On Jul. 9, 2024, Twist Bioscience announced the expansion of its growing portfolio of synthetic viral controls with the launch of a synthetic RNA control for H5N1 Influenza A, which is one of the causes of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) or bird flu, covering 99.9% of hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) genome regions.

Positive controls provide quality control measures for the development, verification, and ongoing validation of both next-generation sequencing (NGS) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays. The Twist control contains synthetic RNA segments of the complete H5N1 HA and NA genome regions, which determine the subtype of the strain.