Emily Leproust: Yes. Maybe I’ll start. Thanks, Matt, for your question. I really like looking at price per gene, but sometimes we have to be a little bit careful — can be a little bit — you can have a good story either way. So what happens is our short genes are priced at $0.09 per base. Our long genes are priced at $0.15 per base. And so when we penetrate more into the makers market where they buy long genes instead of buying short genes then the ASP goes up because now it’s $0.15 per base. And it’s a long gene so the ASP per gene goes up. So from that point of view, that’s a great story, that’s good. At the same time, when we’re doing really well in Biopharma, the average gene size goes down because antibody genes are small.
And so from that point of view, the ASP goes down a little bit. And so — it is a little bit of a mix of — is the strength in the long gene business that is the strength in the human size genes that are done. And then in addition to that, we have been pushing price increases a little bit. And so on NGS, we did our second annual price increase in January. And then in SynBio, we’ve increased prices started last summer. So there’s a little bit of benefit from that as well.
Matthew Larew: Okay. And then as you look towards fast gene in the back half, just remind us what else is required on your end to get those on the market? I think particularly, you mentioned software and training on that software, but just kind of get us from here to there.
Emily Leproust: No, no, great question. So yes, there’s a couple of things. So first of all, we need to be able to make fast genes. And so we developed design the Factory of the Future to be able to do it. And so we have the instruments in place. We are — and so the instruments in place and the current software enable us to make genes about the same speed as what we do in South San Francisco. And then there is a few more software components we need to deliver and training of the team to have the factory be able to make genes faster. So that’s step one. And step 2, we need to have an e-commerce that is adapted to be able to price and book orders for slow versus fast gene, and there’s a big effort on the customer experience. If people can’t afford fast genes, we don’t want them to feel bad.
At the same time, if we want to make it like the Apple website where you don’t know why, but there is money coming out of your wallet and people are incentivized to choose the fast genes. So there’s quite a bit of e-commerce. Software design that needs to happen, so it’s beautiful frictionless and intuitive. And then the last piece is continue to develop and enhance our digital marketing engine. A lot of the fast gene gives us another 270,000 customers. We are not going to send an account manager to the lab in the University is just not cost effective. And so we need to reach those customers through a digital approach and there’s multiple ways to do that, being at conferences, being part of iGEM so Twist is already part of the mindset. But the other goal is through digital teams, get people on the Twist website, get them on to the e-commerce, have a touchless order where no human interaction and then have it shipped to them in a way that’s again, frictionless.
So those are the components that we are still refining, a lot of software basically.
Operator: Our next question comes from Vijay Kumar with Evercore.
