February 4, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco-based startup Twist Biosciences is under fire after allegations of stealing trade secrets were made by Agilent Technologies, Inc.
On Wednesday, Agilent filed a lawsuit against Twist in Superior Court in Santa Clara County, according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times. Agilent is accusing Twist’s chief executive officer Emily Leproust, a former Agilent employee, of stealing company technology as well as 10 Agilent employees to assist with starting up Twist. Leproust has raised $133 million to launch Twist, which is focusing on the use of genes to make biopharmaceuticals and other products. According to Agilent’s lawsuit, Leproust, who left the company in 2013, began pitching the idea of launching Twist to venture capitalists before her resignation, around the time Agilent was developing a relationship with Gen9 Inc., now a competitor of Twist. Additionally, the lawsuit challenges Twist’s patents on its technology to synthesize oligonucleotides, nucleic acid polymers used in research, genetic testing and forensics. The lawsuit said Leproust was working on similar technology while she was at Agilent. Further, the lawsuit said Twist’s patents for the synthesizing of oligonucleotides was filed four months after Leproust left Agilent, which would not allow her the time to truly develop the technology.
“Twist didn’t and couldn’t have independently developed the technology to synthesize oligos at this size and density in its two years of existence,” Agilent said in its complaint, according to the Business Times.
A Twist spokesperson told the Mercury News that the company “intends to defend itself vigorously against what it believes to be meritless claims.”
Twist is preparing for a beta launch of its silicon-based DNA synthesis platform early this year. In June, the company announced it had raised $37 million from sources including Illumina Inc. , Fidelity Management and Research Company, Foresite Capital Management LLC, ARCH Venture Partners and Paladin Capital Group.
In November 2015, Ginkgo BioWorks announced an agreement to purchase a minimum of 100 million base pairs of synthetic DNA over the course of a one-year period for an undisclosed amount. Ginkgo BioWorks said it intends to use the synthetic DNA “to enable rapid prototyping to meet customer needs in industries from fragrance and flavors to cosmetics, nutrition, and health.”
In September 2015, Pharma diagnostics company Agilent Technologies Inc. inked a $235 million deal to acquire privately-held Seahorse Bioscience to complement its mass spectrometry solutions and expand pharma offerings. In June Agilent, in cooperation with Ghent University, announced updates to its SurePrint gene expression microarrays for messenger RNA profiling applications for human, mouse and rat models. Agilent’s genomic workflow includes the 2100 Bioanalyzer and 2200 Tapestation for quality control, SureScan scanner for data acquisition, GeneSpring software for data analysis, and the AriaMX system for real-time polymerase chain reactions.
