we need to be able to make DNA at the 150-micron dimension of the silicon. And so we started our platform at 50 microns. Last year, we proved that we were able to shrink down to 10 microns. And right now, we are... working on the one-micron chip. Let me rephrase just one thing I misspoke. The goal is to get to 150 nanometers, so we want to go to 150 nanometers. Right now, we've gone from 50 microns to 10 microns. We have the one-micron chip in hand. And the milestone that we achieved this quarter is that we were able to synthesize 200 base pair oligos on that chip. And so maybe a few words on what that chip looks like. The features are one micron away from each other. The pitch is one micron. And the dimension of the features is is 300 nanometers. So it was quite an achievement to get there. We believe that it's the longest DNA made on the smallest feature of silicon ever. So it's definitely bleeding edge. We are not finished with the one micron chip. There's a few more experiments we have to do, and a few more milestones we need to reach around speed of synthesis, quality, and cost, but definitely a huge step for us to be able to make 200 base pair oligos, and they are mixed base. Once we are done with the one micron chip, next would be to design and build the next chip that is going to get us to 150 microns. So we are not at the goal yet of $100 per terabyte, but it's definitely another very strong step forward.

That's helpful, Emily. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

Our next question, coming from the line of Puneet Sada with SBB Lyric, Yolanda Feldman.

Yeah, hi, Emily, Jim. First question, maybe this was covered briefly a little bit. In terms of the guidance raised, can you just provide contribution? Is that NGS largely driven and anything you can provide there on the type of the customer, despite the The headwind that you have here, just trying to get a sense of, you know, is that in liquid capacity or in other NGS applications?

So, I'm just trying to summarize the questionnaire. So, in terms of compared to guidance, last quarter's guidance, we've increased 110, so let me frame it, 110 to 118, up to 121 to 129. We've increased NGS from approximately 54 to 58 up to 63 to 67. So in terms of the headwind we are seeing or experiencing, we're working through that. We've included that in the guidance, recognizing that we have been impacted. We're working on resolving that. And it's a week-to-week issue we're working on with our partners. and we'll give an update in the next earnings call. But we've had very strong growth. We don't break it out into liquid buy-offs, but I'll just highlight the number of large customers we're dealing with. Puneet has increased again, and we're now at 170, with 65 having adopted. So we're seeing really good, strong trends in terms of NGS. In fact, we're seeing strong trends across all our businesses. And it's nice to see the academic segment rebound, which is up roughly about 20% in orders. And we believe we're really well positioned for the second half of this year. In addition to that, you probably saw we increased our CapEx for the year. That's in anticipation of ramping up Portland next year. and we did increase our footprint in Portland. We saw that as a very cost-effective option for expansion in the future.

Okay, that's very helpful. Thanks for summarizing that. In terms of the assays that are used in liquid biopsy, I just wanted to get, you know, in terms of getting specced into those assays, any early indications as to sort of where you think those initial trials are headed? How confident are you that you will be getting specced into these assays as they, you know, reach into larger trials and potentially, you know, commercialized? And then if I could ask also on the biopharma front, You know, obviously, generally the outsourcing trend is increasing here in discovery. What's your expectation here, you know, sort of longer term in order to get involved in a larger number of trials? And also, if there is any, you know, in the near term, do you expect any trial enrollment, essentially getting into a phase one trial, any updates there? That would be super helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Puneet. So maybe starting by the last question around biopharma. Yeah, our funnel is very strong around biopharma. It's clear that there is a big interest in what we offer on discovery and optimization because our antibodies are fully human and human-derived on day one. As far as when will the first twist antibody go in the clinic, we don't have a clear timing on that because our partners are having to do that. And we mentioned on the call that we have nine programs that are out of our hands, meaning that another partner is in charge of the timing. And so it's just a question of time. until a recent antibody is in the clinic. But to be clear, our partners will be doing the work. In terms of the liquid biopsy question, we are definitely in a number of liquid biopsy products. We can only talk publicly about Grail because they've mentioned using Twist exclusively. We can't discuss other customers that have not mentioned Twist. But in the past, we have won more than our fair share of bake-offs. And we can see in the revenues that keep coming quarter after quarter after quarter. But those liquid biopsy companies are a source burning DNA to do their work of validating their assay in anticipation of a commercial launch. So that's why we are quite bullish on the long-term prospect of the NGS pipeline. Because as those products go commercial, that should enable us to get continued revenue ramp.

I'm not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Emily Lippers for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much, Reparator. So we've had a very strong first half of our fiscal year with momentum moving into the remainder of the year. We see that our products resonate with our customers, our addressable markets continue to expand. We have the team in place to drive innovation, and we hold ourselves accountable to execute aggressively. We look forward to sharing with you our progress in the months ahead, and I'd like to thank you very much for your time today.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's the conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.