Emily Leproust is an American scientist and entrepreneur. She is the CEO and co-founder of

Twist Bioscience Twist Bioscience is a public biotechnology company based in South San Francisco that manufactures synthetic DNA and DNA products for customers in a wide range of industries. Twist was founded in 2013 by Emily Leproust, Bill Banyai, and Bill Pe ...

, a public company working on DNA synthesis. The company harnesses synthetic biology, providing tools to manufacture

insulin Insulin (, from Latin ''insula'', 'island') is a peptide hormone produced by beta cells of the pancreatic islets encoded in humans by the ''INS'' gene. It is considered to be the main anabolic hormone of the body. It regulates the metabolism o ...

from yeast, to tackle

malaria Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease that affects humans and other animals. Malaria causes symptoms that typically include fever, tiredness, vomiting, and headaches. In severe cases, it can cause jaundice, seizures, coma, or death. S ...

, produce spider silk at scale or store information on DNA. She was awarded the BIO Rosalind Franklin Award in 2020.

Education and career

Leproust earned an M.Sc. in Industrial Chemistry from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry in 1995 and a PhD in Organic Chemistry & Nucleic Acids Chemistry from the

University of Houston The University of Houston (UH) is a Public university, public research university in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1927, UH is a member of the University of Houston System and the List of universities in Texas by enrollment, university in Texas ...

in 2001. She worked for the company

Agilent Agilent Technologies, Inc. is an American life sciences company that provides instruments, software, services, and consumables for the entire laboratory workflow. Its global headquarters is located in Santa Clara, California. Agilent was establi ...

where she was Director of Applications and Chemistry R&D—Genomics before starting the company Twist Bioscience. Leproust participated in a March 2021 tabletop exercise at the

Munich Security Conference The Munich Security Conference (MSC; german: Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz) is an annual conference on international security policy that has been held in Munich, Bavaria, Germany since 1963. Former names are ''Wehrkundetagung'' and ''Münchner ...

simulating an outbreak of weaponized

monkeypox Monkeypox (also called mpox by the WHO) is an infectious viral disease that can occur in humans and some other animals. Symptoms include fever, swollen lymph nodes, and a rash that forms blisters and then crusts over. The time from exposure t ...

Publications

*Gnirke A, Melnikov A, Maguire J, Rogov P, LeProust EM, Brockman W, Fennell T, Giannoukos G, Fisher S, Russ C, Gabriel S. Solution hybrid selection with ultra-long oligonucleotides for massively parallel targeted sequencing. Nature biotechnology. 2009 Feb;27(2):182-9

*Kaplan N, Moore IK, Fondufe-Mittendorf Y, Gossett AJ, Tillo D, Field Y, LeProust EM, Hughes TR, Lieb JD, Widom J, Segal E. The DNA-encoded nucleosome organization of a eukaryotic genome. Nature. 2009 Mar;458(7236):362-6

*Goldman N, Bertone P, Chen S, Dessimoz C, LeProust EM, Sipos B, Birney E. Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA. Nature. 2013 Feb;494(7435):77-80.

References

External links

* American women scientists Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American women {{US-CEO-stub